American attitudes toward ideal family size are dysgenic

We know that smart people tend to have fewer kids, but do they also say that smaller families are best? 

General Social Survey participants were asked, "What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?" I focused on people from the last two decades of surveys (2000-2018) who were childbearing age (18-45).  Immigrants and a small percentage of respondents who answered, "as many as people want," were excluded  (sample size = 3,390): 

Mean ideal family size

The top graph shows results for men and women, and the bottom one is for blacks and whites (other non-whites were omitted).

Ideal family size drops a lot as IQ increases, and the pattern is similar for males and females. People with IQs in the low 60s think more than three children is the right size, while the smartest group say the ideal size is a little over two.

Looking at the bottom graph, the drop for blacks is even sharper than for whites.

To the extent that people have the number of children they think is ideal, American attitudes are dysgenic. The wrong people are idealizing large families. With each generation, we're getting genetically dumber. 

Who's more likely to be unfaithful: smart or dumb people?

There is a tendency among people who take IQ seriously to believe that greater morality comes with intelligence.  While smarts enable a person to see more clearly long-term consequences of his actions and to understand moral systems more deeply, I'm skeptical that IQ is related to the emotional component of morality.  I suspect smart people are just as cold-blooded as the unintelligent.

Let's focus on one type of immorality: cheating on your spouse.  The General Social Survey asked adults, "Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?"  Here are the answers by IQ level for whites and blacks (samples = 9,391 and 1,410):


Whites

Blacks

For both groups, the risk of infidelity rises with IQ.  Perhaps smarter people have a greater ability to attract partners.  Perhaps they have more social opportunities, or think they are better at fooling their partners. Whatever the case, this data makes bright people look like jerks. 

Evidence of Non-White Privilege at American universities

Steve Sailer wrote yesterday that, "A new study from Georgetown University reveals that if the student bodies of the 200 most selective American colleges were enrolled solely on objective SAT or ACT aptitude test scores, their student bodies would increase from 66 percent white under the current subjective system to 75 percent white."  Giving more weight to less objective criteria like essay writing hurts whites and white males the most.

Let's look at General Social Survey (data) to get a sense of the situation for all universities, not just the top schools.

To get a large enough sample size, I looked at the survey years from 2000 to 2018 and ages 25 to 64.  Only Americans born in the US were included since immigrants are disadvantaged on English-language IQ tests (sample size = 8,134).

I chose two cutoffs: I assumed you were not getting enough education if you had an IQ over 110 but did not get a bachelor's degree. I also assumed you did not deserve the bachelor's degree (or higher) you received, and you must have been coddled, if you did not have at least a 100 IQ.

Here are the percentages who did not go far enough broken out by race:

Percent who did not go far enough

Whites      14.5
Blacks        7.4
Other race  7.6

This is one more line of evidence that White Privilege is a myth, and Non-White Privilege is a reality.  The percent of whites who should have gotten a 4-year degree but did not is double that of non-whites.


Percent who went too far

Whites         7.8
Blacks       10.1
Other race   9.8

Whites are supposed to be the group who use their pull to get unqualified children into college and who are favored by professors, etc., but both blacks and other non-whites are more likely to get at least a 4-year degree when they don't have the brains to earn it.  More evidence of non-white privilege.

What is the IQ of the average police officer?

Anyone who has thought about it for more than a minute knows that policing is a tough job.  You have to deal with screwed-up people and situations all the time, and there is bureaucratic BS up the ying-yang.  Like a high-paid ER doctor, you have to make life-and-death decisions in a split second, and let's not forget that many people hate you for your efforts, and even want to kill you. Heck, you might go to prison if authorities don't like how you behave on the job.

Good law enforcement requires real ability, but what is the average intelligence of an American police officer?

Using General Social Survey data, I identified 90 law enforcement officers. Their average IQ is 100.2.  If we look at blacks and whites separately, the means are 99.4 and 100.3, respectively.  Female officers averaged 99.0, while the average man was 100.5.

I work with many aspiring police officers, and they seem to be motivated by the excitement and the desire to be the hero rather than the security of a government job and the early retirement. Money does not seem to be a priority (although it never hurts).

To inspire a talented young man to choose policing as a career, society needs to portray officers as something like superheroes, not as the executioners of innocent black men. Ironically, demonizing law enforcement might push away the talented and attract the leftovers who are more likely to use excessive force against minorities.

Another indicator that Jews tend to be clannish

I showed recently that Americans overwhelming select someone of the same race for a best friend.  Friendship is a good measure of how well groups are mixing, or, on the other hand, how much they cluster.

In this post, let's focus on religion. Does your best friend share your religious affiliation?  I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to answer this question (sample size = 1,932).  Here are the percentages who indicated a religious match between themselves and their best friend:

Percent whose best friend belongs to the same religion

Jews  75.6
Protestants  74.5
Catholics   59.4
None  42.3

Jews emerge as the group that clusters the most.  You might respond that Protestants have basically the same number, but we would expect a high number for a such a large group.  According to the latest GSS, 48.9% of Americans are Protestant, 23.3% are None, 21.2% are Catholic, and 1.7% are Jewish. If Protestants picked their friends at random, their best friend would also be Protestant around half the time. For Jews, a random process would give a Jewish best friend less than 2 percent of the time, and yet the number is over 75%.  This shows an intense level of clustering among Jews.

Smart people are more varied than other people

I showed in an earlier post that, according to the General Social Survey (GSS), the smartest category of people are also the most diverse in terms of income.  Some smart folks are very rich, some are very poor.  They are all over the map.  Nicholas Taleb takes advantage of the wide income dispersion among the intelligent in order to make IQ look like it cannot predict income among smart people and thus is a worthless concept.

If he were biased against the concept of social class like he is against IQ, he could use the same tactic: According to GSS data, the correlation between father's education and offspring income is a paltry .13, and the standard deviation (sd) for people with the most educated dads is $42,000, while it is only $33,000 for those with dads who only finished high school.  For non-nerds who don't know stats, sd is a measure of how spread out the scores are for a sample of people, in this case, individual incomes. 

Turns out, people in the smartest category are diverse on many variables, not just income.  I'll give you the sd for the middle and highest IQ categories to show what I mean.


Standard deviation for average intelligence people and those in the smartest category

Education
Middle IQ  2.4
Top IQ  2.5

Job Prestige
Middle IQ  12.6
Top IQ  14.4

Political Orientation
Middle IQ  1.3
Top IQ  1.6

Church Attendance
Middle IQ  2.7
Top IQ  2.8

Confidence in the Existence of God
Middle IQ  1.3
Top IQ  1.7

In every case, intelligent folks are more diverse than ordinary people.  Compared to the middle, smart people are simply all over the place in terms of education, job prestige, politics (higher scores mean more conservative), church attendance, and belief in God.  Humans beings are so complicated, it's hard to predict which box a person will fall into, and it's even harder when the person is very smart.

This reminds me of the argument that Michael Levin made in Why Race Matters that, because whites are more intelligent, on average, than blacks, they have greater free will, and thus perhaps greater responsibility for their actions.

(You might argue that the sd is higher for smart people simply because their means are higher, thus one can expect the sd's to also be larger. Actually, the means for political orientation, church attendance, and confidence in God are lower for the smart group.)

UPDATE:  I am also reminded of what is said about Jews, a famously smart group:  two Jews, three opinions.

Single, childless women are less happy, and it's due to genes

In the last post, General Social Survey data indicated that researcher Paul Dolan was wrong in claiming that single, childless women are happier than married women with kids.  In the old days, I would have focused, at least some, on the Durkheimian idea that social roles shape characteristics like one's level of happiness.  I was trained as a sociologist, and it has been my instinct to see social forces as important.

Years of study have convinced me that it is time to focus more on biological forces. The correlation between marriage and well-being need not be causal: people who are genetically happy might simply select themselves into marriage.  In fact, the correlations between marriage and a host of positives--greater financial success, mental and physical health, lower mortality, less risky behavior, less crime, and longer longevity--might be due to common genes which cause the correlations.

A study by Johnson et al. (2004) supports this idea.  Analyzing data on a sample of over 7,000 adults that included more than 2,500 twin pairs, they found that certain heritable traits predict marriage, and that much of the link between being married and being happy is due to genes. 

Specifically, they found the following traits for married versus single women: married women are more affectionate, nervous, careful, and traditional, and they feel like they are treated fairly by others. On the flip side, single women are less sociable, more risk-taking; they're calmer, more modern, and they think they are treated unjustly by others.

The profile of married men versus single men is very different: married men are cheerful, active, persistent, decisive, persuasive, aggressive, and traditional. They are less prone to fantasy, and they think that people treat them fairly.  Single men tend to be the opposite: They are sullen, indecisive, undisciplined, passive, modern, prone to fantasy, and they feel they are treated unfairly. 

All of these traits are strongly influenced by genes. According to the study, the heritability of being married is about .7, meaning that 70% of whether or not people are married is due to variation in genes.

So it looks like married people, especially men, tend to be happier because of their personalities. Affectionate, sociable women seek out marriage, and so do cheerful men who have the traits that lead to career success.  Married women seem drawn to comfort, security, and affection.  Men, in general, appear to be drawn to marriage, and the success-bound ones achieve it.

Single men and women are more modern, so they probably see marriage as less desirable, less expected, and both tend to be disagreeable. Single men might be less happy because they are less successful, and single women are more alienated, which is associated with sadness and mental health issues.  In addition, single women are risk-takers, and seem less drawn to the security and comfort of a permanent union.   

Are never-married, childless women happier than married moms?

A piece in the Guardian reported that women are happiest if they stay single and childless, according to research done by London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan.

Dolan is wrong. The graph below displays 2000-2018 data from the General Social Survey (sample size = 12,254).  The bars indicates mean happiness (1 = not too happy, 2, = pretty happy, 3 = very happy).

 















Childless, never-married women are less happy than married women at all nine levels of family size.  A married women with eight or more kids is happier than a single, childless woman.  The difference between between the latter and married women as a whole is close to half a standard deviation, a good-sized gap.

Dolan claims married women only say they are happy when they are interviewed with their husband in the room.  I compared women who were interviewed in person with those who completed a self-adminstered questionnaire.  The results were the same for both groups. 

A recent paper claims that human traits are basically produced by genes and luck

Authors of a paper published earlier this year in Behavior Genetics have made arguments similar to those of  HBD writers Greg Cochran and JayMan: psychological traits are basically the result of 1) genes, and 2) noise. 

Years ago, behavioral geneticists discovered that the environments shared by siblings have little impact on how you turn out. By contrast, the environment you experience that is unique to you appeared to be about as important as genes -- both of them explaining roughly half of the story.   

The authors, two Russians from St. Petersburg University (they're Russians, so they must be evil) explain that research trying to identify specific factors from the unique environment that are important has been mostly unsuccessful.  Factors like illnesses and accidents typically explain less than 3% of the examined traits.

In addition, genetic research (mostly experiments on animals) has shown that traits depend a great deal on stochasticity--a fancy term for randomness, or "luck."  For instance, ultraviolet rays increase genetic mutation rates in organisms, but exactly which genes will be affected is a stochastic process. Random genetic errors that occur in the early stages of embryonic development will be more consequential; in this case, all the descendants of the initial mutant cell will also be mutant. 

Complex organic systems like the human body or brain are especially likely to be shaped by random events. For example, in female embryos, one of the two X-chromosomes is inactivated as a Barr body.  Each cell will make a random 'decision' which X-chromosome (the paternal or maternal) gets inactivated, and the 'decision' is maintained in subsequent cell divisions.  As a result, the female becomes mosaic.  In heterozygous females with the EDA mutation, you get ectodermal dysplasia which leads to an absence of perspiratory glands.  Depending on what X-chromosome is active, some skin areas are defective in sweating, while other areas are normal. The mosaicism is random.  Even identical twins raised in very similar environments will differ significantly.

Another human example is the growth of synapses in the developing brain.  While the number and locations of these connections are under some genetic control, research has demonstrated a significant stochastic component.  So again, identical twins raised the same will end up with brain wirings that are somewhat different, this is simply due to random differences in development, and it can cause behavioral differences.

These authors do not mean that these random factors are actually causal factors that simply have not been identified yet. They are claiming that pure randomness is simply a key part of our development, and the hard determinist view is simply incorrect.

They don't touch the political implications of all this, but I'll jump in.  To summarize, it's only a little bit of a simplification to say that we may be the product of genes and random events.  Genetic research is also telling us that hundreds or thousands of genes influence a trait, but each only a trivial bit, so simple pathways for intervention and improvement might be hard to find.  And you can't control randomness, so there seem to be fewer and fewer possibilities for government to step in and effectively address social problems -- at least in ways acceptable to liberals.  The old-time conservative who contended that human nature is tragically flawed and that one must resign oneself to human limitation seems more and more like a prescient, wise person.     

How are we doing on mixing the races?

One of the strongest findings in sociology is that people follow the principle of homophily--they naturally associate with people like themselves.  It goes without saying that sociologists never take the next logical step and conclude that this universal tendency is rooted in biology; that it is very resistant to change; that it's counterproductive to swim against a very strong tide. The typical view of a sociologist when it comes to a social universal is, "Yes, we see it everywhere, so naturally, we should get rid of it!"

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of race.  Around the entire globe, people of the same race tend to gravitate to each other, so in America, we're bound and determined to see the day when a random white person has all non-white buddies.

So how are we doing on this?  I looked at a question given in the General Social Survey where participants were asked to list friends (sample size = 1,300).  I assume that the first person mentioned is a close friend, if not the closest friend.  When the respondent is white, how often was the first friend mentioned black?  Two percent of the time.  Black respondents first mentioned a white friend 11.2% of the time.

If making friends were truly random, the distribution of friends would match the racial distribution of the population. (We'll set aside the goal of preferring friends from other races.)  For example, 13% of the first friends mentioned by whites should be black since blacks are 13% of the population.  But when I do the math that takes into account the size of the black and white populations, blacks are 37.1 times more likely to say their first-mentioned friend is black rather than white. A white is 9.3 times more likely to mention a white person.  I doubt the numbers were much different in 1960.

For all America's efforts, biology seems to be stronger than sociology.

Which explains how prestigious your job is--intersectional theory or HBD?

On Twitter, Steve Sailer writes, "The pattern that gay black males tend to assimilate into white corporate culture better than do straight black males deserves more social science attention than it has received.  It's hard to notice if you are Woke and believe in the conventional wisdom about Patriarchy, etc."

Let's test this kind of idea with General Social Survey (GSS) data.  Based on intersectionality theory--experiencing more discrimination with each additional minority status--job prestige rankings should look something like this:

Top Tier--Zero Strikes Against
Straight white male

Second Tier--One Strike Against
Straight white female
Gay white male
Straight black male

Third Tier--Two Strikes Against
White lesbian
Straight black female
Gay black male

Fourth Tier--Three Strikes Against
Black lesbian

By contrast, biological theory would focus on traits that are important for high-status jobs, and the obvious candidate is intelligence and the glaring racial gap in IQ. So this view would predict that the big divide will be race, with whites above average in job prestige and blacks below average. The other demographics shouldn't matter much. 

And what are the facts?  According to GSS data for 19,901 respondents: 

Mean occupational prestige 

Gay white male  47.1
White lesbian  46.2
Straight white male  45.2
Straight white female  44.5

Total Sample  44.2

Black straight female  40.9
Black gay male  40.7
Black lesbian  39.8
Black straight male  39.2

As predicted, the major divide is race.  All whites are above average, and all blacks are below.  If intersectional theory were true, black lesbians would be on the bottom, and straight white males would occupy the top position.  Neither is the case.  Biological theory would predict no disadvantage for homosexuals--in fact, I reported in a previous analysis that they have above-average IQs--and indeed they do well.

And relevant to Steve's point about black males, homosexuals do better than straights, which contradicts the claim that it's all about intersectional discrimination.

Biology explains more than sociology.

Is gay liberation leading to gay genocide?

Look at this graph (GSS data) which shows the mean number of children that gay men ages 40-64 have for the past four decades:

In the 80s, the average gay man had two kids.  By the 90s, the number had dropped to .81, and in this decade, it's down to .58.  In other words, a gay man 40 years wasn't that different than a straight guy in terms of offspring. Now, he has less than 30% the family size of a heterosexual.

While Greg Cochran is right that the heritability of homosexuality is not high, there seems to be some genetic influence, so it's ironic that gay liberation is leading to fewer people with genes that raise the odds of homosexuality.  That implies fewer and fewer gay men in the future.  Strange, but I don't hear anyone accusing liberals of secretly pushing for the slow genocide of homosexuals. 

Data: Dot Indians are the most industrious Americans. Feather Indians, the least. Hispanics are in the middle.

Sociologists assume that a man lacking a job is the fault of the economic system. He would take any job if it were simply available.  Common sense and behavioral genetic research contradict this. Industriousness is largely caused by genes, and people vary a great deal in this trait. Some people cannot take it easy, and some cannot not take it easy. I've talked to many people over the years who refuse to take jobs that are not acceptable to them.  That's the reality in America. Sure, you might have a small percentage with REAL health problems, but those are the exceptions. 

So I'm going to use full-time work as a measure of industriousness.  I'm interested in racial and ethnic differences. Men and women still differ in employment, so let's focus on just the men. Here are the percentages of American men ages 30-64 who are employed full-time listed by ethnic group:

Percent employed full-time

Asian Indian  85.0
Jewish  84.0
Dutch  84.7
Portuguese  82.6
Japan  82.2
Russian  81.8
Spanish  81.8
Greek  81.6
Romanian  80.0
Polish  79.3
German  79.1
Mexican  78.7
Italian  78.6
West Indian  78.6
Danish  78.5
Norwegian  77.6
Austrian  77.5
Scottish  77.5
Chinese  76.9
Hispanic  76.9

US Total  75.7

Irish  75.7
English/Welsh  75.4
Czech  74.8
Swedish  75.3
French Canadian  75.1
Belgium  75.0
Arab  74.7
Hungarian  73.5
French  72.9
Filipinos  71.4
Muslim  71.2
Puerto Rican  68.6
Black  67.4
Lithuanian  67.4
Finnish  66.7
American Indian  55.6

Looks about right. For a moment, let's compare the top group with the lowest. If it were true that discrimination determines who works, why would Asian Indians surpass every single white group?  Wouldn't a bigot choose the lamest white person over a South Asian?  While American Indians are also non-whites, at least most of them are Christians. Wouldn't a bigot choose a Christian over a heathen Hindu?  American Indians have a tragic history, and whites feel bad about that. They were here long before Europeans. Wouldn't an employer choose a Real Red American over an immigrant invader, just off the boat?

And yet, Asian Indians tower over all other groups. Why? Because biology explains better than sociology.

By the way, I'm at a cafe, and seated at the next table over is a Native American. He's super friendly. He's always here, and I'm not sure he's old enough to be retired, but he doesn't seem particularly busy. The Asian Indian guy I always see here is also popular, but he owns a business and uses the cafe to network.

Data: In some cities, 3 out of 10 black men had sex before they were 13 years old

Look at this table from a study of the age at first sexual intercourse among males:

Depending on the city, 12 to 29% of black males have had sex before age 13. This is compared to 2 to 9% of white males.  The numbers for Hispanic males are 6 to 17%.

These stats support the view that blacks are shifted toward "fast" life history strategies. Along with shorter life expectancies and less investment in each child, life history theory claims that "fast" individuals mature more quickly and become sexually active at earlier ages.  Even though the study does not report figures on Asians, I'm confident they would be the lowest group.

Data: Despite liberation, gay men are less happy than in 1980

The General Social Survey asks participants, "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"  I calculated the mean happiness for gay males over the past four decades.  Here is the graph:

In terms of liberation, life has been good for homosexuals since 1980. Approval of homosexual sex by the general public has skyrocketed.  When I was an undergraduate, gay marriage was not even on the radar for progressives. Now it is the law of the land.  An openly gay man -- Buttigieg -- is a popular Democratic presidential candidate. In my department meeting Wednesday, a colleague boasted that her son now identifies as gay, making us all feel inferior because our kids are straight.

All this progress and liberation has really delivered on gay happiness, right?  Actually, mean happiness has dropped in every decade. Homosexual men are less happy than they were at the height of the AIDS epidemic. 

This reminds me of female liberation. Women are also less happy. Look at the graph.

Liberation has not delivered.

Data: I'm skeptical that the Hispanic crime rate is similar to that of whites

I doubt the Hispanic crime rate is similar to that of whites. Let's put aside police statistics and victim surveys because both depend on someone reporting the crime, and immigrants are notorious for failing to report crimes out of fear of authorities.  And arrest data also depend on law enforcement policies.

Criminologists understand that homicide is a good measure of serious violent crime because corpses advertise crimes loudly.

The CDC has a neat website for analyzing mortality data.  I looked at homicide rates for 2017, the most recent year available. Here are the rates per 100,000 in the specific population:

Homicide Rate
Black  23.0
American Indian  9.7
Hispanic  5.3
White  2.8
Asian  1.7

Not surprisingly, blacks are at the top with a rate that is 13 1/2 times the Asian rate.  American Indians are second with a rate that is 5.7 times that of Asians.  This reminds me of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending's hypothesis (if I remember correctly) that Native Americans never got pacified by centuries of the state weeding out the most violent.  Henry and Peter Frost published a paper three years ago that found that the English proclivity to execute criminals with abandon resulted in a country with a homicide rate that is a tiny fraction of what it was a 1,000 years ago.

Criminologists excuse black violence by blaming criminogenic urban environments. If living in a big city is the key to violence, why are rural Indians so murderous? Genes explain better than sociology.

When it comes to homicide, Hispanics resemble their racial reality: they are somewhere between American Indians and whites. Looking at Latin America, I'm pretty sure crime is a more serious problem for Hispanics than it is for whites.

Data: If Taleb is right that IQ is a BS measure, why do higher scorers have big brains? And why the perfect racial rankings?

A 2015 meta-analysis of 88 studies found that the correlation between human brain volume and intelligence is .24, a small-to-moderate size relationship.  In new research that re-analyzed the data from the 2015 study, the authors showed that the strength of the link depends on how well IQ is measured and the degree to which studies include a full range of values for brain volume and IQ (For example, if only college students are included, many lower IQ people will be excluded, and this will shrink the correlation.)

Based on their analysis, the researchers estimated that the true brain volume/IQ correlation is around .40 -- a fairly strong correlation.

Keep in mind that many researchers have reported racial differences in brain volume that match up with IQ differences. Rushton and Ankney (2009) summarized the research. For example, Beals et al. (1984) measured the endocranial volumes of close to 20,000 skulls from around the world. The Asian-black gap was reported to be a roughly 150 cubic centimeter advantage for Asians.

If IQ is BS measure like Nassim Taleb says, why do high scorers have big brains? 

Sociologists like to crow about the immigration-low crime connection, but it undercuts their own theories

For the past few decades, conservatives have been linking illegal immigration to crime. In response, a whole new literature appeared among liberal researchers showing that more immigration results in less crime.  In usual liberal fashion, they treat illegal immigration as the same thing as legal or overall immigration.

But let's not get into that literature -- that's a discussion for another day.  I'm interested in the fact that social scientists have spent a great deal of energy for more than a century concocting excuses for why poor minorities -- immigrants or native-borns -- are so heavily involved in crime.  The list is long: 1) low crime neighborhoods require years of committed investment in institutions charged with socializing youths, and migrant neighborhoods lack to residential stability, resources, and population homogeneity needed to build effective institutions; 2) migrants tend to come in with low human, social, and cultural capital which makes a criminal career more attractive; 3) due to America's xenophobia, migrants are blocked from opportunities to become integrated into mainstream society with its middle-class jobs and middle-class values; 4) the youthful migrant is torn between Old Country traditions of his parents and the lower-class American values of his native-born peers. Such alienation leads to crime.  And the list goes on and on.

But for these sociologists, refuting conservative claims takes priority over consistency. After a century of predicting lots of immigrant crime, now they're scrambling to explain why immigrants are better behaved than the rest of us, and, of course, everyone knows that they always have been better than us. 

After a century of telling us that communities must be slowly built up into an ecosystem of strong institutions that effectively control the behavior of adolescents, now they tell us that people who just crossed the Rio Grande and found some shack to live in instantly create stronger communities than groups who have lived in a neighborhood for generations. 

The kid whose parents come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador enjoys a rich, healthy culture that actually frowns on crime, unlike mainstream American culture. Being forced into barrios and excluded from white society is a good thing because these Hispanic communities are tight-knit, while mainstream society is atomistic and dog-eat-dog. These researchers are hilarious.  They truly suck at predicting the future, but they are very skilled at concocting explanations after the fact.

Data: What is the average IQ of your healthcare providers?

I get annoyed when a low IQ kid gets my fast food order wrong, but no biggie. It's a different story when my child is sick and needs medical treatment. 

What is the mean IQ of health care workers?  To get a sufficiently large sample (GSS, no immigrants), I included the following jobs: physicians, dentists, optometrists, podiatrists other health diagnosing practitioners, registered nurses, pharmacists, dietitians, physical therapists, speech therapists, and other therapists. 

For the whole group, I get a mean of 104.8. Not good. For occupations with at least 10 survey respondents:

Mean IQ

Physicians  114.5

Dentists  108.4

Registered nurses  104.6

Pharmacists  108.2

Dieticians  90.9

Physical therapists 110.6

Speech therapists  104.6

Other therapists   109.4

All of these numbers are discouraging. Don't take advice from a dietician.  

What about race? We can only look at the overall mean for all healthcare providers. For whites, it's 105.9; for blacks, 96.1; and for other races, it's 99.2.  A little bit scary.   

And gender? 109.9 for men, and 103.5 for women. 

Data: Compared to dumb people, are smart individuals more interested in politics?

I've always assumed that smart people are fascinated by politics. One complaint I have of social scientists is that they're so obsessed with politics, they can't conduct fair research. (But I can hear you saying, "You said SMART people.")  Anyway, is my assumption correct? Is it different for men and women?

The General Social Survey asked respondents: "How interested would you say you personally are in politics?" Answers ranged from 'very interested' to 'not at all interested.'  I measure IQ with a 10 question vocabulary quiz (sample size = 1,141):

Look at how those scoring a perfect score on the test are much more interested in politics than any other group. To get precise, the correlation between the two variables is .20 -- a moderate relationship.

Now for the women (sample size = 1,507):

I separated by sex because I suspected that the rise in interest as one moves up the IQ scale might be sharper for men. My experience is that smart women are more interested in politics than less intelligent women, but I see more intensity among men.

The female pattern is similar to that for men. The correlation is slightly weaker -- .18. The gender gap is pretty visible at the highest IQ level: 16.8% of these women have little or no interest, compared to only 5.4% of the men.