IQ and economic inequality

There are those, particularly among the libertarian ranks, who are of the mind that an uber-intelligent society is not optimal because there still must be people to wash the dishes and pick up the trash, something those of modest intelligence are putatively better at doing than brainiacs are. But even in an industry such as trucking, higher IQs make for better truckers. And more intelligent people cause less in the ways of costly externalities like crimal activity and poor health. They are also more likely to come up with more efficient and effective ways of doing menial jobs in addition to the more complex ones, and add societal value without recompense (Linux, the blogosphere, or free media-inspired entertainment). For a fuller refutation of the fallacies in this strain of thought, see Randall Parker's classic post, Benthamite Libertarian Collectivists Wrong On Open Borders.

Equality of outcomes is not generally at the top of the libertarian's priority list. It is for many on the left, however. So here's a reason for the left to support policies aimed at raising average IQ (merit immigration, welfare for sterilization, progressive child tax credits, etc): More intelligent states are more economically egalitarian states. As of 2006, the correlation between a state's average IQ and its gini coefficient is .68 (p=0). This means nearly half (46%) of the income inequality in a state is explained by its population's estimated average IQ.

Unfortunately, another ostensible top priority on the left is the maximization demographic diversity, which is at odds (not just in actuality, but even tautologically) with equality. At Taki's Magazine, Austin Bramwell and Robert Spencer have come up with two broad distinctions in libertarian thought, the comic (optimistic) and the tragic (pessimistic). I prefer a binary distinction based on ends and means, and conceptualize the comic and the tragic accordingly. That is, the comic wants ecumenical freedom for the individual and is focused on maximizing positive rights for him in every context, while the tragic is concerned with ensuring what might be termed "cultural federalism" or more simply just "localism"--allowing people to have a hand in determining the laws, mores, and ways of the societies they live in, whatever their nature.

On the right, there are perhaps three major sub-categories of conservatism: The social, concerned with things like abortion and same-sex marriage; the fiscal, concerned with taxation and governmental wealth redistribution; and the national security, concerned with ensuring the US maintains strong, ambitious military capabilities on the global stage.

Is there a similar set of broad distinctions on the contemporary Western left? From my vantage point, an obvious perforated edge along which to tear it in two is on the primacy given to egalitarianism (of outcome, not just isonomic) or to maximizing demographic diversity. I've not seen this distinction given much thoughtful treatment in the US. In Europe, diversity seems subjugated in importance to egalitarianism, and is promoted more as a consequence of equality than as an ends in itself. That is, Muslims vociferously advocating the adoption of sharia law in the UK are supported by the left because they don't want to be seen as limiting the rights of a specific group more than because they want to increase the size of the South Asian and Middle Eastern population in their country. I might be wrong on that, though.

Intelligence of black Republicans, Democrats compared

A handy, brief synopsis of the US Supreme Court's 08-09 session that places the nine Justices on a political spectrum with Clarence Thomas as the most conservative on the bench makes me wonder whether or not black Republicans are cognitively a cut above the mass of their Democratic co-racialists.

The only black Republicans I've met who have made known their party membership to me are a handful of pious Baptists and a tree trunk of a man who played Rudy Giuliani in a mock primary debate in front of a local conservative booster organization back in January of '08 (I was Ron Paul). Yet I am hardly able to name three or four--let alone the 15 or so needed for proportionate representation--major black media figures on the political left for every one on the right. Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, Condoleeza Rice, JC Watts, Walter Williams, Michael Steele, Alan Keyes, just off the top of my head. Good luck naming 100 prominent black Democrats to match!

Does the the larger US black population exhibit the a similar skew toward Republicans? No, not according to the GSS. Converting Wordsum results into IQ scores with a standard deviation of 15 and on the presumption that the white mean is equivalent to a 100 yields 87.8 for black Republicans and 92.5 for black Democrats.

As Michael Steele's selection as head of the RNC and the choice of Bobby Jindal to deliver the GOP's first major televised rebuttal to the Obama administration lead many to suspect, being non-white does not appear to hinder political and punditry aspirants of a conservative bent. The GOP is a white party not because it intentionally screens out non-whites, but because most NAMs do not stand to benefit from the things it putatively stands for.

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(2), PARTYID(0-2)(4-6), WORDSUM, YEAR(2000-2008)

Inflation, the potential stealth tax

Be wary of the stealth tax inflation can hide. It doesn't just destroy dollar-denominated wealth. In a progressive income tax system, such as we have in the US, inflation destroys real income even when that nominal income is effectively indexed for inflation if tax brackets do not undergo an increase corresponding to the increases in inflation and incomes.

For example, if the tax rate is 10% up to $10,000 and 20% for each dollar earned over $10,000, if in year 1 you earn $10,000, you pay $1,000 in taxes. If 50% inflation occurs in year 2, you're now making $15,000. Everything costs 50% more, so it's a wash, right? Except now you are paying $2,000 in taxes--100% more than the year before.

Over the last few years, tax rate schedules have increased at about 3% annually, approximately in line with CPI-measured inflation. But if the leviathan needs to be fed and the farmers and fishers are caught in a secular cycle of declining harvests, its tenders will look for creative, undetectable ways of sucking the necessary sustenance out of the baskets of the producers to grow the beast.

Falk forces thoughts about interactions between cholesterol and mood, aggressiveness

OneSTDV pointed out a rabid response to the previous post, eloquently described by author Geoffrey Falk as "dumbfuckery". Falk's comment section is closed, so I'll respond here to a few of his points of contention. Falk begins by arguing that concerns about image have no influence on why most vegetarians impose food restrictions on themselves:

What else do the underpaid teaching, therapy and social-worker professions have in common? [Being paid less is not synonymous with being underpaid. Relative to other jobs, these require even less productivity and industriousness than their modest pay rates would suggest, which is why people in such occupations make more in the public sector than they do in the private sector.] Maybe the idealistic wish to help other people, even if it means making less money? You know, making personal sacrifices to help others?

Would that perspective have anything, anything at all, in common with the concern for the welfare of animals and for the environment that drives many of the “conversions” to vegetarianism? You know, might the career choices and the diet choices be driven by a common psychological force, rather than by two different forces?

For myself, I had already decided that I should go vegetarian at age nineteen, for animal-rights reasons; but only actually did it when I started following my erstwhile fraud-guru, Yogananda. So you see, I did it for the best of all possible reasons, which had nothing to do with signaling my superiority to others, and which any conservative could and should approve of: I did it for God. And by the way, although I grew up in a very conservative Christian community, I’ve never believed anything in my life that’s even half as ridiculous as what every Christian believes, as their articles of salvation. Frankly, in all seriousness, I’m not even capable of being that gullible.

Uh huh. Well, I'm convinced. No image tied up in this one. Doesn't matter how other people react to such a non-statement. Doesn't matter at all!

After several more paragraphs of moral posturing, Falk takes aim at the substance of my post:

I was quite surprised to see (from a very small sample size of 42) the GSS data (from the same blog post quoting Peter, above) showing that vegetarians have a lower IQ than meat-eaters. But then I did a little Googling. And guess what? High IQ link to being vegetarian:

...

"The study of 8,179 [which, I will point out for those of you whose brains are sluggish from eating too much meat, is somewhat greater than 42] was reported in the British Medical Journal.

Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian—although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.

Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians."

That’s the same five-point gap which Audacious Epigone found in his number-crunching, but in exactly the opposite direction. From a sample size nearly 200 times larger. Plus, while AE’s numbers are from the 1993-4 GSS, the news item is from December of 2006. So there’s no contest at all about which study to take more seriously. It’s fucking hands down.

Given that he is exploding with righteous indignation throughout, I'm going to give Falk the benefit of the doubt and assume in his haste he accidentally made--and then emphatically repeated--an invalid apples-to-oranges comparison before making another errant comparison, no doubt as honest a mistake as the first.

Firstly, the total respondent pool for the GSS question is 1583, not 42. Falk compares the number of those who abstain entirely from meat from the GSS to all people included in the Southampton University study, the vast majority of whom are not vegetarians. The study is not 200 times larger than the GSS sample. It is five times as large.

Secondly, although the "news item" is from December 2006, the study is based on IQ tests administered in 1970 and data collected on dietary habits in 1990. The GSS data is from 1993 and 1994. But if he insists we use his methodology for determining which results are the most contemporarily relevant, the blog item is from July 2009. Either way, it's hands down for me.

Participants in the university study took IQ tests at age ten. Intelligence is relatively unanchored at that age, which plausibly fits with Peter's conception that vegans/vegetarians tend to be SWPL-types who come from middle- to middle-upper SES backgrounds, but who do not make big bucks in adulthood.

Falk admits causality cannot be determined, but the university study casts doubt on the idea that meatless diets boost intelligence:

There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who reported eating fish or chicken.

In other words, more than diet it is self-assigned labels (or possibly just avoidance of red meat) that were found to be associated with higher intelligence. SWPL posturing, anyone?

The GSS is a wide-ranging, mutli-year database that is considered the gold standard in social surveying. Still, as has been repeated here several times, the analyses run and the results presented are not claimed to be anything more than suggestive.

Falk insinuates that the research on the relationship between vegetarianism and intelligence is deep and mature. In reality, googling "vegetarianism intelligence" returns page after page of write-ups on the Southampton University study he references. There just isn't much out there.

That paucity is why it's worthwhile to glean what we can from the GSS. It's another source to consider. I'll allow readers to draw their own conclusions as to why Falk reacts so viscerally to it being tapped.

Veggies more educated, less intelligent than omnivores

In the comments of a post at Half Sigma, a perspicacious commenter named Peter (unsure whether or not it's Mr. Iron Rails and Weights) writes:

Veganism is a way for decently educated but lower income people to distinguish
themselves from proles. If you're a teacher or an occupational therapist or a social worker making $50K a year being vegan makes a statement that you're not a
prole despite the fact that many proles earn more money than you do. Veganism can even be a way for an academic or professional in the $100K realm to make a statement that they're superior to the frat boys who went to B school and are now pulling down $300K as sales reps. I wonder how many vegans there are among the overclass? My sense is not that many.

The GSS only probes veganism/vegetarianism (v/v) in a single question posed in 1993 and again in 1994. Respondents were asked how regularly they refuse to eat meat for environmental reasons. I suspect the typical human herbivore's primary motivation for avoiding eating flesh is something other than environmentalism (ie, deontological concerns about animal rights, health or fitness, frugality, etc), but many, and perhaps most, non-meat eaters would probably include it among a host of reasons they abstain if it was suggested to them as a potential reason by somebody else. In any case, to the extent that the framing of the question skews the v/v population, it must be in the SWPL direction.

Despite this, v/vers are not the most vulpine swine in the barnyard. IQ estimates, converted from wordsum scores under the assumption that the mean white result corresponds to an IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, by how often respondents aged 26 and older* refuse to eat meat (thus "always" identifies v/vers; n = 1583):

Avoid meat	IQ
Always	94.8
Often	98.3
Sometimes	97.5
Never	100.6

The sample size for herbivores is pretty small (42), but the gap between those who always avoid meat for environmental reasons and those who never do is not miniscule.

The above might not be particularly surprising (though it was not what I expected to find). However, in conjunction with the following table showing meat avoidance by mean years of education for those aged 26+, it is quite remarkable:

Avoid meat	Education
Always	13.60
Often	13.47
Sometimes	13.31
Never	13.13

As far as I am able to recall, this is the only variable for which educational attainment and intelligence trend in opposite directions.

The GSS does not allow for a satisfactory gauging of economic status. However, as measured by personal income, omnivores--who are relatively less educated--have a marginal edge in earning power over herbivores.

Consequently, I have nothing to add to Peter's apt commentary other than to chime in that Edna Krabappel would serve as a more representative vegetarian than Lisa does.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM, EDUC, AGE(26-89), NOMEAT, REALRINC

* Those under 26 are excluded so students still accumulating years of education do not skew the results of the second table.

BusinessWeek looks at Kurds, Brazilians to explain relationship between immigration and housing market

The feature article of the June 29 issue of BusinessWeek magazine includes one-page profiles of housing markets in seven cities; six because they look to be set for a vigorous, speedy recoveries (Omaha, Seattle, Saratoga Springs, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Austin) and one, Merced, to serve as an example of how some places will be in the dumps for years to come.

Maybe I've been listening to the Derb's sardonic cynicism too much recently, but the write-ups for Nashville and Merced seem worth looking at for how they demonstrate the invisibility of massive immigration from Mexico and Central America in the eyes of the major media. Invisible, that is, unless the issue is the electoral viability of the GOP, in which case it is actually inflated right alongside predictions of Republican demise unless the party actively courts it, election after election after election.

From the prognosis for Nashville:

Music City U.S.A. is also home to one of the largest Kurdish populations outside the Middle East. The wave of immigration started after the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Since then, the Kurdish community has swelled to more than 8,000 people, adding to a foreign-born population that's approaching 10% of the city's population.
More immigrants are purchasing homes, making them an important factor in the housing recovery.

...

The immigrant population has been a stabilizing force in Nashville, where mosques and markets occupy a stretch of Nolensville Road south of downtown.

...

Toxic mortgages are less of an issue for Nashville's Kurds. They are forbidden by their Muslim faith from paying interest on a loan. Many potential buyers in the community are instead turning to Habitat for Humanity. The housing charity offers interest-free loans that require borrowers to pay only the principal. In Nashville, Habitat built Providence Park, a subdivision with 138 homes, more than a third of them occupied by Kurds.

Who knew Habitat for Humanity not only subsidized aspiring homeowners in financial need but also those in need of compliance with Sharia law?

Immigration is not an unmitigated benefit, though. No group better demonstrates this than do... Brazilians. In Danbury.

Uh huh. Continuing:

An influx of immigrants can be a double-edged sword, however. Consider Danbury,
Conn. During the housing boom, Brazilians flocked to the town, helping to revive
the former hatmaking capital of the U.S. But many Brazilians in Danbury took out
subprime mortgages. Now, 212 borrowers are in default or foreclosure, according
to research firm RealtyTrac. That's a lot in a city with roughly 25 home sales a
month.

Given that Merced--which the BW article flatteringly refers to as "Ghost Town, USA"--is nearly half Hispanic, one-quarter foreign-born, and has a resident population whose members are about as likely to speak Spanish at home as they are to speak English, it's reasonable to assume that in discussing the city's housing market, the immigration angle would have been given a look.

Not a word, however. The effect of immigration on the housing market appears to be confined to Kurds in Tennessee and Brazilians in Connecticut.

Young women do get around, albeit once every few years

I previously attempted to refute the presumption thick in some areas of the Steveosphere that today's young women are nymphos. The GSS does not lend any credence to blogger Whiskey's assertion that it is not unusual for educated, urban white women to have more than 50 different sexual partners.

He has subsequently questioned the utility of the survey on the grounds that even for questions with 600 responses, for any given year of age there might only be 5 or 10 participants. The criticism is inane. Unless the issue at hand is how 53 year-olds feel about something, that doesn't matter. If it did, polling organizations that gauge things like President Obama's approval rating or the level of support for same-sex marriage would be out of business unless they could devise an economically viable way to 10,000 people for every poll they conducted. Instead, they conduct surveys with 3% margins of error in either direction using samples a tenth that size or smaller. If statistical reliability was desired not just for age in years, but age in months, the required sample size would grow by another order of magnitude.

But Whiskey's is the place for that to be addressed. The purpose here is to show that there is no massive shifting in female sexual behavior currently taking place in the US. The following graph shows the average number of male partners women aged 25-30 report having had since turning 18, beginning in 1989, the first year respondents were queried on it:


The trendline is pretty flat, perhaps rising marginally over the last couple of decades. The anomalously high mean in 2000 is the result of one woman reporting 122 partners. Removing her from the calculation yields a mean of 5.15, nearly identical to the 2002 result. For the last 15 years, young women of middling salacity have, with the exception of 2002, consistently reported having had three partners. The mode (most frequently occuring number of partners) in every year is 1. That is, if you ask a woman in her late-twenties how many people she's had sex with, the reply you are most likely to receive is that she's had just one.

The following table shows the percentage who say they have had ten more more partners as well as the total sample size for women aged 25-30 who were asked about their sexual behaviors:

Year	10+	N
1989	11.1%	95
1990	9.3%	81
1991	12.8%	90
1993	8.8%	109
1994	15.3%	193
1996	14.2%	176
1998	9.9%	175
2000	14.5%	129
2002	17.9%	138
2004	14.2%	148
2006	15.7%	155
2008	14.7%	104

The prevalence of 10+ women appears to have edged up a bit over the last couple of decades, with about one in seven having had partners in the double-digits by the time they reach the age of 30. Even sleeping with ten different people over ten years hardly qualifies as slutty behavior--it amounts to a different person each year. Not all women are made for long-term relationships, after all.

Ricci wins

A reason to celebrate:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a group of white firefighters in Connecticut were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision endorsed by high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

It was something of a mantra aimed at those on the disaffected right during Bush's 2004 re-election campaign that while he may have disappointed with regards to illegal immigration, unrestrained spending, promises of a humble foreign policy, ad nauseum, his upcoming, long-lasting contribution to the composition of the Supreme Court necessitated their support for the 43rd President.

As today's ruling makes me prouder than any other handed down during my adult lifetime, it's difficult not to feel as though the argument had merit. But a GOP-controlled Senate, not a Republican President, has been the sure thing in the Ricci ruling. The following table shows which party held the White House and which controlled Congress during the confirmation of the nine current Justices (technically eight now, I suppose):

Justice	Start date	Presidency	Senate	Favored Ricci?
Stevens	Dec '75	Republican	Democratic	No
Souter	Oct '90	Republican	Democratic	No
Ginsburg	Aug '93	Democratic	Democratic	No
Breyer	Aug '94	Democratic	Democratic	No
Scalia	Sep '86	Republican	Republican	Yes
Kennedy	Feb '88	Republican	Democratic	Yes
Thomas	Oct '91	Republican	Democratic	Yes
Roberts	Sep '05	Republican	Republican	Yes
Alito	Jan '06	Republican	Republican	Yes

Not surprisingly, current Democratic dominance of both the Executive and Legislative branches produced a nominee and likely future Justice who sided against Ricci.

Jack Cashill marshalls more evidence of an Ayers-Obama collaboration on "Dreams"

Jack Cashill has not abandoned his dogged diligence in digging up suggestive evidence that Bill Ayers played a significant role in President Obama's 1995 book, Dreams from my Father. His suspicions have been corroborated by a couple of other investigative journalists. A sampling of the newest discoveries:

Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man." ...

In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.

When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."

Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent. He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school. Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed." ...

Both authors link Indonesia with Vietnam. In each case, clueless officials - plural -- with the "State Department" try to explain how the march of communism through "Indochina" will specifically imperil "Indonesia." The Ayers account, however, at least sounds vaguely real. The Obama account sounds like an Ayers' memory imposed on Obama's mother. She allegedly discussed these geo-political strategy sessions in Indonesia with her pre-teen son. ...

Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."

As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.

Taking inspiration from another man and actually allowing him to ghostwrite for you are two very distinct things. Refuting the possiblity that only the former occured and definitively showing that the latter took place are going to be Jack and company's biggest challenges. Two of the three Ayers' books they use as primary sources of comparison were written after Dreams was published, including Fugitive Days, the work that shows the most striking similarities with Obama's putative autobiographical account. Pointing out that Audacity of Hope is sophomoric and cliched in comparison to Dreams is not enough to prove Ayers wrote Obama's first book.

Piling on Sanford the non-restrictionist

The biggest reason I was never able to share Jack Hunter's enthusiasm for Governor Sanford has been his poor legislative history on immigration (from a restrictionist's point of view)--Americans for Better Immigration, an outfit of NumbersUSA that issues grade cards for House and Senate members, assigns him an underwhelming 'D+' for his six years as a Congressional representative out of South Carolina. Nationwide, Republicans average a 'B', Democrats a 'D'.

Since his pillorying, it has been revealed that he has known his mistress for eight years, and it is not implausible to assume that he may have had other "exotic" Latin American love interests in the past. Might a personal affection for Latina women influence his position on immigration into the US? Perhaps one of those previous hookups is an ardent supporter of open migration for Latin Americans wanting to head northward?

Speculating on personal motivations of people I know little about does not mesh with the spirit of empirical inquiry I strive to stick to, but it does serve as a thought experiment in how immoral actions can conceivably force stewards into compromising their fidelity to those for whom they are putatively acting in the best interests of.

Apology for hypocrisy, but not amnesty for hypocrites

Defending hypocrisy is nothing novel. But a previous post on the (favorable) shift in America's moral evaluation of extramarital sex, even if it is not matched in deed, got me thinking about it a little more deeply.

Bruce G. Charlton, who is a wellspring of ideas he is frustratingly hesistant (in the opinion of this amateur who is accountable to no one!) to 'go public' with, recently wrote in an email exchange:

Libertarians and secularists have gotten things completely wrong about hypocrisy. Honesty is vital, but hypocrisy about bad things one does is much better than bragging, rationalizing and propagandizing in favour of bad things.

I try to minimize the amount of space devoted here to abstract philosophical discussions of morality, culture, aesthetics, and the like because I'm not smart enough or strong enough a writer to pull them off. I stick to empirical data like a gaper sticks to the beaten trail. Bushwacking is better left to more skillful trekkers. But even the clumsy and cautious feel compelled to step off the path and approach a dell for a better look now and then.

To consider hypocrisy as detestable (or even more so) as rationalization of a pathological behavior is to work toward the ushering in of that behavior if it carries with it even the slightest temptation. If it is tempting, some who oppose the behavior will fall to it and then be attacked for so doing, while those who deny there is anything wrong with the behavior are left unmolested, to wallow in their own crapulence.

The easier stand, not just behaviorally but also morally, is to accept it as being legitimate.
We see this periodically in the US with Republican officials who engage in behavior that is deemed immoral by the mainstream political conservative establishment. Sticking with Orson Scott Card's treatment of the subject of homosexuality and the Mormon Church (sent by BGC to spur me), consider Larry Craig and Mark Foley, two recent high-profile figures to have gone through this. Had Craig been a vociferous proponent of homosexuality, he would not have been pilloried by the national media. Pedastry as morally acceptable is still a minority position even among libertines, but had Foley been an exponent of it, his sufferance it would have been reduced.

That this reduction in shame and punishment for controversial and arguably pathological behavior can be brought about simply by voicing support for, or at least not opposition to, the acts in the first place is inherently destructive to any moral structuring in which the behaviors are deemed harmful. It becomes easier to withhold judgement from or even praise the behavior if it is tempting, even if one has no doubt that it is pathological, as a way of lessening the consequences of engaging in it in the first place.

Consequently, one must subdue individual interest for the well being of the larger society if he is to publicly condemn the behavior. It is difficult enough to do the right thing when you're told it is the right thing to do, let alone when the crowd is shouting at you to go ahead and give in. Weakness is not synonymous with moral failure. Those who recognize the latter while still being consumed by the former should not be taken as living illustrations of the invalidity of the judgement in question just because they are unable to consistently put it into practice.

By preaching the inherent value of individual liberty of action--what might be termed hedonism or "libertinism"--elite opinion makers undercut opposition to individual pathological behaviors.

Yet for very practical reasons, those in positions of stewardship--namely leaders and managers, political and otherwise--need to suffer by losing those positions when acting immorally*, especially when hypocrisy is involved, because knowledge of these immoral actions by others compromises the fidelity of the steward to those he works on behalf of. It is not difficult to imagine how Mark Sanford or Silvio Berlusconi could be subjected to blackmail by third parties aware of their private failings who have objectives at odds with those of South Carolinians or Italians as a whole.

* Here defined as engaging in behaviors that have pathological consequences when practiced in larger society (ie, cheating on income taxes, surreptitious extramarital affairs, lying to constituents, etc).

Pew reports high ratings hold as Obama's approval advantage cut in half in five months

Pointing out political bias in major media sources is old hat. When the subjective slant tilts in Barack Obama's favor, reading up on it creates a feeling of novelty comparable to what discovering your great grandfather's homburg from a time before the bombing of Pearl Harbor does.

To ensure that readers remain saturated with examples of that bias, I turn attention to a recent release from Pew Research entitled "Obama's High Ratings Hold Despite Some Policy Concerns".

What does the survey data actually reveal? From February to June of this year, Obama has dropped from a 4 to 1 approval advantage (64% approve, 17% disapprove) to a 2 to 1 advantage (61% approve, 30% disapprove).

On foreign policy, his 3 to 1 advantage (52% approve, 17% disapprove) in February has fallen to a less than a 2 to 1 advantage today (57% approve, 31% disapprove).

Public perception of his handling of the economy has suffered the most. In February, he had more than a 2 to 1 advantage (56% approve, 24% disapprove)--now it is approaching parity (52% approve, 40% disapprove).

The President has to be given credit for those impressive numbers in the face of 10% unemployment, increasing commodity prices, a DJIA stuck in the low 8000s, the tenuous uncertainty of what will happen next in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and North Korea, etc. But there is little doubt that Pew would have come up with a less flattering title if a rightist were in the White House.

In Africa, men want more children than women do?

In the discussion thread of a recent Parapundit post, commenter Dragon Horse argues high sub-Sahara African fertility is the result of men wanting large broods:

The main problem, as outlined by in Potts and Hayden (2009) "Sex and War" is access to affordable birth control. Most African women express a desire to control family size, it is the men who do not.

Potts and Hayden's argument is also "Freedom" but not the libertarian kind. Pretty much, they found that the less free a woman is in society, the more a male controlled societal (or religious) structure control their fertility the higher the birth rate tends to be. In societies where women have a higher education level, more legal rights, more say inside their marriage, etc, they have less children.

Having not read the book, I cannot respond to what the authors write. It is not clear that the second sentence excerpted above is asserted by the authors or if Dragon Horse is pulling it from somewhere else.

I am able to see whether or not the World Values Survey lends credence to the claim that African men want more children than African women do, however. A question probing for participants' ideal number of children was not asked in the most recent "fifth wave" survey, so responses are from the fourth wave, spanning 1999-2002. The following table shows the average number of children desired, by gender, for sub-Sahara African countries surveyed by the WVS:

Ideal children	Men		Women
by country	Mean	Median	Mean	Median
Nigeria	4.5	4	4.6	4
South Africa	2.9	2	2.8	2
Zimbabwe	4.0	4	4.2	4
Uganda	4.3	4	4.0	4
Tanzania	4.1	4	4.0	4

Not much in the way of support for the claim. Differences in the perceived ideal rate of children exist between countries, and, at least in the US, by educational attainment among residents of that country. Gender does not predict fertility in sub-Sahara Africa (or anywhere else to any significant degree, for that matter).

The second point Dragon Horse makes is valid. Specifically, the gender gap in education is a strong predictor of national fertility rates. As measured by the World Economic Forum's 2007 report entitled "The Global Gender Gap", the correlation between fertility and educational parity is an inverse .75 (p=0), far stronger than it is among the other measures of gender equality, including economic participation and opportunity (.22), political empowerment (.22), and health and survival (.01).

Paul Craig Roberts suggests Europeans do not believe US gov't account of 9/11

Writes Paul Craig Roberts, who knows the official 9/11 account to be false but whose omniscience unfortunately does not extend to what actually transpired:

No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced
documentary films that laugh at the official explanation.

George Noory scoffs at a lot of official explanations, a response that is not terribly unusual for those of Middle Eastern descent. So what? Most Europeans do not find the narrative of 19 Muslims hijacking four planes to be as risible as Roberts would have his readers believe they do.

In September of last year, WorldPublicOpinion.com, a left-leaning organization affiliated with the University of Maryland, released what appears to be the most expansive international survey of opinion on the attacks to date. Those surveyed were asked to volunteer, without offered responses, who they believed to be behind the attacks:


In all of the European nations surveyed except for Ukraine, absolute majorities answered with al Qaeda, bin Laden, or Islamic extremists. If the "don't know" responses are excluded, majorities in Indonesia and every non-Muslim country save Mexico feel this way. In contrast, by a 3 to 1 margin, Eygptians and Jordanians think Israel was behind the attacks rather than al Qaeda, bin Laden, or Islamic extremists. Outside the Muslim world, the US government's story is seen as the most credible on offer.

When making such serious charges, sloppiness is a killer. Roberts would better serve the skeptical cause if he were not so messy (and he'd better serve VDare readers if he actually wrote about immigration).

Racialism among whites

The previous post showing more evidence that non-whites are more racialist than whites are led me to wonder how racialism varies among those of European descent. The following table shows the percentage of people, by ancestry, who included race or ethnicity as one of the three most important methods of self-identification from a list of ten possible descriptors:

Heritage	Race important	N*
British**	2.8%	138
Scandanavian^	3.0%	32
Irish	8.6%	127
German	9.4%	148
Eastern European^^	10.2%	49
French	11.2%	18
Italian	14.3%	56

Because the question was only asked in 2004, sample sizes are not as optimally large. The French figure should be seen as suggestive at best. Yet the results have face validity.

The Irish percentage is a little lower than expected. Those of Irish descent are unique among whites in that they have their own ethnic holiday (never mind that St. Patrick was actually British) and benefit from mild, if light-hearted, cultural encouragement in the celebration of that heritage (ie, "Kiss me, I'm Irish" or Riverdance). Like Italians, the disdain their Catholicism brought in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century doesn't hurt, either.

Germans, despite their ancestral homeland's oh-so-atrocious relatively recent history, were forced to suffer the humiliation of anglicizing their surnames during the Great Wars and dropping their purely Teutonic tongues to integrate with broader American society, so in the oppression pecking order, they're a notch above the English.

Those of British ancestry, without claim to historic oppression--Roman legions and the Danegeld are negated by the slave trade the Empire waited all the way until 1833 to thoroughly outlaw--are left to wallow in the crapulence of massive achievement, and are consequently the least likely to think of themselves in racial or ethnic terms. Americans of Scandanavian descent are not far behind.

Despite Sacha Baron Cohen's best efforts, Eastern Europeans in the US are not completely embarrassed by their heritage. Wait, come to think of it, the question was only asked in '04, before Borat or Bruno came into existence and Ali G was just beginning his ascent to household name recognition. Perhaps those anti-Semites have been brought to heel in the interim!

Unsurprisingly, Italians are the most cognizant of their ethnic heritage. Among the European waves, they were impoverished latecomers. Further, they tend to be more easily physically distinguishable from other whites than those of English, French, or German descent are. Still, even this most ethnically conscious European group is far less racialist than are blacks, Hispanics, or Asians in the US.

GSS variables used: SOCID1, SOCID2, SOCID3, ETHNIC

* Respondent sizes vary slightly in some cases for each degree inquired about (most important, second most important, third most important). Those listed in the table represent the smallest number of responses from the three parallel questions.
** British includes those of English, Scottish, and Welsh descent.
^ Scandanavian includes those of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish descent.
^^ Eastern European includes those of Czeckoslavakian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian descent.

Racialist non-whites and non-racialist whites

To assert that whites don't think in racial terms and non-whites do is hardly novel in the Steveosphere, but the narrative that holds white racism to be ubiquitous and oppressive relies on the assumption that whites are racially conscious.

There is little evidence for this assumption. The GSS asked respondents to choose the three most important ways they self-identify from a list of ten descriptors. One of these was by racial or ethnic background. The graph shows the percentages by race of those who included this among the top three most important methods of self-identification:


The sample sizes for Hispanics (37) and Asians (44)* are small, but the pattern is clear. Only one out of ten whites included this among their top three. Among non-whites, about four out of ten did.

Since minorities are by definition not in the majority, it is expected that a distinguishing attribute will be deemed more important by the minority than it will be by the majority. The option combines race and ethnicity, though. When whites are broken down by ethnic group, only those of German descent constitute a larger American population than blacks do. But it's not just race that whites ignore. They don't think in ethnic terms, either.

As the percentage of the population that is white continues to shrink, white racial self-awareness will increase. This question set was only posed in 2004, so it's not possible to gauge the change in self-identification over time, but just looking at different age generations bears this out. By age range, the percentage of whites who include race or ethnicity among the top three ways they identify themselves:

18-29: 17.2%
30-44: 9.9%
45-64: 8.8%
65+: 5.3%

A colorblind society is a society in which everyone is the same color. Diversity leads to more racialism. Those who relentlessly promote it should be asked to explain why they support increasing the amount of racialism in society.

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1), SOCID1, SOCID2, SOCID3, AGE(18-29)(30-44)(45-64)(65-89)

* Hispanic also includes "some other race", as it is a method of racial identification used almost exclusively (97% of the time) by Hispanics. The Asian category includes Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and "other Asian".

Pious: We'll keep the virgins and still raise you half a kid

Randall and Razib both recently posted on a study out of UCSF that found, among unmarried people aged 25-45, church attendees are several times more likely to be virgins than non-attendees are:

Men and women who attended church at least once a week were respectively 5 and
3.9 times more likely to be virgins than those who attended church less often.

Randall sees this as suggesting that the propensity to attend church is being selected against. That butts up against the fact that church attendance is a predictor of higher rather than of lower fertility. From the turn of the century to today, the mean number of children among those aged 25-45, by frequency of church attendance (N = 6,207):

Attendance	Kids
Never	1.36
Less than once a year	1.34
Yearly	1.25
Several times a year	1.56
Monthly	1.68
2-3 times a month	1.84
Nearly every week	1.94
Weekly	1.91
More than once a week	1.90

Obviously unmarried virgins are not buoying the fecundity of the religiously active, and unmarried churchgoers are more likely to be virgins than unmarried pre-game football votaries are. Yet this doesn't translate into lower average fertility among those who sit in the pews than among those who do not, because bachelors and bachelorettes comprise a larger percentage of the pagan population than they do the pious. The following table shows the percentage of those aged 25-45 who are married, by frequency of church attendance:

Attendance	Married
Never	44.8%
Less than once a year	49.3%
Yearly	54.1%
Several times a year	57.7%
Monthly	59.5%
2-3 times a month	60.7%
Nearly every week	64.6%
Weekly	74.8%
More than once a week	74.0%

Most non-attenders are unmarried, while those free of marital vows constitute only one in four regular worshippers. Marrital status is a strong predictor of fertility. Continuing with the same age cohort (25-45) over the same period of time (2000-2008), unmarried people average a paltry 1.15 children compared to 1.91 for married folks.

It is these married folks who do the procreating, and, relative to the unmarried, they're a lot more likely to reserve Sunday mornings for their transcedent God than they are to reserve Saturday nights for their transgressive gods. The relatively high incidence of virginity among unmarried weekly churchgoers aged 25-45 does weigh down the total fertility of the pious, but the demographic is a featherweight--it constitutes just 9.5% of all weekly attendees aged 18 and older and only 2.4% of the total adult population. The 68% of regular churchgoers who are married (and 75% among those aged 25-45*) more than make up for the barrenness of their virgin co-congregates.

The GSS confirms that unmarried weekly attendees are more likely to be virgins than those who attend less frequently are. However, even among the unmarried, churchgoers outdo those who steer clear of houses of worship. Though unmarried people inside a church are more likely to be innocent than those outside its walls, the chaste constitute a minority of the unmarried population in both cases. And those unmarried churchgoers who do get busy pick up the baby-making slack of those who abstain--and then some. Among the unmarried aged 25-45, the average number of children of those who attend church on at least a weekly basis is 1.29. For those attending less frequently than that, it is 1.12.

Parenthetically, it shouldn't be surprising that among the unmarried, regular church attendees are more than four times as likely to be virgins than is the rest of the unmarried population. In remaining chaste, they're merely adhering to the tenets of their religions, just as their fellow married worshippers are in being fruitful and multiplying. Also, keep in mind that those who are holding out for a marriage they will eventually avail themselves of are faring better in the Darwinian struggle than are those who've shown a coven of women the sheets they sleep on. The most fecund people are those who have only shared themselves with one other person.

No children out of wedlock, lots of children once ensconsced in it. Sounds like an ameliorative prescription for a sick civilization to me. I'm encouraged to know people who strive to realize this ideal are outbreeding those who have no use for it.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), MARITAL(1)(2-5), ATTEND(0-6)(7-8), SEXFREQ, CHILDS, AGE(18-89)(25-45)

* Due to the death of a spouse, the likelihood of being married is lower among all adults than among those aged 25-45. Of all adults regularly attending church, 8% are widowed. Together with those who are married, this constitutes 76% of the total weekly church-attending population.