The Audacious Epigone

GSS on drug use and IQ

2012-01-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

Inductivist points to a new article in the journal Intelligence that finds that recreational drug use and alcohol consumption correlate positively with intelligence up to a certain point before trending in opposite directions again at the right end of bell curve, the thought being that openness to experience is a personality trait that tends to be associated with higher IQ, and drug use is a way to open oneself up to more novel experiences.

I'm not sure how strong the correlations are or if the relationship holds for some type of alcohol consumption or recreational drug use versus abstention from all of them, or if the correlation holds in varying degrees for alcohol and each drug considered separately (only the abstract is freely accessible). Based on GSS responses and a United Health Foundation report, alcohol consumption and IQ appear to be positively correlated.

Recreational drug usage is a topic for which the GSS contains a relevant question as well, so why not see if it supports what the journal article found? The percentage of respondents who have ever injected illicit drugs by intelligence grouping*. To allow ample time for experimentation to have occurred, only those aged 30 or older are included. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2002 or later (n = 9,892):

Intelligence	Injected
Real Dumbs	4.0%
Pretty Dumbs	3.9%
Normals	3.5%
Pretty Smarts	3.2%
Really Smarts	2.3%

This doesn't include smoking weed, the most easily attainable and frequent form of recreational drug use in the US. That said, the modest relationship is, in contrast to the article's finding, inversely correlated with intelligence.

I wonder how important the specific drug in question is to detecting a relationship between usage and intelligence. Presumably crack cocaine users tend to be less intelligent than powdered users are (although as crack is a predominately black drug and powdered cocaine a predominately Hispanic one, neither may correlate positively with intelligence). I'd guess that meth use and intelligence, if anything, trend in opposite directions, as the stereotypical methhead is a rustic white prole of the lowest order. PCP, shrooms, LSD, and ecstasy, on the other hand, are fairly prevalent on college campuses. I know people who use or have used all of them, and they're mostly well-adjusted and intelligent folks. I don't have much of an impression one way or the other when it comes to heroin. The Chinese liked it and it seems pretty popular in Europe, but I'm aware of heroin users who are of cut from the same cloth as methheads, too.

Parenthetically, I've never had even the slightest desire to engage in illicit drug use of any kind. I've associated it with being sickly and desperate for as long as I can remember, and always avoided it without issue even during my formative years. On personality tests, I come up around the 40th percentile on openness, so that bit of built-in protection might help a little, too!

GSS variables used: EVIDU, WORDSUM, AGE(30-89)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

Wholesome Mormons

2012-01-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

As someone of a conservative traditionalist bent, I find contemporary Mormonism encouraging. Not for its theological aspects--if I have a spiritual bone in my body, I've yet to find it--but instead for its practical expression. As Jack Cashill memorably said in response to a question about Mormonism's relationship to Christianity at a mock debate in which he played Mitt Romney, "We're socially conservative, baby-making married members of the middle class and we vote overwhelmingly Republican, so why worry about our theology when we're producing those kinds of results?" Of course, to someone who takes the tenets of his religion seriously, that response could come off as supercilious and flippant. Be that as it may, it captures my sentiments pretty well.

A recent report put out by Pew Research entitled "Mormons in America" accentuates my positive feelings. Some highlights:

- Mormons don't see the US as particularly 'structurally unjust'. Excepting perceived discrimination against themselves, Mormons detect less discrimination against every other protected class (and it can hardly be said that the PC aegis shields Mormonism) than the general public does.

- They're more content with the communities they live in than other Americans are. While only 38% of the public rates the communities they live in as "excellent", 52% of Mormons do. Given the high concentration of Mormons in Utah specifically and the Southwest more generally, this isn't especially surprising. The dictionary definition of "community":

A social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

Mormons actually live in communities thus defined, rather than in multicultural hodgepodges lacking any sense of unity, where disparate members avoid one another and instead "hunker down", acting as "turtles" retreating into their shells.

- Younger Mormons are more conservative than their elders are, with 68% under the age of 50 identifying as conservative compared to 62% of those aged 50 and older. As the insultingly popular adage "If you're 20 and not a liberal, you have no heart; if you're 40 and a liberal, you have no brain" attests, the opposite is the case among the larger public.

In further contrast with broader American social trends, the more educated a Mormon is, the more religious he tends to be. While 90% of college-educated Mormons say their faith is "very important" to them, only 70% of Mormons with a high school education or less report the same.

- While Mormon positions on so-called hot button social issues like same-sex marriage have been highly publicized, Mormons are stoutly conservative on fiscal issues as well. The following table ranks several major religious traditions in the US by how favorably inclined they are towards pushing for a smaller government that provides fewer social services as opposed to a larger government that provides more social services by taking the percentages of adherents from each tradition who favor "smaller government, fewer services" and subtracting from it the percentages of adherents from that tradition who favor "bigger government, more services":

Religious affiliation	Small gov't score
Mormons	+55
Evangelical white Protestants	+51
Mainline white Protestants	+28
Catholics	+3
Unaffiliated	(4)
Black Protestants	(55)

- While Mormons often find themselves as the butt of jokes about polygamy, by a margin of 86%-2%, American Mormons overwhelmingly reject it as immoral (Gallup polling shows that among the general public, polygamy is similarly rejected as immoral, 91%-7%).

- Mormons take a harder line than the rest of the public does against other degenerate behaviors. The following table shows the percentages of Mormons and of the broader public who assert that the behaviors in question are immoral:

Immoral?	Mormons	Public
Sex between unmarried adults	79%	35%
Abortion	74%	52%
Drinking alcohol	54%	15%
Divorce	25%	29%

Well, if you're only allowed to hit it with your wife, you'd better be able to kick her to the curb if things don't work out. Man is a sexual animal, too.

- Mormons are more family-oriented and less career- and self-oriented than the rest of America is. The following table shows the percentages of Mormons and of the broader public who count the following goals as "one of the most important things in life":

Among the most important things in life	Mormons	Public
Being a good parent	81%	50%
Having a successful marriage	73%	34%
Living a very religious life	55%	20%
Being successful in a high-paying career	7%	9%
Having free time to relax and do the things you want to do	7%	10%

If the nuclear family is the building block of Western civilization, Mormons are better stewards of our venerable occidental traditions than the rest of us are.

- Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. This image is heart-warming in its own right (irrespective of whether or not the guy kneeling in the center is recognized):

Tangentially, in a post at Secular Right last October, Andrew Stuttaford wrote:

To an outsider, at least, Mormonism is clearly a part of the greater Christian family.

And not just to an outsider. Most people in the US feel the same way. By a 51%-32% margin, Americans consider Mormonism to be a "Christian religion".

Which candidate gets the most beltway dollars?

2012-01-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

++Addition++Noah offered some much needed guidance as to what geographic areas constitute "the beltway". Due diligence has now been done. I've cleaned up the FEC zip code areas to better reflect what the post was trying to show (and now more accurately does).

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We hear plenty of grumbling from the conservative 'grassroots' about those referred to as Washington insiders, beltway conservatives, and the like. Before imploding, in fact, Herman Cain explicitly billed himself as a political outsider who would "bring change to Washington!"

One way to measure insider status is to look at where campaign donations are coming from. Having recently familiarized myself with the FEC's useful website, the following table ranks (current and former) presidential candidates by the percentage of contribution dollars for each campaign that have come from people and organizations inside of Washington DC and also from Montgomery County on the Maryland side and Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria on the Virginia side, where much of the influence and affluence in the nation's capital actually resides:

Presidential candidate	DC dollars
1. Newt Gingrich	4.61%
2. Rick Santorum	3.93%
3. Barack Obama	3.81%
4. Mitt Romney	3.08%
5. Tim Pawlenty	2.23%
6. John Hunstman	2.23%
7. Gary Johnson	1.79%
8. Rick Perry	1.37%
9. Charles 'Buddy' Roemer	1.16%
10. Ron Paul	0.52%
11. Herman Cain	0.34%
12. Michelle Bachmann	0.29%

Indeed, despite his past as a lobbyist, Cain appears to be quite the outsider. Other outcasts in the eyes of the Republican establishment--Bachmann and Paul--round out the rest of the bottom. Gingrich, while not especially popular within DC itself, still appears to have many friends and fans inside the beltway (in addition, of course, to the many enemies he has there). Rick Santorum's beltway share stands out more than anyone other candidate's does--is it due to a strong contingent of "religious right" influence peddlers in DC having gotten behind Santorum? I'm (now!) surprised to find that the percentage of Obama's campaign dollars coming from the seat of federal power is not higher than every single one of his Republican challenger's percentages. Alas.

Which presidential candidates do lobbyists like?

2012-01-23T17:39:00.001-08:00

Having a little more fun at the FEC website, I calculated the total dollar amounts received by presidential candidate through the end of November 2011 from individuals* who listed "lobbyist" as their occupations:

Presidential candidate	Lobbyist $
1. Rick Perry	$25,500
2. Tim Pawlenty	$11,770
3. Newt Gingrich	$11,500
4. Mitt Romney	$8,000
5. Rick Santorum	$3,000
6. Herman Cain	$2,500
7. Barack Obama	$1,150
8. Jon Hunstman	$500
9. Michelle Bachmann	$250
10. Charles "Buddy" Roemer	$100

Enjoying the influence that the governor of a large state does (or to a lesser extent the recent governor of a middling sized one) helps get the professional special pleaders to open their wallets up. So does having a long history of political consultancy work. Lest one think that being the current POTUS pales in comparison, Obama absolutely cleans up among those occupationally describing themselves as activists, garnering an astounding $36,128 of the $36,515--or 99%--that they have contributed thus far.

The astute reader may notice a conspicuous absence in the table above. Not a single self-described lobbyist has given Ron Paul a dime.

As for the seemingly trivial dollar amounts considered given the weightiness of the position being sought after, beyond rhetorically asking how many readers have made presidential campaign contributions of their own (not many I suspect--I certainly haven't--and we're intellectually vested in and follow this stuff a lot more closely than the general public does), the best I'm able to do is defer to Steve Sailer's reaction to Sheldon Adelson's $5 million dollar donation to a pro-Gingrich political action committee:

Is $5 million really headline news in politics these days? I feel very naive about this because I have no clue what the real deal is, but I've long noticed that when I'm reading stories about the political contributions of heavy hitters like Adelson and Haim Saban, the numbers tossed around about their donations don't seem all that staggering. Now, T. Boone Pickens giving $165 million to get Oklahoma State almost into the BCS title game -- that's significant money. But $5 million sounds like what some used car dealer ponies up to get his college football team's weight room refurbished, not the kind of serious moolah that may determine the course of American history. Reading these articles, I feel like I'm in that scene in Austin Powers where Dr. Evil is defrosted after 30 years and threatens to blow up the world if he's not given "One. Million. Dollars!"

* Consequently, PACs, political parties, and candidates' self-financed contributions are excluded. These excluded sources are, however, modest--some 98% of direct donations to 2012 presidential campaigns have come from individuals.

A Roissy by any other name

2012-01-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

Today Roissy (look, if I start writing "Heartiste, the artist formerly known as Roissy", the next time I step onto the field I'll have to expect the divine justice I receive when someone inevitably drubs my faggy ass!) wrote on the comparability of benefits received from marriage and long-term cohabitation, pointing to a previous post here as evidence of what happens when that comparability is ignored. My response follows.

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My man,

I realize you’re making a rhetorical point, and I even appreciate a little condescension because it points a lot of your readers my way, but I’m certainly aware of your concerns re: the GSS. Here’s the brief post preceding the one you linked to, in response to the assertion that marriage means, as you so eloquently phrase it, “crossed arms and clamped pussies”:

In aggregate, of course, married men get more sex than unmarried men do. But that’s because the latter category is dragged down by men who are unattractive or uninterested in women.

What about those guys who are able to successfully play the field? In addition to variety, do they also enjoy greater frequency? Among those aged 22-36, sexual frequency for married men (4.15) is marginally higher than it is for unmarried men who have racked up double-digit counts (4.10).

Getting married will tend to net you about the same amount of snatch time as a go getter gets. The treasure chest won’t be clamped shut, though your prize won’t glitter as much.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), AGE(22-36), SEX(1), MARITAL(1)(2-5), NUMWOMEN(10-250)

I don’t have a dog in the fight, I just like rummaging through the data. But if, instead of writing primarily for and to the benefit of silver-tongued alphas as you do, we think of the above as being relevant to a broader and presumably majority-beta audience, the point that marriage (or long-term commitment, if you prefer–marriage just happens to be the only reliably way to track it in broad-based social surveys of which the GSS is the best of the best) does generally offer men who aren’t adept at playing the field a tolerable sexual lifestyle is at least worth considering.

Your filter, and your subsequent reactions to the things that come in through it, aren’t universally productive upon reception, even if they are perfectly valid for your target audience. By way of analogy, you’re like the entrepreneur who offers tips for the self-employed to make them more successful in their ventures while simultaneously belittling the poor suckers who go work for someone else. But a lot of those corporate cogs don’t have what it takes to run their own businesses and, despite your best advice, are staring down economic ruin if they go the route you prescribe. Many of them will be better off working for someone else. As someone who is grounded in the realities of HBD, it’s difficult for me to conceive it being otherwise.

Intelligence and depression

2012-01-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

OneSTDV wonders:

There's some controversy over whether higher intelligence and depression correspond. From reading the "intellectual" sphere, generally defined as people who engage in self-analysis, one would surely conclude that such a correlation exists.

Arriving at this conclusion, unfortunately, demonstrates how problematic relying on a few anecdotal data points to arrive at generalized conceptions often is. On top of a prohibitively small sample size, selection bias is also at work here. Robert Lindsay summarizes the relevant scientific literature as follows:

Careful studies have shown that the high IQ basket case is a myth. Studies of very high IQ types have found that in general, as IQ rises, so does mental health. Why this is is not known.

The GSS shows that the least intelligent are the most likely to view life as being devoid of meaning. It's not difficult to imagine why this is the case, whether one employs a Maslow-esque hierarchy of needs where those of modest intelligence tend to be found near the base and the more intelligent closer to the top, or one simply realizes that those on the left end of the bell curve are generally incapable of thinking abstractly.

OneSTDV contrasts "cloudy skies" depression (which might be defined as feeling blue) from the sort of existential depression that a person is susceptible to if he dwells too much on the "relative scale of humanity in the context of our universe". We've seen evidence that argues against the assertion that existential depression and intelligence are correlated. Propitiously, the GSS also provides an item to gauge the more mundane "cloudy skies" depression. Since 2002, it has asked respondents how often they've experienced mental health problems (which include, but are not limited to, depression) over the last 30 day period. The averages (means), by intelligence grouping* (n = 2,537):

Intelligence	Blue days
Real Dumbs	3.7
Pretty Dumbs	3.7
Normals	4.1
Pretty Smarts	3.4
Really Smarts	3.3

Not much variance in the averages here. About the only thing that might be suggested is that higher intelligence may provide a bit of resistance to melancholy.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), MNTLHLTH, NIHILISM

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

Campaign contributions by candidate from US military personnel

2012-01-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

Reading Mangan's recent post contrasting the top sources of campaign contributions for the Romney and Paul presidential campaigns, I was surprised to find that the Texas congressman's three largest boosters are the Army, Air Force, and Navy. As Dennis points out, the lists compiled by OpenSecrets.org are comprised of donations from employees, family members, and organizations' political action committees, not from the actual organizations themselves.

Ron Paul is described as the "isolationist" (an absurdly inaccurate term to use in describing a vociferous free trade supporter such as Paul) candidate who wants to reduce the size of the US military's global footprint and substantially cut federal spending on defense. Pundits of the mainstream Republican establishment, who must now bite their tongues when they talk about Paul upon the realization that without Paul's supporters a GOP victory in November is virtually unattainable, have in the past expressed no reservations in labeling him an "anti-American". It's noteworthy, then, that those who actual serve in the US military appear to be among his most ardent supporters.

Mangan's post, however, reveals that Romney's tenth largest contributor has donated nearly five times as much as Paul's largest contributor has. So maybe the military branches are just further down Romney's list but still give more to Mitt and the other candidates than they do to Paul.

To find out whether or not that's the case, I went to the FEC's website and downloaded the entire donor listings for all individuals who listed "Army", "Navy", "Marines", or "Air Force" as their employer or occupation through the end of November 2011 (the latest figures available). The following table ranks all 2012 presidential (current and former) aspirants who have received campaign contributions from members of the US military by the amount of money each has received:

Presidential candidate	$ received
1. Ron Paul	$80,500
2. Barack Obama	$71,492
3. Mitt Romney	$12,700
4. Rick Perry	$7,575
5. Herman Cain	$7,318
6. Michelle Bachmann	$7,157
7. Newt Gingrich	$1,375
8. John Huntsman	$1,250
9. Gary Johnson	$750
9. Rick Santorum	$750
11. Charles 'Buddy' Roemer	$735
12. Thaddeus McCotter	$250
13. Tim Pawlenty	$250

Paul has garnered twice as much in donations for his presidential campaign from military personnel as the rest of the Republican field combined. Even president Obama, who owns the Democratic ticket, comes in below him.

I'd love to hear how Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity would react if questioned about why we should ignore what the "troops on the ground" are saying about the direction of our foreign policy and what needs to be done to change it. Of course we'll hear instead about the need to rally behind someone who supports the military and is strong on defense without a word on how those in the military actually feel about him.

Directions for Republicans on how to take cyanide

2012-01-16T10:34:00.001-08:00

The strategy is as simple as it is obvious as it is disingenuous. Continue to urge Republicans to abandon immigration restrictionism and instead Hispander at full bore. It's inevitable that Hispanics are going to continue growing not only in absolute numbers but also as a share of the US population, so best not to do anything to offend them:

Mitt Romney "is done," said DeeDee Blase, founder of Somos Republicans in Arizona. "He'll be lucky to get 8 percent of the Hispanic vote" after saying he would veto legislation that would create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants and accepting the endorsement of anti-immigration activist Kris Kobach, architect of two of the strongest immigration crackdown laws in the country.
The GOP front-runner, Romney has referred to the legislation — called the DREAM Act — as a handout.

The fact that Hispanics are more concerned about a host of other issues than they are about immigration aside, this putative inevitability is of course evitable with the enforcement of immigration laws and the halting of illegal immigration from across the US-Mexico southern border:

The government projects Hispanics will account for roughly 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size and boosting their political power. Overall, Hispanics traditionally tilt Democrat, meaning the Republican Party is looking at a threat to their future power if they don't work to make inroads with this politically pivotal group now.

Eating low-fat pudding is not the way to lose weight. If the margin on each additional sale is negative, a business can't make up the loss by increasing sales volume. It doesn't strike me as being overly cynical to presume that the leftists who prescribe this strategy for Republicans are fully aware that it will work to relegate the GOP to permanent minority status.

In a stunning display of amnesia, the AP article provides the following:

Some worry that this year's eventual GOP nominee won't fare much better than McCain four years ago — and may fare worse — if candidates don't soften the way they talk about immigration.

McCain, of course, was co-sponsor of the 2007 Senate amnesty bill, relentlessly courted Hispanics and chastised restrictionists in his own party, and barred those who took a tough line on illegal immigration from the 2008 Republican nominating convention. He was the epitome of a Republican Hispanderer, and yet he still got his clock cleaned among Hispanics, 31%-67%. If most Hispanics are "natural Republicans" save for the party's stance on immigration, McCain would've been the perfect pol for them to rally around to mold the GOP in exactly the image they wanted. They did nothing of the sort though, as the list of reasons that Hispanics tend to vote Democratic is a long one, of which immigration is just one (and a relatively unimportant one at that) of many.

As for Romney, I'm feeling vindicated for having promoted him as far back as the 2008 presidential primary season as a relatively hard-line restrictionist on the issue of illegal immigration. Kobach's endorsement is enough to get this guy to surprise himself by doing something other than throwing his vote away on a third party this November and instead supporting Mitt.

2011 NFL regular season wins and stat correlations

2012-01-15T17:43:00.001-08:00

With the conference championships teed up for next weekend, here are correlations between several stats and wins during the 2011 NFL regular season. This isn't a sports blog, and I'm not making any audacious claims about being able to provide special insights. Just the raw correlations for entire teams here, next to the same for last year for comparative purposes:

Offense	2011	2010	2009
Team passer rating	.79	.68	.81
Team points scored	.77	.71	.88
Yards gained per pass play	.72	.49	.80
Total yards gained	.63	.49	.77
1st downs	.61	.51	.70
Total yards gained per play	.60	.43	.81
Pass yards gained	.59	.30*	.68
Turnover ratio	.56	.72	.69
Time of possession	.55	.61	.46
3rd down conversion %	.53	.64	.64
QB hits allowed	(.40)	(.31)*	(.53)
Sacks allowed	(.29)*	(.26)*	(.53)
4th down conversion %	.26*	(.05)*	.25*
Rush attempts	.19*	.48	.12*
Pass attempts	.17*	(.06)*	.14*
Yards gained per rush play	(.10)*	(.05)*	(.09)*
Rush yards per game	(.07)*	.35	.04*
Total team penalty yards	.04*	(.08)*	.11*
Offensive penalty yards	(.03)*	(.11)*	.04*
Pass:Run ratio	(.01)*	(.31)	.02*
Special teams
Average net punt	.38	(.08)	.27*
Average yards gained per kick return	.38	.23*	.05*
Average kickoff distance	.26*	.08*	.32
Average kickoff return yards allowed	(.11)*	(.13)*	.15*
Field goal %	.07*	.08*	.03*
Defense
Rushing yards allowed per game	(.60)	(.56)	(.58)
Points allowed per game	(.58)	(.72)	(.68)
Opponent's passer rating	(.56)	(.54)	(.47)
Yards allowed per pass play	(.35)	(.49)	(.57)
4th down conversion % given up	(.33)	.03*	(.30)
Passing yards allowed per game	.28*	(.13)*	(.24)*
3rd down conversion % given up	(.18)*	(.13)*	(.23)*
Sacks made	.15*	.30	.41
Defensive penalty yards	.13*	(.01)*	.14*
1st downs given up per game	(.10)*	(.43)	(.45)
Total yards allowed	(.09)*	(.47)	(.56)
Yards allowed per play	(.09)*	(.32)	(.54)
Yards allowed per rush	(.05)*	(.16*)	(.33)

* not statistically significant at 90% confidence

Quarterbacks are king. Teams that move the ball through the air, win. Teams that can't, don't. The difference between having a play maker with a rifle for an arm like Jay Cutler and a dud like Caleb Hanie is starting off 7-3 and finishing 1-5. Need we even mention Peyton Manning?

The 2011 season felt to this fan more like 2009, which Steve Sailer deemed the year only passing mattered, than it did 2010. Indeed, the correlation with wins and the statistics presented above between the 2011 and 2009 seasons is .84, even more rigorous than the .76 correlation between 2011 and 2010.

OneSTDV, on why the NFL is the most popular sports league in the US:

The NFL is now the ultimate sports behemoth, perhaps as a result of helmets and pads covering up black superstars and whites still dominating the marquee positions of QB and head coach.

I'm unclear as to how strong the relationship between professional sports players' demographics and the popularity among the public of the sports they play is. The NHL and MLS are both a lot whiter than the NFL while remaining far less popular than that football behemoth is. Over the last few decades, the MLB has become increasingly non-black and yet has experienced a long-term decline in popularity not just among blacks but also among whites to such an extent that football, not baseball, now clearly deserves to be referred to as America's favorite pastime. But it's hard to argue that in football's most important position, whites are in fact overrepresented relative to racial composition of the country as a whole.

While assertions that "defenses win championships" inevitably abound during postseason play, the offensive correlations are considerably and consistently stronger*. That total rushing yards allowed--not yards per attempt, but total run yards given up--correlates more strongly with wins than any other defensive stat does says a lot about offensive predominance. When defenses give up a lot of rushing yards in a game, it's often because the opposing team spent a good chunk of the second half on the ground to burn off the clock and avoid costly turnovers while protecting an early lead that the losing team's offense couldn't match.

To argue that offense matters more than defense does might seem like arguing that it only matters how hard your side pulls on the rope in tug-of-war, not how hard the other side does. Yet defenses in the NFL are mostly fungible. Tampa 2 is a bit of an exception, where the outsized importance of the middle linebacker is akin to the quarterback's, albeit to a lesser degree, but the phrase "cookie cutter" gets (over)used so often because it is accurately descriptive. If an offense can move the ball in the air against a standard NFL defense, that team is likely to be found still playing in January.

It's sometimes asserted that special teams are one-third of the game. It's not true in terms of duration and rarely feels like they are as important as downs from scrimmage. The table above confirms that feeling.

Turnovers and penalties? Turnovers, yes. Penalties, not so much. The Colts and Cowboys were the least penalized team in the league this year. The Raiders and Lions were the most penalized (even if penalties don't appear to be significant in the outcome of games, it is telling that the notoriously dirty Raiders and Detroit, which was embarrassingly chippy this season, accumulated the most fouls).

* Of course, especially stout defenses are still helpful. The Ravens and 49ers both have shots at the Super Bowl primarily because of the strength of their defenses (or, in the case of San Francisco, the astounding and league-leading +28 turnover ratio that continued in the upset against New Orleans). To oversimplify, next weekend features the Ravens and 49ers representing defensive primacy and the Giants and Patriots the power of offensive dominance. Should make for some enjoyable spectating!

Self-identified social class membership over time

2012-01-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

In an essay adapted from the forthcoming Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray writes:

Finally, there is the most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

Murray argues that this phenomenon is ceasing to exist, in what seems to be a natural outgrowth (via HBD chick) of the increasing cognitive stratification that characterizes the contemporary United States, something Murray and Herrnstein famously chronicled in The Bell Curve. Instead of each person viewing himself as being crowded halfway up the ladder alongside everyone else--or, better yet, together flipping the ladder on its side and taking seats next to one another on a long bench of equal height--many more find themselves at the top or bottom ends, the distance in between too wide for either end to see, let alone interact with, the other end.

Murray goes on to statistically detail a divergence between that top and bottom on a host of social indicators. I wondered if Murray's observations might also be detectable in the way that Americans self-identify themselves. The proceeding graph traces the percentages of whites aged 30-49 (to stick with the demographic Murray discusses) by the social class they see themselves belonging to from the early seventies to the present (click to the left of the image for greater resolution):

Overwhelming majorities of Americans think of themselves, in essentially equal numbers, as either working- or middle-class. Small minorities identify at the bottom of the heap or at the upper echelons, again in equal numbers, with a small divergence identifiable in the last few years, presumably due to the 'Great Recession'.

Of course, ideal behaviors and actual behaviors are rarely the same thing. Indeed, we see that on the whole, people have perceived themselves maintaining similar levels of social standing over the last four decades even as the criteria for evaluating said social standing tells a different story. Propositionalism alone isn't enough. It may be a necessary ingredient of American exceptionalism, but it isn't a sufficient one. As Francis Grund observed nearly two centuries ago:

No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States, with a different code of morals. The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation.

GSS variables used: CLASS, RACE(1), AGE(30-49)

Changes in positions on social behaviors over time, by country

2012-01-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

Thinking about Razib's post at Discover magazine and then responding to Razib's subsequent comments on the same, Parapundit's Randall Parker wonders how stable social values are across countries:

It occurs to me that stability in how countries poll in world values surveys is an argument against the idea that the world is inevitably going to become liberal.

There are changes in wording in most of the survey questions by wave (that is, years in which surveys were conducted), but there is quite a bit of consistent overlap in a section over how justifiable certain "hot button" social behaviors are. The number of countries participating picks up enough in the 1990-1991 wave (before that, the pickings are pretty sparse) to make comparisons to the most recent 2005-2008 wave. This 1990-1991 wave corresponds fairly closely with the "end of history" predicted by Francis Fukuyama, when all countries were predicted to be moving inexorably towards liberal democracy.

The following tables show the mean responses of survey participants by country in the 90-91 wave, the 05-08 wave, and the shift in mean score over that decade and a half time period, by social issue. All questions ask respondents how often they feel the behavior in question is justifiable, with potential answers on a 10-point scale ranging from "never justifiable" (1) to "always justifiable" (10). So the higher the score, the more liberal a country's population is. If a country's values have liberalized (which, in the context of this post, refers to the freedom of the individual to choose to behave however he pleases) over time, the result is a positive number in the last column. Conversely, if the country has become less liberalized, the number will be negative.

There are data for 26 countries in both waves, though Slovenia is not included in any of the proceeding tables*. The WVS is mostly populated by affluent, first-world countries, especially in the earlier waves, so the only Islamic representative is Turkey:

Claiming government benefits	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.9	3.6	1.7
Brazil	2.7	2.7	0.0
Bulgaria	1.8	2.2	0.4
Canada	1.9	1.9	0.0
Chile	4.1	4.3	0.2
China	1.7	3.3	1.6
Finland	4.7	2.1	(2.6)
France	3.5	3.1	(0.4)
Great Britain	1.8	2.2	0.4
India	1.8	3.1	1.3
Italy	2.0	1.6	(0.4)
Japan	2.0	2.1	0.1
Mexico	4.9	4.1	(0.8)
Netherlands	1.6	1.5	(0.1)
Norway	1.4	2.1	0.7
Poland	2.1	2.3	0.2
Romania	1.7	2.0	0.3
Russia	2.1	2.8	0.7
South Africa	2.3	2.6	0.3
South Korea	2.2	2.8	0.6
Spain	2.8	2.5	(0.3)
Sweden	1.6	1.9	0.3
Switzerland	1.9	1.5	(0.4)
Turkey	1.5	1.6	0.1
United States	1.9	2.3	0.4

One standard deviation is 2.7 points, so the average Mexican resident is two-thirds of one SD further to the left (that is, at about the 72nd percentile of the US distribution) than the average American is. Yet another argument free market libertarians should employ when clamoring for open borders!

It's in the European welfare states like Finland and France--where liberalism has been normative for the longest--where the most backsliding has taken place. In most countries though, there has been a moderate shift towards liberalism.

Someone accepting a bribe	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.1	1.4	0.3
Brazil	1.4	1.9	0.5
Bulgaria	1.5	1.9	0.4
Canada	1.6	1.6	0.0
Chile	1.5	1.7	0.2
China	1.3	1.7	0.4
Finland	1.6	1.6	0.0
France	2.1	2.2	0.1
Great Britain	1.5	1.6	0.1
India	1.4	3.0	1.6
Italy	1.6	1.3	(0.3)
Japan	1.8	1.5	(0.3)
Mexico	2.8	2.4	(0.4)
Netherlands	1.8	1.5	(0.3)
Norway	1.5	1.5	0.0
Poland	1.6	1.4	(0.2)
Romania	2.1	1.4	(0.7)
Russia	1.4	1.8	0.4
South Africa	2.1	2.4	0.3
South Korea	1.8	1.6	(0.2)
Spain	1.5	1.8	0.3
Sweden	1.6	2.0	0.4
Switzerland	1.5	1.5	0.0
Turkey	1.2	1.3	0.1
United States	1.5	1.7	0.2

One SD is 1.6 points. Public positions on bribery have held fairly steady since the collapse of communism, although to the extent that they've moved at all, it's been in a liberal direction everywhere except some of Europe's more corrupt countries, our neighbor to the south, and surprisingly, the Netherlands.

Homosexuality	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.0	5.3	2.3
Brazil	2.4	4.2	1.8
Bulgaria	1.8	4.1	2.3
Canada	4.1	5.7	1.6
Chile	1.8	4.9	3.1
China	1.2	1.6	0.4
Finland	4.4	5.9	1.5
France	3.9	6.5	2.6
Great Britain	3.5	5.7	2.2
India	1.2	3.0	1.8
Italy	3.6	3.3	(0.3)
Japan	2.4	4.8	2.4
Mexico	2.9	4.5	1.6
Netherlands	7.2	7.2	0.0
Norway	4.1	7.7	3.6
Poland	1.8	3.1	1.3
Romania	1.5	2.1	0.6
Russia	1.4	2.5	1.1
South Africa	2.3	3.0	0.7
South Korea	1.6	2.8	1.2
Spain	3.4	6.7	3.3
Sweden	4.5	8.4	3.9
Switzerland	4.2	7.3	3.1
Turkey	1.6	1.7	0.1
United States	3.1	4.6	1.5

One SD is 3.5 points. It's not just in the US where the legalization of same-sex marriage appears to be an inevitability. There has been a veritable worldwide shifting in moral perceptions of homosexuality in less than one generation, with the only countries holding the line against a rain of fire and brimstone being the Catholic stronghold of Italy and Muslim Turkey (well, perceptions among the Dutch have remained constant, but are coming from a position that was already very tolerant towards homosexuality). Turkey, along with China, is far less tolerant of homosexuality than the rest of the countries represented are.

Prostitution	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	2.1	4.1	2.0
Brazil	2.0	3.1	1.1
Bulgaria	2.2	3.0	0.8
Canada	3.4	3.3	(0.1)
Chile	1.8	3.5	1.7
China	1.2	1.4	0.2
Finland	4.3	3.1	(1.2)
France	3.2	3.4	0.2
Great Britain	3.1	3.9	0.8
India	1.5	3.1	1.6
Italy	2.5	2.4	(0.1)
Japan	1.9	2.0	0.1
Mexico	3.2	3.9	0.7
Netherlands	5.5	5.6	0.1
Norway	2.1	4.1	2.0
Poland	1.6	2.5	0.9
Romania	1.9	2.1	0.2
Russia	1.8	2.3	0.5
South Africa	2.1	2.5	0.4
South Korea	2.2	2.5	0.3
Spain	2.8	4.6	1.8
Sweden	2.1	3.1	1.0
Switzerland	3.7	5.1	1.4
Turkey	1.7	1.8	0.1
United States	2.4	3.2	0.8

One SD is 2.8 points. The world's oldest profession is seeing many of its modern objectors falling away, as positions on prostitution have become more liberalized in nearly every country surveyed, with Finland the one glaring exception. Again we see that positions in China and Turkey have moved very little over the time period.

Abortion	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.4	3.2	(0.2)
Brazil	2.5	2.4	(0.1)
Bulgaria	5.1	5.6	0.5
Canada	4.9	4.7	(0.2)
Chile	1.8	2.6	0.8
China	4.9	2.1	(2.8)
Finland	6.5	5.5	(1.0)
France	5.0	6.5	1.5
Great Britain	4.5	4.9	0.4
India	3.4	3.3	(0.1)
Italy	4.3	3.5	(0.8)
Japan	3.7	4.6	0.9
Mexico	3.8	3.2	(0.6)
Netherlands	5.2	5.5	0.3
Norway	5.0	6.7	1.7
Poland	3.2	3.0	(0.2)
Romania	4.9	3.3	(1.6)
Russia	4.5	4.1	(0.4)
South Africa	2.8	2.6	(0.2)
South Korea	4.2	3.5	(0.7)
Spain	4.1	5.5	1.4
Sweden	5.4	7.8	2.4
Switzerland	3.2	5.5	2.3
Turkey	4.2	2.3	(1.9)
United States	4.0	4.5	0.5

One SD is 3.1 points. As liberalism traipses across the globe, it gets tripped up on the issue of abortion. While many social conservatives in the US despair of what they perceive to be an abandonment of values at home, the moral trajectory of abortion is far less clear than it is of homosexuality.

China, where penalties can still result when an abortion is not undergone by Han who violate the one-child policy, has seen a significant shift towards a more pro-life position as the aberration that is the country's procreation-limiting policy has presumably become more widely understood by the Chinese populous.

Turkey, which has yet to show any liberalizing in sentiment, continues not to show any here.

It's tempting to think that birth dearths in countries where public sentiment has moved away from abortion rights like Russia, Romania, South Korea, and Italy is a result of said decline in fecundity, but there are other nations like Norway, France, and Spain that are well below replacement level fertility yet have nonetheless become more inclined towards abortion over the same period of time.

Divorce	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	5.8	6.5	0.7
Brazil	4.9	5.6	0.7
Bulgaria	4.5	6.4	1.9
Canada	5.6	6.0	0.4
Chile	3.5	6.0	2.5
China	4.8	2.7	(2.1)
Finland	7.2	6.8	(0.4)
France	5.6	6.9	1.3
Great Britain	5.3	6.4	1.1
India	2.7	3.9	1.2
Italy	5.2	5.0	(0.2)
Japan	4.9	6.4	1.5
Mexico	4.8	5.3	0.5
Netherlands	6.1	6.4	0.3
Norway	5.3	7.2	1.9
Poland	4.2	4.7	0.5
Romania	5.0	4.2	(0.8)
Russia	4.8	5.4	0.6
South Africa	3.5	3.9	0.4
South Korea	4.3	4.6	0.3
Spain	5.3	7.1	1.8
Sweden	6.3	8.4	2.1
Switzerland	4.8	6.9	2.1
Turkey	5.0	3.4	(1.6)
United States	4.9	5.8	0.9

One SD is 3.1 points. Most countries have been moving in a liberal direction with two notable--and now familiar--exceptions; Turkey and China. Of course, with one-sixth of the world's population, when China moves one direction, even if the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction, it's tough to sell the change as inexorable on the world stage. What about India and Brazil, two other non-Western and non-East Asian countries with large populations? On abortion, they both have treaded water. On all the other social issues considered thus far, they've shifted in a liberal direction (as have Argentina and Chile, the other two Latin American countries represented in the WVS).

Euthanasia	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.2	4.0	0.8
Brazil	2.7	3.5	0.8
Bulgaria	3.5	5.6	2.1
Canada	5.0	5.3	0.3
Chile	2.7	3.7	1.0
China	6.7	3.3	(3.4)
Finland	6.2	5.8	(0.4)
France	5.2	6.8	1.6
Great Britain	4.7	6.1	1.4
India	3.3	3.9	0.6
Italy	3.6	3.9	0.3
Japan	5.3	6.5	1.2
Mexico	4.2	4.3	0.1
Netherlands	5.9	6.3	0.4
Norway	4.2	5.6	1.4
Poland	2.1	3.4	1.3
Romania	3.5	3.0	(0.5)
Russia	3.6	5.3	1.7
South Africa	3.3	3.2	(0.1)
South Korea	n/a	n/a	n/a
Spain	3.9	5.6	1.7
Sweden	5.0	6.7	1.7
Switzerland	5.2	6.6	1.4
Turkey	3.0	2.8	(0.2)
United States	4.2	4.9	0.7

One SD is 3.3 points. On what social conservatives deem "sanctity of life" issues in the US, China has markedly shifted away from a liberal position. Turkey again shows no evidence of liberalization. South Africa, the only sub-Saharan African country represented, has, excepting abortion, become more liberal on all the issues considered thus far. When it comes to euthanasia, however, South Africans, along with the Turks, have not undergone any change in public sentiment.

Suicide	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.7	2.3	0.6
Brazil	1.4	1.8	0.4
Bulgaria	2.3	2.5	0.2
Canada	2.9	2.8	(0.1)
Chile	1.7	2.3	0.6
China	2.6	1.8	(0.8)
Finland	3.8	3.3	(0.5)
France	3.8	3.8	0.0
Great Britain	3.2	3.8	0.6
India	1.6	3.4	1.8
Italy	2.1	2.1	0.0
Japan	2.7	2.9	0.2
Mexico	3.2	2.6	(0.6)
Netherlands	4.4	3.8	(0.6)
Norway	2.6	3.4	0.8
Poland	2.2	2.3	0.1
Romania	1.9	1.5	(0.4)
Russia	2.2	2.2	0.0
South Africa	2.1	2.4	0.3
South Korea	2.9	2.9	0.0
Spain	2.2	3.1	0.9
Sweden	3.4	4.4	1.0
Switzerland	3.0	4.6	1.6
Turkey	1.7	1.5	(0.2)
United States	2.2	2.8	0.6

One standard deviation is 2.9 points. There hasn't been an enormous amount of change in perceptions of suicide anywhere in the last 15 years, although the ratchet is turning towards liberalism in most countries, with China and Turkey again being notable exceptions.

Most of the data comes from the Westernized world, and there's little to dispute that in the West, the move towards liberalism has been a steady one since the lifting of the iron curtain, in the former Soviet Union as well as free Europe and the US. Only on abortion has Russian opinion moved away from liberalism. In Latin America, India, and to a lesser extent, South Africa, it has been the same story--excepting abortion, all have become more liberal.

China and Turkey, however, have conspicuously not. Turkey is more liberal (or in media parlance, more "moderate") than North Africa, which is in turn more liberal than Egypt and most of the Middle East. I'm certainly not qualified to say whether or not Turkey proxies well for the rest of the Muslim world in terms of liberalization of social mores, and Turkey has notoriously crept away from secularism over the last couple of decades, but it at least suggests that Randall's suspicion that the move towards liberalism is evitable may be accurate. And this century is going to be a Sinitic story much more than the last one was. If the Muslim world, where fertility is still high, and China, where wealth and worldwide influence are on the rise, are not liberalizing, liberalism's future is not too bright.

Parenthetically, this is hardly a novel concept. Pat Buchanan dealt with it in his invaluable The Death of the West, and Steve Sailer added to it in his review of Buchanan's book.

WVS variables used: V201, V202, V203, V204, V205, V206, V207

* There were obviously some errors in coding the Slovenian responses for the 05-08 wave, as I first became aware of a couple of years ago. The data corruption extends beyond the one item I initially noticed it on, as the responses for all of the justification questions are extreme outliers, with virtually every behavior being almost always justifiable if the WVS data are to be trusted (which I'm confident in saying should not be done).

Stay awhile, amigo

2012-01-10T17:02:00.001-08:00

Apparently reeling a bit from a publicizing of the uptick in deportations that have taken place under the Obama administration, the department of homeland security announced that it will abnegate deportation proceedings against some 215,000 El Salvadorans illegally present in the US through at least late 2013, citing damage from earthquakes--earthquakes that occurred in the Central American country several months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001:

The Obama administration has extended temporary protected status to El Salvadoran nationals through late 2013, shielding them from deportation and forcible return to their home country.

The Department of Homeland Security cites ongoing disruptions from a series of earthquakes in 2001, concluding that "El Salvador remains unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of its nationals."

The Obama administration's deportation policies have come under scrutiny, just as the president has geared up for his reelection campaign. Despite his support for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship, deportations have soared to new highs under the Obama administration— and the president's approval ratings among Latino voters have flatlined.

El Salvador, which has a monetary standard of living about half that of Mexico, is heavily reliant on remittances from its natives living in the US, which constitute one-sixth's of the country's annual GDP. Fittingly enough, one-sixth of El Salvador's native population also currently lives in the US. Only Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica have larger shares of their populations living stateside:

The protected status designation currently applies to 215,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. illegally and otherwise subject to deportation, and remittances from ex-patriate Salvadorans in the United States help keep that country's economy afloat.

So, it's clear that this de facto amnesty is the right thing for El Salvador. Consequently, it's occurrence must come as no surprise.

What would come as a (pleasant) surprise? A campaign trail denunciation of it, particularly from Mitt Romney, who could use it to shore up support with blue collar whites who might have been taken aback (I guess--that's the media narrative, anyway) by his apology for the creative destruction that makes capitalism work and also to show that he's looking past the primaries and towards next November.

Educated younger Americans don't mind homosexuality much at all

2012-01-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

In an intriguing article where he wonders if "disgust homeostasis" is inherent in human nature, the Derb writes:

My impression of educated younger Americans is that they don’t mind homosexuality at all.

That impression is assuredly correct, but TAE's raison d'etre is to validate stereotypes, so please indulge me as I do just that.

The GSS doesn't explicitly ask respondents how they feel about homosexual acts, but support or lack thereof for same-sex marriage provides a pretty good indication of their sentiments. Among those with at least 16 years of education (equivalent to a bachelor's degree or more), aged 24-30, from 2008 and 2010 for contemporary relevance--that is, among contemporary educated younger Americans--63.6% support it, while only 21.5% oppose. Among the broader public, 42.7% support it and 44.4% oppose.

GSS variables used: MARHOMO(1-2)(4-5), AGE(24-30), EDUC(16-20), YEAR(2008-2010)

Racial variation by state

2012-01-07T11:26:00.001-08:00

++Addition++Razib explains why the quest for the representative state is doomed to fail.

I should point out that I'm not arguing much of anything in this post but instead have created a list that does just what it is purported to do--show by what amount each state deviates from the national mean when it comes to the racial composition of its population. And yes, I'm aware that Hispanic is technically a linguistic and/or cultural label, not a racial classification, but for all intensive purposes, Hispanics are treated as a distinct racial group in the US as much as Asians are.

---

Andrea Mitchell's highly publicized assertion that Iowa is 'too' white, rural, and evangelical made me wonder which state is the most racially representative of the country as a whole.

The proceeding table is constructed from 2010 census data. I took the absolute differences between each state's (non-Hispanic) white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and other (primarily Native American) population percentages and that of the US as a whole in each of the respective racial categories and then added those values together to come up with a racial variance score for each state. The higher the score, the more divergent a state's racial demographics are from the national mean, the lower the score, the more racially representative the state is of the country it is part of:

State	Variance
1. Illinois	3.8
2. New Jersey	12.0
3. New York	14.2
4. Connecticut	15.0
5. Virginia	17.2
6. Florida	19.2
7. Delaware	20.8
8. North Carolina	21.0
9. Colorado	21.4
10. Rhode Island	25.4
11. Massachusetts	25.8
12. Arkansas	27.2
13. Nevada	28.2
13. Washington	28.2
15. Michigan	29.0
16. Kansas	29.8
16. Kentucky	29.8
18. Oklahoma	31.4
18. South Carolina	31.4
20. Pennsylvania	31.6
21. Tennessee	32.0
22. Arizona	32.8
23. Oregon	33.0
24. Alabama	33.8
25. Missouri	34.6
26. Ohio	34.8
27. Maryland	35.0
28. Utah	35.2
29. Indiana	35.6
30. Georgia	35.8
31. Nebraska	36.8
32. Louisiana	38.8
33. Wisconsin	39.2
34. Minnesota	39.6
35. Alaska	40.2
36. Idaho	41.4
37. Texas	42.6
38. Wyoming	46.4
39. Mississippi	48.8
40. Iowa	50.0
41. New Hampshire	57.2
42. South Dakota	57.6
43. North Dakota	59.0
43. West Virginia	59.0
45. Montana	59.6
46. California	60.0
47. Vermont	61.2
48. Maine	61.4
49. New Mexico	74.2
50. District of Columbia	76.2
51. Hawaii	118.8

Here is a visualization of the table, the lighter the shading, the more racially representative the state is.

My presumption was that the Upper Midwest would be the country's most representative region. It has a small but significant and historically established black population, and while it's not nearly as Hispanic as the Southwest, the brown wave has begun lapping up on its shores. With Illinois at the top of the list with a racial composition that nearly mirrors that of the entire country, that presumption might look pretty impressive. However, excepting Illinois, a big chunk of the other most representative states come from the Northeast (excluding the Northeast's lily white northeastern section!) and Mid-Atlantic.

It comes as little surprise that the seat of our federal government rests in one of the most demographically unrepresentative places in the country.

Iowa (and New Hampshire) are both near the bottom of the list on account of being substantially whiter than the country on the whole. Florida, which holds primary #4 at the end of January, is the first in the nominating process that isn't too something, although it's highly doubtful that we'll hear any major media types suggest that South Carolina, which comes before Florida, is "too black".

Parenthetically, the putative "too evangelical" rap is off the mark, setting aside contentious reactions to the supercilious use of the word "too". The Pew Religious Landscape Survey finds that 24% of Iowans are evangelical, compared to 26% of the US population on the whole. The state is, from a religious perspective, one of the country's most representative.

As for rurality, Iowa comes in as the country's 36th most densely populated. Missouri, at 28th, most closely reflects the US as a whole.

Cardio contingencies

2012-01-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

Santa brought me P90X2 for Christmas. I won't actually dive in until next week after I've made the necessary additions to my home gym, but it seems as relevant a time as any to pick a bone with those leveling criticism at cardio workouts as being something that should be avoided. In a post entitled "Why the P90X exercise program is overrated", Vin Miller writes:

Don’t Do the Plyometrics, Kenpo X, or Cardio X Workouts

When proper safety precautions are observed, plyometrics is a great way to improve performance and injury resistance. However, the P90X Plyometrics workout is more of a long calorie burning session than a true plyometrics workout. Along with Kenpo X and Cardio X, these workouts are very similar to aerobics, step, or spin bike classes which means that they’re relatively high in intensity and are a significant physiological burden that can easily wear down the body and require more time to recover from, especially when done on a regular basis.

It's not that Vin Miller's recommendation is necessarily incorrect, it's just that it's not universally applicable. Oddly, he earlier criticizes the program for focusing too much on glamor muscles and not enough on a "truly healthy and balanced lifestyle", yet it is anaerobic work, not aerobic work, that gets the most conspicuous aesthetic results.

If the goal is to build upper body muscle mass, intense cardio is potentially counterproductive, especially when done in long intervals and/or high frequencies. But it's crucial piece of overall conditioning for athletes, and not just for professionals. As a recreational athlete, pullups and pushups aren't going to do me as much good when I'm playing soccer or ultimate frisbee as endurance work will do. Body builders suck at most team sports like basketball and 7-on-7 because all that mass is heavy and demands a lot of oxygen when exerted.

During plyo, Tony Horton states that the workout really helps him step up his game on the court, and it is undoubtedly true--plyometrics makes one a better basketball player.

Vin Miller suggests as an alternative to intense cardio going on a brisk walk or an easy bike ride and getting one's heart rate up in the 55%-75% range. For general health, there probably aren't any negative consequences in getting out there and doing what my 55 year-old mother does each morning, but it's not going to do a thing to help an athlete (which I define here as anyone who pushes his physical capacities to their limits--in addition to playing sports, it also applies to those who figure skate, rock climb, etc). To realize real gains, an athlete needs to push into the 90% range.

Capitalist whites, socialist blacks, libertarian youths

2012-01-01T16:33:00.001-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. is reported to have said the following in a speech to staff members in 1966:

We are saying that something is wrong ... with capitalism ... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

Nearly half a century later, that dream still appears to live on in the hearts and minds of a majority of America's black population.

The source of this assertion comes from Pew's recently released report on word associations. The invaluable organization often (though not always!) goes where other polling and survey organizations--even those putatively on the right--refuse to go. Pew breaks down responses by race and ethnicity, among other things. The following table shows the percentages of participants, by race, who have positive and negative reactions to the term "socialism". The fourth column shows net favorability, computed by simply taking the positive reaction percentages and subtracting from them the negative reaction percentages:

Socialism	Pos	Neg	Net
Whites	24%	68%	(44)
Blacks	55%	36%	+19
Hispanics	44%	49%	(5)

While a slight plurality of Hispanics are averse to socialism, likely stemming from having had some experience with it if not first-hand then vicariously through relatives in Central and South America, they are not positively disposed towards capitalism, either. The same table, this time for the term "capitalism":

Capitalism	Pos	Neg	Net
Whites	55%	35%	+20
Blacks	41%	51%	(10)
Hispanics	32%	55%	(23)

How widely known is it that black feelings towards socialism mirror white feelings towards capitalism, and that a majority of blacks both react positively to the idea of socialism and react negatively to the idea of capitalism? Can Steve Innskeep handle the truth?

I'd love to hear a free market open borders leftist like Thomas Friedman challenged on how he squares the Hispanic preference for socialism over capitalism with the claim that the US should open its borders "as wide as possible".

Even the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, despite claiming to represent the 99%, is comprised almost entirely of whites (who only constitute 63% of the US' population and a mere 15% or so of the world's), is less inclined towards socialism than either blacks or Hispanics are, with 39% of those who support the movement expressing positive feelings towards socialism while 52% of OWS supporters react negatively towards it.

The Pew report should also help direct the attacks of mainstream radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity towards a new target. "Liberal" has been beaten to death to such an extent that it only carries positive connotations with it in the minds of half (50%) of the population, compared to "conservative" (62%) and the new target, "progressive" (67%). Even among Republicans a majority (55%) is favorably inclined towards the term "progressive". Time for the ditto heads to get to work!

Parenthetically, Hispanics express warmer feelings (67%) towards "liberal" than whites (45%) or even blacks (54%) do, another blatantly obvious reason for the Republican Establishment to keep clamoring for amnesty and open borders!

To the extent that the GOP will be able to bring younger Americans into that 'big tent' Republican pols are always blathering on about, it will be by way of their libertarian (read Ron Paul), not neocon, ideas. The following table shows the percentages who elicit positive and negative feelings towards the term "libertarian" by age group, with the fourth column showing net favorability, computed by simply taking the positive reaction percentages and subtracting from them the negative reaction percentages:

Libertarian	Pos	Neg	Net
18-29	50%	28%	+22
30-49	41%	35%	+6
50-64	35%	43%	(8)
65+	25%	43%	(18)

Hispanics vote Democrat because of economic concerns and health care, not immigration

2011-12-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

Though it is persistently asserted by self-proclaimed 'Latino activists'*, media types, and Establishment Republicans alike that taking a restrictionist stance on immigration is to commit political hara kiri, Hispanics are not particularly concerned with immigration (and to the extent that they do care, their opinions are far more ambiguous than the casual observer has been led to believe).

Pew just released the results of a survey on Hispanics in the US headlining with their reactions to an uptick in deportations carried out under the Obama administration as compared to the Bush administration. The report also contains other points of interest, including the emphasis placed on the question of immigration. Of the six issues participants were asked about, immigration came in dead last in the percentage of Hispanic voters who say they are "extremely concerned" about it. From most to least important: Jobs (50%), Education (49%), Health care (45%), Taxes (34%), Federal budget deficit (!) (34%), Immigration (33%).

Hispanics primarily favor Democrats because of the party's policies on health care and economics--policies that seek to transfer wealth from middle class whites to the (disproportionately Hispanic) poor. The GOP would have to move to the left of the Democratic party on both of these fronts to beat it at its own game and have a chance at winning over Hispanics, a move that would necessarily entail the Republican party ceasing to be conservative in any meaningful way.

Calling for open borders alone doesn't aid the Hispandering cause. The survey was conducted when the three big names in the GOP field were Romney, Perry, and Cain. Romney, whose relatively tough stance on illegal immigration is only outdone by Bachmann, was found to be running neck-and-neck with Perry and slightly ahead of Cain among Hispanic voters, even though Cain was running at the front of the pack among Republican primary voters at the time.

Perusing the rest of the report, I was reminded of a one of my favorite Simpsons moments, when, as the family shovels down low-fat pudding, Marge remarks that she can just feel the pounds melting off. The report shows that while Hispanics who are fluent English speakers, make $75,000+ per year, and/or have a college degree feel the Republican party is more inclined towards Hispanics as a group than the Democratic party is (14%, 19%, and 14%, respectively) than are Hispanics who primarily or exclusively speak Spanish, make under $30,000 per year, and/or have less than a high school education (6%, 10%, and 7%, respectively), an increase in even the more assimilated and successful portion of the Hispanic immigrant contingent is obviously bad news for Republicans.

* Despite an apparent upsurge in preference for the term "Latino" over the term "Hispanic" by 'activists' and SWPLs in the media over the course of the last decade or so, more people descended from south of the border prefer the latter descriptor, Hispanic, over the former, Latino. This remains the case whether those Latinos/Hispanics in question were born in the US or outside of it, by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

As I proudly stand up next to you?

2011-12-28T14:00:00.001-08:00

Reading Jared Taylor's most recent book, White Identity, I wondered how the seemingly endless number of examples provided to illustrate how widespread the disdain for the United States as a European-descended country is among non-whites translated into opinions offered by a representative sampling of the US population. Taylor's tone is thoughtful and sober, yet the book's content--intentionally or not--surely inflames racialist passions in many who read it (myself included). To use an example that doesn't happen to involve whites, consider the following (p82):

[Last year] in Manhattan, police arrested a group of black teenagers who specialized in beating up Asian women in their fifties to seventies. The boys acted as lookouts; it was the girls who attacked.

But in a country of over 300 million and a world of over 7 billion, anecdotes demonstrating just how vile acts of human depravity can be are always going to be abundant enough to fill a book like Taylor's from cover to cover. Taylor's book is not meant to be a comprehensively objective look at race relations in the West, however, and to criticize him for failing to present something he neither attempted nor claimed to be presenting is stupid. Having maintained a data-focused blog for several years, I'm well aware of the fact that it's not cold numbers but hot stories that move people to action.

That said, this post doesn't attempt to break the mold. It's true to TAE's tagline. Before tying into questions Taylor raises, we'll go there. In 2004, the GSS asked respondents how proud they are to be Americans. The following table shows the percentages who answered "very proud" by partisan affiliation. In all cases, non-citizens are excluded:

Party ID	Proud
Republican	92.1%
Independent	78.1%
Democrat	73.6%

Okay, so when Rush Limbaugh says Democrats are "anti-American" he's hardly being precise. Give them due credit for at least knowing they are free! Still, the conventional assertion by those on the right that conservatives are more patriotic (which, by definition, means to love, support, and defend one's country) than liberals are is accurate.

The differences are more politically-based than they are class-based:

Class	Proud
Lower	86.2%
Working	79.7%
Middle	81.1%
Upper	84.7%

Race, as it so often does, matters at least as much as almost anything else, although it's hardly clear that Hispanics in the US take more pride in Reconquista efforts than they do in the country they are citizens of:

Race	Proud
White	83.2%
Black	74.1%
Hispanic	71.6%
Asian	56.2%

Parenthetically, the Asian sample includes just 38 people (the only grouping in any of the tables with fewer than 100 respondents), so it should at most be interpreted as being merely suggestive. Incidentally, White Identity does include an unsettling chapter entitled "Asian Consciousness" that disrobes to some extent the 'model minority' conception of our yellow cohabitants.

When it comes to taking pride in their adopted homeland, the foreign-born largely assimilate to native norms:

Ancestry	Proud
Native	81.3%
Foreign	77.5%

Even wider than the partisan pride divide are the results of the generational invitational:

Age	Proud
18-24	63.3%
25-34	73.6%
35-49	85.5%
50-64	84.5%
65+	90.9%

While I'm not ashamed of my ancestors--not those who came over from England four centuries ago nor those who came from Ireland and Germany after WWII--it's almost instinctive for millennials to be embarrassed by the thought of being asked whether or not we love our country (and not because of concerns like Mangan's, although those are the more relevant issues to me). For my grandfathers, the answer would've been an automatic, delivered without hesitation. In contemporary schools and in the media, the narrative has increasingly become one focused on the oppression and exploitation that are said to constitute not only America's past but also her present, a focus utterly devoid of historical context or comparative objectivity. This is not without consequence.

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), PARTYID(0-1)(2-4)(5-6), CLASS, AGE, BORN, AMPROUD1(1-4)

Nihilistic Manosphere

2011-12-26T15:04:00.001-08:00

In an argument with Ferd, OneSTDV characterizes the so-called Manosphere as nihilistic. Well, the GSS offers some insight into nihilism, so let's look at what it has to tell us.

The following tables display mean nihilism scores from the years 1998 and 2008, computed by taking participant responses to the 5-point scaled GSS item on perceived lack of purpose in life and inverting the averages for ease of reader comprehension. The higher the score, the more nihilistic the group is. One standard deviation is .76 points on the nihilism scale.

First, among men in their forties or older (who have thus had ample time to get married if they desired to do so) who are married (or widowed) and those who have either divorced or never married in the first place:

Marital status	Nihilism
Married/widowed	1.55
Unmarried	1.74

About one-fourth of one standard deviation's difference, equivalent to the nihilism gap between the middle class and the underclass.

Some of those guys are inevitably unmarried not because they willingly choose to be flying solo but because they don't really have a choice, though. Some guys are just too unattractive to women to ever land one. C'est la vie.

So, consider the same by the number of lifetime notches in the belt, again aged 40+:

# of women	Nihilism
0	1.93
1	1.53
2-5	1.52
6-10	1.61
11-20	1.67
21+	1.57

Those with one lifetime partner or whose lives have been characterized serial but long-term monogamous relationships are a little less nihilistic than the club hoppers are, but the men who don't (or can't) get any at all clearly are the ones who feel tend to feel that life does not serve much of a purpose.

This doesn't disprove One's assertion, of course--I'd guess a significant chunk of the Manosphere is comprised of bitter men who've faced unending frustration in their relationships (or lack thereof) with the ladies.

GSS variables used: NIHILISM, NUMWOMEN(0)(1)(2-5)(6-10)(11-20)(21-500), SEX(1), AGE(40-89)

The left's manly intelligence (distribution)

2011-12-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

In a blatant but understandable attempt to gain electoral advantage (anything that makes voting more restrictive benefits Republicans, and anything that makes it easier to do benefits Democrats), the Justice Department rejected South Carolina's version of a voter-ID law requiring putative citizens to produce proof that they are indeed citizens eligible to vote in their respective state and federal elections:

The Obama administration entered the fierce national debate over voting rights Friday, rejecting a South Carolina law requiring photo identification at the polls after determining the statute discriminates against minority voters. ...

In its first ruling on the voter-ID laws, Justice's Civil Rights Division said South Carolina's statute is discriminatory because the state's registered minority voters are nearly 20 percent more likely than whites to lack a state-issued photo ID.

This is, of course, a predictable and inevitable consequence of treating 'disparate impact' as evidence of unequal treatment. The Establishment wants to maintain that isonomy is of paramount importance, but simultaneously (and incorrectly) assumes that all people--and by extension, all groups of people--are the same, so that any unequal outcome must necessarily be the result of unequal treatment (ie, an isonomic breach has occurred) irrespective of whether or not such an occurrence can be definitively proved.

In the case of a discrimination settlement with a mortgage lending company, this line of reasoning may go mostly unchallenged, but when it comes to something as simple as presenting a photo ID--something that most people do on a regular basis, be it to write a check or drive a car--the assertion that certain groups are being treated unfairly in being required to do as much strikes an overwhelming majority of the public as absurd.

Putting aside the question of intentional voter fraud, the reason voter-ID requirements hurt the left more than they hurt the right is because voters at the left end of the IQ and future time orientation spectrums are mostly Democrats, not Republicans. I've seen multiple facebook posts over the last couple of days in reaction to the Justice Department's actions along the lines of "liberals are too unorganized and stupid to vote".

In fairness, it's more because the left's intelligence distribution is wider than the right's is, with more lefties at the bottom and top and more conservatives in the middle, not because liberals are less intelligent on average than conservatives are (in fact, the IQ means by political orientation are essentially equal). That distributional difference, in turn, is due primarily to the left's racial diversity. So, if the FB posters wanted to be more precise (and more crass), they'd say "NAMs are too unorganized and stupid to vote". SWPLs, who would generally be happy to accuse conservatives of believing as much, are in tough spot if they assert as much though, because based on the Justice Department's accusations, it is transparently true. Oh how political correctness makes us stupid.

To dredge up a bit of evidence to back up the assertion that the disproportionately female political left sports a more manly intelligence distribution than the mostly male right does, consider that the GSS shows that one standard deviation in wordsum score for all liberals is 2.18 points, while for all conservatives it is only 1.99.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM, POLVIEWS(1-3)(5-7), YEAR(2000-2010)

She got shot, and... it's more than you ever did!

2011-12-22T16:19:00.001-08:00

OneSTDV captures the societal shift away from celebrating accomplishment and towards celebrating suffering in discussing Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords and the coverage surrounding the Loughner shooting and her recovery from it. The PC orthodoxy leverages (and pushes for) this shifting to prop up favored groups at the bottom and minimize the laudatory attention that should rightly be given to those of great accomplishment. This inherently delegitimatizes the moral worthiness of middle class white kids from intact families while putting on a pedestal those who come from broken families and mean streets (as One demonstrated here).

It was not suddenly detectable for the first time in the 2008 election, when two potential sufferers-in-chief squared off (compared to, say, Winston Churchill or Dwight Eisenhower), of course. The Simpsons captured it nearly two decades ago in Radio Bart (which happens to be one of my top five episodes of all time):

Homer: That Timmy is a real hero!
Lisa: How do you mean, Dad?
Homer: Well, he fell down a well, and... he can't get out.
Lisa: How does that make him a hero?
Homer: [flustered and frustrated] Well, that's more than you did!

(Video clip here, albeit not in English)

Climate change and IQ

2011-12-21T15:08:00.001-08:00

Although ~~global warming~~ climate change has been a "hot button" issue for several years, until the 2010 GSS surveys were completed, my favorite database for gauging American society hadn't pushed it. What spurred me to check the newest stuff was a post by Half Sigma a few months back where he lamented what he sees as the intellectual herd mentality among the brightest that leads them to buy into the CAGW narrative:

People with higher general intelligence (let’s call that fluid g) are better at reasoning, but they aren’t more likely to use their reasoning ability to figure out the actual truth of a matter, they are just better at figuring which group’s opinions to mimic. People with higher intelligence also have a greater degree of social conformity than people with lower intelligence. ...

Mitt Romney says he believes in global warming but Governor Rick Perry of Texas doesn’t. Rick Perry has the correct beliefs about global warming. It’s what people who are smart, are knowledgeable about physics, and who think for themselves believe. ...

Unfortunately, Rick Perry has the correct belief about global warming not because he’s smarter than Mitt Romney but because he’s stupider than Mitt Romney. We have reached the sad state in which the majority of smart people believe in global warming, and smart people figure out what to believe based on what other smart people believe, and that is how Mitt Romney has come to the wrong conclusion on global warming and why Rick Perry has failed to come to the wrong conclusion on global warming. Rick Perry isn’t smart enough to realize how stupid he appears to smart people when he says that he disbelieves in global warming.

HS' cynicism and self-assuredness aside, it's difficult to dispute that the popular conception is of more knowledgeable and well-educated people believing that human activity is driving changes in the climate in a significant and dangerous way and rubes denying it. Fortunately, the GSS lets us put that to the test, using wordsum scores as a proxy for intelligence. The following table shows the average responses by IQ group on the 5-point scale question in which respondents are asked how dangerous they think the rises in global temperatures from climate change are. For ease of comprehension, scores have been inverted so that the higher the score, the more dangerous the cohort thinks climate change is:

IQ	CC danger
Real dumbs*	3.62
Pretty dumbs	3.41
Normals	3.39
Pretty smarts	3.30
Really smarts	3.44

One standard deviation for the respondent poll is 1.17, so the difference between the most and least 'alarmist' groups is modest, at barely one-quarter of one standard deviation's difference between their averages. Still, if anything, the trend is towards more skepticism of the dangers of climate change as intelligence increases, in contrast to what HS seems to correctly identify as the popular conception of who believes in climate change and who doesn't.

That's misleading, though, because less intelligent people are probably more inclined to buy into the potential for all kinds of catastrophes than smarter people are, whether it be a flood of biblical proportions, an alien invasion, or the zombie apocalypse. When presented with a list of ten environmental concerns and asked to select which one of them is the most pressing, the percentages who select climate change shake out as follows:

IQ	CC worst prob
Real dumbs*	6.7%
Pretty dumbs	8.6%
Normals	9.1%
Pretty smarts	10.8%
Really smarts	18.3%

As expected, the intellectually elite portion of the populous is significantly more likely to finger climate change as the biggest environmental problem the country faces than the rest of the population is.

To pick some low hanging fruit and validate stereotype that will come as no surprise to anyone of any persuasion, the average responses on the 5-point scale question about how dangerous climate change is, and the percentages of people who assert that it is the most pressing environmental problem of our time, by political orientation:

Orientation	CC danger
Liberal	3.85
Moderate	3.54
Conservative	2.92

Orientation	CC worst prob
Liberal	14.9%
Moderate	10.5%
Conservative	6.8%

Self-described moderates tend to be less intelligent than either liberals or conservatives are, but the liberal-conservative gap is negligible, so that confound isn't much of a problem here. It's clear that opinions on climate change, rather than being stratified primarily by intelligence, track with political orientation (something HS mentions occurs often in his post, although he curiously does not carry this through to his discussion on climate change in particular). Because major media generally portrays liberals as open-minded and enlightened and conservatives as close-minded and hidebound, the move from liberals being worried about climate change to intelligent people being worried about climate change is an easy one to make in the popular mind.

As someone utterly lacking in credentials of any kind to offer an informed perspective on climate change and its consequences, I'm more skeptical of the calls for increased regulations on and centralized bureaucratic control over energy consumption than I am over whether or not we're experiencing appreciable warming. I'm unconvinced that warming, which has generally been beneficial for humanity, will (or would?) be a bad thing (and could be beneficial in many ways), especially the farther away from the equator one moves.

But it's tough to reject the smarties out-of-hand when they encourage me with their support of nuclear power! The following table shows the percentages of people by IQ who think nuclear power should be the US' top energy priority in the future:

IQ	Nuclear future
Real dumbs*	9.3%
Pretty dumbs	6.3%
Normals	6.7%
Pretty smarts	14.9%
Really smarts	20.5%

GSS variables used: FUTENRGY, TEMPGEN1, ENPRBUS, WORDSUM, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that roughly forms a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

A few comments on the Republican presidential nomination

2011-12-18T14:27:00.001-08:00

With Herman Cain out, race isn't an issue in the Republican presidential nominating process. It never was among voters, of course, as GOP voters are overwhelmingly white. Age, educational attainment, income, sex, and religious affiliation are still there, but of the polling data I've combed through, the only characteristic outside of political orientation (is the respondent a conservative, moderate, or liberal Republican?) and support or lack thereof for the tea party that gets broken out is sex.

I hadn't given it much thought, but I guess it shouldn't come as a big surprise that women are a lot more supportive of Romney than men are. A Pew poll released earlier this week found that 40% of male likely GOP voters currently support Gingrich, compared to just 19% for Romney. Among women, however, the gap is only one-third as wide, with 29% for Gingrich and 22% for Romney. Gingrich is the ugly, adulterating doughboy; Romney the good-looking, athletic, devoted family man.

More alarming for those like myself who, while not enthused by the idea of a Romney nomination (Ron Paul's still my favorite, though if I had my way his son would be running in his stead), would much rather see the former governor get the nod than Gingrich get it comes from WSJ/NBC polling conducted last week. It asked Republican respondents likely to vote in the primaries to assume that their respective primaries were being held today, and only Gingrich and Romney were in contention for the nomination. Under this scenario, Gingrich cleans Romney's clock, 59%-36%.

The 25% ceiling Romney has been bumping his head on since the campaign began doesn't look like it will rise much even when the race is winnowed down to just two people. As Santorum, Bachmann, and Perry throw in their towels, their supporters will move into the Gingrich camp. Romney gets his best shot if the rest of the field continues to ride the roller coaster up and down. If he doesn't win in Iowa, he needs Ron Paul to. The sooner it becomes Romney vs. the anti-Romney, the worse his chances become.

The Derb has written that Mitt is the odds-on favorite. I wonder if he remains as confident as he did a couple of months ago. Randall Parker concisely stated why Romney is the best choice:

He's got very high analytical skills, understands finance, understands business management, and knows how to be a CEO. His Mormonism is not important. That he governed a liberal state from a moderate position was really the only choice he had as governor of Massachusetts. He's not a nut case or a dummy like some of the other Republican candidates. He harkens back to an earlier (and better) Republican party when executive competence mattered and ideological zeal was suspect.

While I couldn't have put it any better myself, his Mormonism, necessary centrism in a liberal state, and his lack of ideological commitment all do, in fact, matter to most Republican primary voters.

Trust and violence

2011-12-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

Agnostic has been marshaling a sundry series of posts that trace how shifts in the rate of violent crime are associated with changes in the behaviors and culture of broader society, from the rise and fall of shorts' length (heh) to disappearance and resurrection of drive-ins.

Initially, I figured, understandably enough, that trust levels would tend to rise as violent crime declined, and fall during times of increasing violence. Agnostic argues that this is not the case, however. Instead, increasing levels of trust propel people out of their cells and into the commons where they come into more social contact with other people than they do during low trust times, when people keep to themselves. It is this increase in social mingling that brings on an increase in violent crime, as the perpetrators of those crimes now have greater and more varied opportunities to strike (and it is not always necessarily a consequence of mendacious intent on their part--more social contact inevitably means more confrontations that may result in violent outcomes, even if neither party involved planned on having it end up that way).

Agnostic's trust-influences-violence-and-violence-influences-everything-else theory (my eloquent naming, not his!) is intriguing if not obviously convincing. How does the increasing racial and ethnic diversification of the US, and the consequent "hunkering down" it brings, play into this relationship? Robert Putnam shows that diversity dampens social participation, but it is also associated with higher rates of violent crime. Of course, despite increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the US, crime levels have fallen steadily for two decades now. As more diversity brings more social retreat and lower levels of trust, will violent crime rates continue to decline? Perhaps a continuing drop in violence should be thought of as a silver-lining in the balkanizing skies above.

Anyway, I wondered if any correlation between trust levels and violent crime could be detected in the US from the early seventies to today. Scaling the national rate of violent crime to responses to the GSS question over whether "most people can be trusted" or "you can't be too careful in life", I graphed the relationship:

The correlation is an insignificant .10. When violent crime is compared to trust levels a couple of years prior, the correlation becomes an inverse (which is to be expected in Agnostic's conception of the trust-violence relationship) .16 (p = .47). That's only slightly less easy to dismiss as meaningless.

By no means does this refute any part of Agnostic's theory, as the GSS survey question just gauges a general feeling among respondents, not how they actually behave, and is subject to some statistical noise (though the average annual sample size is over 1,400). Further, trust has been declining for three decades, violent crime for two. The lag might simply be considerably longer than two years, maybe closer to ten, something that is unfortunately not testable using the GSS. But it would've been neat if it clearly supported the theory, which it does not do.

GSS variables used: YEAR, TRUST(1-2)

Mexican fatalism

2011-12-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

I don't tap into the World Values Survey nearly as often as I'd ideally like to because it's more difficult to trust than the GSS is. Sometimes the problems are apparently just coding errors, but often the issues involve representative sampling (or the lack thereof), confusion in translation, or something else. Exacerbating this challenge, it's tougher for me to use my intuition as a first approximation of whether or not the results are flawed when the comparisons are between Slovenia and Andorra than when they're between Kansas and New York because I'm merely a citizen of the US, not of the world.

That said, Steve Sailer recently recounted the following childhood experience from Mexico:

Having traveled a modest amount in Mexico with my father when I was young, it seemed like a not badly behaved place. Mexico under the PRI was a police state, although only a small fraction of the large number of policemen were efficient and formidable. The populace was fairly cowed and meek, at least when sober. Bad driving and accidents were a major problem (presumably originating in Mexican fatalism), and petty graft was an annoyance, but outright crime wasn't a major problem for tourists.

People enjoying relatively high socio-economic status tend to be less fatalistic than people on lower rungs of the ladder do, and I suspect this pattern would manifest itself at the national level, but being the parochial guy that I am, I wasn't aware of Mexicans being particularly fatalistic.

The WVS (fourth wave) offers some potential insight into the question. The following table ranks the participating countries by how much control over their lives respondents in those countries feel they have. The higher the self-determination score, the less fatalistic the country is:

Countries	SD
1. Mexico	8.4
2. Colombia	8.0
3. Argentina, New Zealand, Trinidad/Tobago	7.9
4. Sweden, Uruguay	7.8
5. Norway, Brazil, Andorra	7.7
6. United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Switzerland, Romania, Jordan	7.6
7. Finland, Slovenia, Cyprus, Guatemala	7.5
8. Turkey, Indonesia	7.4
9. Great Britain, Taiwan, Malaysia	7.3
10. Chile, China, Zambia	7.2
11. Peru, Ghana, Vietnam, Iran	7.1
12. Russia	7.0
13. Spain, Moldova, Thailand	6.9
14. Germany	6.8
15. France, the Netherlands, South Korea	6.7
16. Poland	6.6
17. Serbia, Rwanda	6.5
18. Georgia	6.4
19. Italy, Hong Kong	6.3
20. Ethiopia	6.2
21. Japan, Egypt, Mali	6.1
22. India, Ukraine	6.0
23. Bulgaria	5.8
24. Burkina Faso	5.7
25. Iraq	5.4
26. Morocco	5.3

With Egypt, Mali, Iraq, and Morocco at the bottom of the list, at first blush it appears that Muslim countries are more fatalistic than non-Muslim countries are, in accordance with the thesis put forth by the late Samuel Huntington. However, Turkey, Jordan, and Indonesia are among countries where the greatest levels of self-determination are perceived, in conflict with that observation.

The Anglophone nations are all bunched pretty close to one another, with the three largest British offshoots having the same self-determination scores. Along with Scandanavia, these countries are less fatalistic than eastern and southern European countries are.

One standard deviation is 2.3 self-determination points, so the gap between Morocco and Mexico is almost 1.5 standard deviations wide, suggesting that the average Moroccan is more fatalistic than over 90% of Mexicans are. That revelation stuns me, and I have no idea how accurately it reflects reality (see the opening paragraph!). Given that Steve has the opposite impression of Mexico, I'll withhold judgment. There does appear to be some geographical consistency with regards to Mexico, though--the other Latin American countries represented cluster near the top of the list as well. Peru is the most fatalistic country to our south, and it's in the middle of the pack.

Let's look a little closer to home. The GSS queried respondents on something similar in 2008, asking them to state whether or not they agreed with the statement that "there is little that people can do to change the course of their lives". Again, the higher the score, the less fatalistic and more self-determinative the group is (n = 1,356):

Race	SD
Whites	4.14
Asians	4.04
Blacks	3.74
Hispanics	3.38

One standard deviation is 1.01 points, so the difference between whites and Hispanics is substantial, with Hispanics being considerably more fatalistic than other Americans are. Perhaps self-determination is one of the few things that does stop at the Rio Grande. Or maybe Steve is correct and the WVS is once again shown not to be very useful. In Sailer and GSS v. the WVS, my money is on the plaintiffs!

WVS variables used: V46 (excluding DK/NA)

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), FATALISM

It's a typical report in these typical times

2011-12-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

Typical NPR reporter and pundit Mara Liasson filed a typical NPR story on the role of immigration in the GOP's presidential nomination process. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are said to differ starkly in their positions on immigration. To Liasson's (and Romney's!) credit, this is fairly accurate and goes largely unreported most of the time:

As for Gingrich, the predictions that his remarks on immigration would prove toxic to Republican voters haven't come true.

Rick Perry's don't-have-a-heart comment was "toxic" because it lacked any tact and was intentionally insulting towards restrictionists. Gingrich, in contrast, sold his similar Establishment stance as the necessary one on immigration to be integrated seamlessly into the Republican party's broader family values platform. While I think that's BS, it comes across as a difference of opinion delivered relatively respectfully (for an open borders proponent, anyway) in a debate setting among candidates vying for the nomination. At the risk of sounding obnoxiously partisan, maybe it's an illustration that the mainstream right is more tolerant of diversity of opinion than media outlets like NPR give it credit for! Heck, driving home from work the other day I heard Sean Hannity interviewing Rand Paul, something that, to my pleasure, I've come across on multiple times before. The occasion this time? For Rand to push his dad's presidential campaign.

Liasson also informs us that Republicans need at least 40% of the Hispanic vote to win in the general election. Bush won with 39% of it in 2004. It's not so much that the assertion is incorrect as it is almost irrelevant. In 2008, when the non-white turnout was high, Hispanics constituted 8% of the electorate. Whites made up 75% of it. Thus, increasing it's share of the white vote by 1% does as much for the GOP as increasing its share of the Hispanic vote by 10%. In a story about immigration and the presidential election, then, one might naively expect to hear about how candidates' positions on immigration influence white voters. But, alas.

In the last three elections, the GOP has received 54%, 58%, and 55% of the white vote, respectively. In 2004, with 58%, Bush won the popular vote. In 2000 and 2008, at 54% and 55%, the Republicans lost it. If the GOP manages to get 60% of the white vote, it'll win the next three presidential elections with relative ease. After that, the white percentage required will tick upwards as the percentage of voters who are white continues to decline.

That said, I'd love to hear someone like Liasson run through the logic of how it can be so confidently asserted that taking an open borders position will significantly help an aspiring Republican nominee with Hispanic voters. If that's the case, John McCain did as well any GOP contender can ever hope to do. The GOP had the highest-profile open borders member of the party's national leadership, who teamed up with Ted Kennedy in an amnesty attempt that united the public in opposition and who virtually barred restrictionists from the Republican National Convention on the ticket, running against Obama, who lost the Hispanic vote 64%-36% during the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton, a margin less favorable than Bush enjoyed among Hispanics in '04. What better way for "naturally conservative" Hispanics to show the Republican party they're on board with it if only it loses its restrictionism than to have backed McCain in 2008? Why, if immigration is Hispanics big hangup with the Republican party, would they not jump at the opportunity to back an open borders Republican? Yet McCain didn't even manage to garner one-third of Hispanic support.

Steve Sailer has noted that despite the fact that the politics of immigration doesn't seem to influence the Hispanic public in the US much, media outlets reliably tap self-appointed Latino activists for quotes saying that if so-and-so doesn't drop all his restrictionist rhetoric immediately, the Hispanic tidal wave that is forming really soon now will wash him out to sea:

The conventional wisdom is largely driven by New York Times and Washington Post reporters calling up self-appointed Hispanic spokesmen who get right back to them with quotes saying, yes, indeed, the coming Hispanic Electorate Tidal Wave wants nothing more than more immigration.

NPR does not disappoint:

"If you think about the so-called negative narrative on immigration ... it basically comes from Gov. Romney," says Alfonso Aguilar [who?], who runs the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. "In the last debate, it sounded like he was closing the door to any type of legalization. It does hurt him. ... And he does risk not being able to get enough Latino voters, if he's the nominee, to win back the White House."

...

"I think [Romney] has been ill advised, because he hears the traditional strategy from political pundits that say, you know, 'Forget about the Latino community during the primary."

Indeed, the strategy overwhelmingly pushed by pundits like David Brooks is for the GOP to forget about Hispanics and adopt the Sailer Strategy instead! That, of course, is the conventional wisdom that the GOP has been incorrigibly tied to since before the first Bush administration! If only they'd stop listening to the NYT and NPR and start paying attention Hispanics instead, they'd have both chambers of Congress and the White House in a landslide!

Finally, it's encouraging to look at the comment threads on stories like these. NPR's SWPL listenership clearly sympathizes with Romney's position, not Gingrich's. The American public just won't go along with Establishment opinion that it should replace itself as soon as possible.

Don't risk eating crow

2011-12-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Sam Harris' post (via RP) detailing practical steps to take and things to think about to minimize one's risk of becoming a victim of physical violence is a worthwhile read. A snippet:

Take this maxim to heart: Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do.

At the risk of invoking the naturalistic fallacy, I'll point out that Harris' prudent advice is not just applicable to humans, but exists instinctively in other parts of the animal kingdom. When it's time to stone the crows, take a cue from how raptors deal with them:

A red-tailed hawk, of course, could dispatch a crow in as instantly as it could get a talon on one. But the payoff is nil (for whatever reason, birds of prey don't eat them--vultures won't even take them as carrion), and it risks injury in doing so, especially if it's being pestered by a murder. An injury to the hawk is potentially fatal because of how he feeds (like a prominent lawyer being arrested for escalating beyond the legal notion of self-defense and making some hothead pay for trying to be a tough guy). The crow mostly scavenges so doesn't need to be as careful, even if he's aware of the hurt that the hawk could put on him (and he's probably unaware of it, anyway). The hawk has nothing to prove and nothing to gain from engaging the crows, so he just evacuates.

Parenthetically, the second part of the video is fictional narration by the person who captured it. This isn't the same bird (if it's a hawk at all, it's not a red-tail) and it doesn't give chase to the crow, it's simply leaving its perch as soon as the coast, er, air, is clear.

If you don't let yourself fail, you're going to fail

2011-12-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

It's my understanding that the media mass exhorting people to stick to this or that various difficult diet and exercise routine is incalculably large, and a google search confirms as much. I've never so much as glanced at it, let alone dived in, though, because for whatever reason--propitious or not--physical prowess has at least since high school been incorrigibly desirable to me. I've never smoked, drank, or used other illicit drugs, largely because of this. Yet running stairs or doing clap pushups are not mentally effortless activities for me by any stretch. A few tips from personal experience that are applicable (and hopefully helpful) to readers who want to improve quality of life through their outputs*:

- The first step is always the hardest of all. Not feeling sprite? Tell yourself you're just going to knock out ten minutes worth of work and then call it a day. I've done this forever and still do, and I suppose if I really did feel like throwing in the towel after a few minutes, I would. But I never have. Once I get the blood flowing, the lungs opened up, and let the adrenaline pumping, it's go-time.

- To facilitate this, dispense with the predetermined number of exercises and reps. This was difficult for me to do at first, but it makes finding fail a lot more realistic, and failing is how you get results. If you tell yourself you're going to do this progression of exercises and X number of reps for each one, tricking yourself with the ten minute trial won't work. As you're slugging through, you'll be apt to start thinking about how you're going to have to do 30 squat presses in half an hour and how fatigued you'll be then, so let's not push beyond 10 Y-presses now.

And some days are simply going to be better than others. Sometimes I'm able to get beyond 10 one-arm pushups per side, other days I'm collapsing at 6 or 7. If I obsessed over rep counting, I'd almost have to conclude that I was backsliding, which is a demotivating thought I need to avoid. I've broken the same rib three times playing football, and some days my right obliques are really tight with the consequence that my V-ups on that side are pathetic. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I do as many as I'm able to.

- Which segues nicely into an important phrase to remember: The mind always gives out before the body does. I say "remember", but it's actually something you don't want to think about while you're pumping, because if you rely on your mind to consciously tell you its thinking is flawed, well, that's a flawed strategy. Working out with others (even if they are on a screen) helps keep your mind from focusing on this and instead focuses it on surpassing (or at least keeping pace with) them, which you're a lot more capable of doing than your mind wants to tell you that you are!

If you're working out alone, have some sort of external stimulus to distract your mind from the exertions of your body. For cardio, I run stairs in a commercial stairwell I have access to, north of 200 flights per session. It's when I get my weekly Radio Derb and EconTalk podcasts in, or listen to an NFL game is my timing is right. Only once have I forgotten my iPod (and after that, I bought an AM/FM radio that sits in the car just in case), and decided to try to pull it off with nothing but the sound of my feet pounding and my lungs sucking. Frustrated, I finished earlier than usual and took multiple 30 second water breaks in between. I guess if you're going for mastery of mind over matter and want to override the signals your mind is receiving to let up through sheer force of will, go the Zen route. But if it's physical results you're after, don't engage the quit signals--distract your mind from receiving them in the first place.

* I'd convey what I've gleaned regarding eating what you want to be eating instead of what you want to eat, but the best I can come up with is don't have access to what you don't want to be eating (ie, don't buy it), and know that if you eat the right stuff, you are allowed to eat as much as you want (my daily calorie intake is around 4,000). Also, avoid calories in liquid form, because with a few exceptions, those calories are going to come almost exclusively in the form of sugar. Water (at least two gallons per day, in my case), a sugarfree energy drink or two (Rockstar is my personal favorite--and this is admittedly a personal indulgence, probably not something I should recommend), a cup of black coffee or tea, and low sodium V8 is all I do. Fruit juices, colas, beers--that's going to turn right into dough.

White, Caucasian, or Anglo?

2011-12-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Take lessons in class and character from Steve Sailer. He graciously praises Andrew Sullivan, who has shown no compunction in the past for nailing people to the wall for political incorrectness in the past, for a qualified public defense of HBD realities with regards to average IQ differences between different groups. That's laudable intellectual leadership on Steve's part.

Facetiously, Steve finishes that post with the following:

In 1972, it looked like the rank order of average intelligence was Oriental, Caucasian, Chicano, and black. But, in 2011, of course, we now see from endless studies and real world examples that the actual rank ordering appears to be Asian, non-Hispanic white, Latino, and African-American. So, everything has changed!

"Asian" has been preferred over "Oriental" since the late 1930s, but the gap was narrower in 1973 than it is today. "Black" has always been and is still today more common than "African-American", though the gap has been closing over the last two decades. I've not traced the usage history of "Chicano", so I can't comment there.

What about "White" versus "Caucasian"? As far as I'm aware, the latter has never been the preferred term for referring to people of European descent in casual conversation--"white" always has been. Of course, always extends back to around 2000 or so for me, and though it may slip my mind from time to time, history in fact began before then.

To gauge the popularity of each term, in addition to "Anglo", the other recognizable descriptor for those of European descent (well, those who speak English, anyway), the percentage of total articles in The New York Times containing the terms "Whites", "Caucasians", and "Anglos" (capitalization doesn't matter), is graphed below (via NYT's handy archival site), by decade from 1851 to 1959, and by year after that:

The "Caucasians" and "Anglos" lines are not missing--they both run flat along the bottom of the graph for the entire 160 year period being considered. "Whites" is orders of magnitude more common than either of the others and has been since at least Lincoln's presidency. I could remove "Whites" from the graph and just contrast "Caucasians" and "Anglos" to bring them into better focus, but both consistently get only a handful of articles each year (around 11 and 7, respectively) compared to "Whites", which gets anywhere from several hundreds to thousands, so there's little point in doing so.

"White" is such a bland adjective or noun to use for a person, nearly as bland as the people it represents. This is, of course, in contrast to the various terms used to describe non-whites that have come in and gone over the years, a diversity in descriptors that parallels the vibrancy of non-white cultures, compared to the predictability of white 'culture', if we can even call it that!

Parenthetically, "Caucasian" tends to appear in articles mentioning Asians, while "Anglos" travels alongside Hispanics/Latinos, especially those involving Texas in some way. The latter is not surprising, since Anglo is (at least partially), like Hispanic, a linguistic characterization. It seems unnecessarily confusing to use "Caucasian" and "Asian" repeatedly in the same article though, when "White" and "Asian" would make distinctions easier, but alas, it is what it is.

Who's the $#@!ing nihilist around here?!

2011-12-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

From City Slickers to The Great Labowski and from The Purpose Driven Life to The Selfish Gene, the question of purpose in life is not just one for philosophers, theologians, and psychologists--it has strong popular appeal as well.

It's perhaps easiest to define purpose by looking at its absence. The Inductivist recently reported on nihilism (as defined by agreeing with the statement that "life does not serve any purpose") and ethnicity, and that post served as the impetus to dig a little deeper into what the GSS reveals about nihilistic sentiment.

So, let's run the standard demographic gauntlet. The following tables display mean nihilism scores from the years 1998 and 2008, computed by taking participant responses to the 5-point scaled GSS item on perceived lack of purpose in life and inverting the averages for ease of reader comprehension. The higher the score, the more nihilistic the group is. One standard deviation is .76 points on the nihilism scale.

The first image that comes to my mind when conceptualizing a person who finds life devoid of meaning is of a person who is unhappy. But I attribute my own sense of contentment with what I see as purposes for my existence, so I have an obvious bias. The GSS also asks a question on self-described general happiness that was cross-referenced with the nihilism question:

Happiness	Nihilism
Very happy	1.44
Pretty happy	1.58
Not too happy	1.85

Biased as I am, my intuition appears to be accurate. People who feel life has no purpose are more likely to be miserable people than those who see purpose in their lives are.

The next stereotype that comes to mind is a person who is irreligious but vaguely "spiritual" and likes to claim to be into mysticism, etc. They're awash in the sea of life, without anything firm to hold onto. Conscious atheists tend to be adamant that God is unnecessary for meaning or morality in life, not that, having disabused themselves of the notion of God, meaning and morality have consequently disappeared for them as well. And those who firmly believe in the supernatural have had the purpose of existence spelled out explicitly for them:

Happiness	Nihilism
Atheist	1.60
Agnostic	1.76
Uncertain believer	1.69
Firm believer	1.50

Two for two. But the differences are more modest than I'd have guessed. Parenthetically, to give a little more purpose (heh) to blogging, I always write up impressions of the issues at hand before looking at the relevant data as a way of trying to maintain transparency and also because it's more fun (drilling down through the numbers can have a numbing effect if one isn't careful about how he approaches it).

Bruce Charlton, professor, former medical journal editor, and Christian apologist, colorfully contrasts non-believers with believers:

For the modern hedonic atheist nihilist - to look at the Universe is to feel insignificance, despair, meaninglessness...

But the uncorrupted man sees the heavens as the work of God, is overwhelmed by gratitude, delight, amazement - is moved to praise and worship.

To state with certainty that God exists is still the most common response to the question regarding God's existence (at least in the US), with nearly two-thirds of GSS participants doing so. But acknowledging the big guy in the sky and trying to live one's life in accordance to his wishes are hardly the same thing. Let's look at belief in the supernatural from a different angle, by comparing those who are "moved to praise and worship" with those who are not:

Worship frequency	Nihilism
Weekly or more	1.45
More than once a month	1.59
At least once a year	1.55
Less than once a year	1.70

Each classification is exclusive, so the second should actually read "More than once a month but less than weekly or more", etc.

The differences are a bit more pronounced here, and trend in the expected direction, with those who make it a point to go to church regularly sensing more purpose in life than those who do not.

How about children? It's said that once you have them, your life changes forever. What's more important than the well being of one's own children, on both the emotional and biological levels?

# of kids	Nihilism
0	1.62
1	1.53
2-3	1.53
4+	1.66

Swing and a miss. The number of kids a person has doesn't appear to influence the amount of purpose in existence. I guess passing the hot potato around a few more times before getting burned out doesn't necessarily give the silly game any additional meaning.

How about that beautiful organ, the brain, that separates us from beasts in the field? Excepting the supernatural, what thing possesses capabilities for discovering purpose that outranks those of the human mind? SWPLs love being driven by the things they are passionate about, the things that give their lives meaning. If life is devoid of meaning, engaging in abstract thinking begins to seem pretty pointless (even in a world where everything is already pointless, and... never mind). Or, turning it around, the ability to think abstractly allows one to perceive (or more creatively construct?) purpose. The inability to do so makes it difficult to see beyond immediate impulses and the steps needed to satisfy them. Do unintelligent people see a reason for existence? I don't know, do dogs?

Intelligence*	Nihilism
Real Dumbs	2.34
Pretty Dumbs	1.63
Normals	1.39
Pretty Smarts	1.35
Really Smarts	1.44

The differences between those of middling to high intelligence and those at the left end of the bell curve are large, with averages that are more than a standard deviation apart. Some of the gap gets closed by those of modest but limited intelligence. Intelligence, more than anything else, appears to influence whether or not a person feels that life has no meaning.

I may be reading too much into marginal differences, but perhaps those at the right end of the bell curve have some tendency to fully grasp their seeming insignificance in the larger universe and hence minimize what otherwise is seen to give their lives purpose.

Maybe it's better that the least intelligent amongst perceive the least purpose in existence. When they opt out of the conventional, established methods of discovering meaning in their lives through religion or professional success, they are liable to create harrowing identities like the ICP-inspired juggalo 'movement'.

More practically, influential people with prestigious careers are in positions to make decisions and engage in behavior for which the magnitude of consequences is much greater than people in the underclass are, and both groups are aware of as much, at least to some extent. Well, maybe greater meaning in one's own personal actions relative to other people translates into the perception of greater meaning in life more generally:

Class	Nihilism
Lower	1.78
Working	1.58
Middle	1.54
Upper	1.43

Makes sense to me.

Liberals want to turn Western Civilization on its head, conservatives want to bring Calvinism back into vogue, and wishy-washy moderates don't know what they want! As noted earlier, those who don't know what they believe in or what they want don't know what Fate wants for them, either:

Political orientation	Nihilism
Liberal	1.60
Moderate	1.61
Conservative	1.50

Another miss. Maybe politics just don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things.

Inductivist found that those of Mexican ancestry tended to be the most nihilistic of any ethnic group in the US. As the bulk of Hispanics in the US are of Mexican descent, we'd expect non-Hispanics of various races to be less nihilistic than Hispanics are:

Race	Nihilism
White	1.53
Black	1.55
Hispanic	2.02
Asian	1.80

Two-thirds of a standard deviation between the US' founding stock and its Great Society additions. Well, Manifest Destiny definitely insinuates purpose. The Great Cultural Mosaic or whatever the multicult mess will end up being called, on the other hand, is its own end-game, without much definable purpose beyond celebrating itself. We're the ones we've been waiting for, and when we get here, then... (Do I hear crickets chirping?)

I suspect women are less nihilistic than men for a couple of reasons. One, from an evolutionary perspective males are more expendable than females are, so there is less instinct for men to see a purpose in it all. Hell, even if there is a purpose, a bunch of them had no part in serving it! Two, the conventional societal response to the question of whether or not life is meaningful is yes, of course it's meaningful, and women are less comfortable violating social norms than men are:

Sex	Nihilism
Men	1.64
Women	1.51

Small difference in the averages, but as predicted men are more nihilistic than women are.

It's comforting to think that over time, as wisdom accrues and experiences accumulate, I'll increasingly come to perceive meaning in life. That vaguely seems to be the case so far. Yet I'm not oblivious to what the decaying process that is aging can do to a person's spirit. Once a week I spend a few hours with the elderly, and it's obvious that more than a few of them are donning thin disguises with happier visages that appear to be more at ease with what's in the not-so-distant future than the faces underneath those disguises betray. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What's the point in that?

Age	Nihilism
18-29	1.70
30-44	1.49
45-64	1.55
65+	1.61

Looks like while we're young, we're still searching. As we settle into middle age, we come to terms with what we've found and accept it. Then, as the aches and pains creep up and the thrill of living recedes, backsliding begins.

In summation, happy, intelligent, middle-aged upper class white women who are found in the pews on Sundays (and sometimes Wednesdays) tend to see the most purpose in life. Young, dumb, pissed off underclass Hispanic guys who wouldn't be caught dead in a church unless it was to grab a handout see the least. Purpose is so passe! The future is nihilism!

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

GSS variables used: NIHILISM, HAPPY, WORDSUM, GOD(1)(2)(3-5)(6), ATTEND(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)(7-8), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), KIDS(0)(1)(2-3)(4-8), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), CLASS, SEX, AGE

Locke Cole's proviso

2011-12-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

NES and SNES era rpgs are close to my heart, an inseparable part of my childhood. Hey, we're talking about the early nineties here, so I could've been doing a lot worse. As I'm always happy to point out, these games are the reason why I knew, as a third grader, what the words "zenith", "troglodyte", and "mercurial" meant.

While I was going through high school and college, always working, playing sports, and maintaining multiple committed long-term relationships (not simultaneously--I'm not that alpha!), I went on an extended hiatus from gaming, but a few years ago as I settled into the same kind of lifestyle that sent ~~Guile~~ Frost off on a hunt for M. Bison's head, it was easier to make time to indulge myself again.

Still, as precocious as I like to fancy myself having been as a stripling, I missed a lot. Several months ago, I played through Final Fantasy VI on Game Cube using the GBA accessory. That Locke personifies a caricature of what Robert Nozick coined as the Lockean Proviso (I say as a caricature because he does not do so in an affirming way, as the things Locke seeks out are not in abundance and his gain is some other explorer's potential loss) is one of the many things that flew right over my head when I was younger. As defined in the Second Treatise on Government:

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

The accusation, first stated indirectly by way of the fascistic Empire he is resisting through Terra, that Locke is a thief and his riposte that he is a treasure hunter is a recurring theme in the game. Occupationally, though, what Locke sets out to find lacks ownership (at least presently--some of the things are relics and other treasures lost to civilization), so it's not as though he is blatantly stealing property clearly and contractually owned by another entity--which is exactly why the proviso is relevant, since it presents a way of evaluating how private ownership should be determined. And the work of a treasure hunter who is motivated by gain does not satisfy the proviso, even when that gain is not of the vain material variety, but is instead Lazarusian in nature.

His work does, however, assist in the ultimate downfall of the Empire and eventually of Kefka. So while Locke is a humorous caricature of one of John Locke's central ideas on the moral distribution of property, he's still a sympathetic protagonist.

Taking it a step further and making editorial presumptions of Kitase and crew, one might assert that Locke serves as a vehicle for the argument that while the ambition for wealth is inherently selfish--and not the unadulterated force for the common good that is impervious to being impugned as the most stringent libertarians might argue that it is--it is, on net, a positive force for humanity (while the ambition for power, personified by Gestahl and to a more perverted extent, Kefka, is not).

The protocols of religious Jewish advocacy groups in the US

2011-11-28T18:29:00.000-08:00

In a recent report on religious advocacy groups in the US, Pew lists the top 40 organizations by advocacy expenditures and policy makers and other government agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, AIPAC comes in at number one.

The top 40 groups account for 85% of all dollars spent by religious groups for the purpose of influence peddling. Because I tend to use the term "neocon" disparagingly, it follows that I must harbor an envious hatred of Jews and consequently am wondering what percentage of the $330 million spent came out of the coffers of explicitly Jewish advocacy groups!

As it turns out, just over one-third (34.1%) of it. For constituting less than 2% of the nation's total population, with a constituency that is notoriously secular to boot, it would sure seem that 'religious' Jewish groups carry a lot of sway!

And yes, I realize I'm not the first person to make this observation. To those with that reaction, I kindly direct you to the blog's header.

Which division is the NFL's best?

2011-11-26T13:53:00.001-08:00

The NFC North is arguably (in sports, what's inarguable, after all?) the best division in the NFL this year. There's a good chance both of the conference's wild card teams will come from it if Detroit is able to steal a big win against the Saints next week and Hanie is able to make things happen the way Cutler does. If the Packers are able to protect Rodgers against the Giant's front four in East Rutherford, it's not difficult to see Green Bay going 19-0. The 49ers have a soft enough schedule to conceivably finish the regular season 14-2, which will be enough to keep the Pack from making preseason games out of their last couple (although the Bears and especially the Lions could both benefit if the 49ers falter down the stretch--before one of them falls to their division foe in the divisional round and maybe the other in the conference championship).

For the NFC North to be so dominant feels unusual. As someone who learned the game while living in Dallas during the early and mid-nineties, I've seen "my" team (which I begrudgingly have to share with the rest of America!) take some tough breaks due to the strength of their division rivals over the years. Every division has its dog except for the two Easts. Talking to a friend last night who lives in the DC area, he suggested what I deem the Redskins (and Bills) "lost decade" was in large part due to the same (though it's hard not to argue that Dan Snyder's capriciousness deserves a lot of blame, too).

To give some relevance to the above, let's use it as a segue into the purpose of the post--creating an empirically determined ranking of the eight NFL divisions since the league tidily realigned itself in 2002 up through the end of last year. The following table shows regular season win percentage among the four teams in each respective division, after backing out all divisional play and excluding the handful of ties that have occurred over those nine seasons:

Division	Win %
1. AFC South	.567
2. NFC East	.556
3. AFC East	.548
4. NFC South	.526
5. AFC North	.503
6. AFC West	.481
7. NFC North	.448
8. NFC West	.370

No surprises in the way the rankings shake out, except perhaps for how far down the list this year's top division falls and that the AFC South rather than the AFC East is king of the hill. Detroit has just been really, really bad for a really long time (they were 37-107 from 2002 to 2010). That, and to a lesser extent the mediocrity of the Vikings, is why. And the Colts have been as stellar as the Lions have been terrible over the same period of time. It's not absurdly hyperbolic to say that Peyton Manning, almost single-handedly, lifted the division to the top. Without him, we're witnessing the division come crashing down. But hey, at least the Texans will finally get that elusive playoff berth and rid the league of its last postseason virgin.

The NFC West's showing is awful. That the Seahawks won it last year despite a losing record typifies what has been unending ugliness since Kurt Warner, Tory Holt, and Marshall Faulk (remember the "greatest show on turf"?) were at their best.

It's worth noting that the geographic dominance of the SEC that shows up in college football (those guys are ~~blacker~~ faster!) also exists to a noticeable extent in the NFL. The South and East divisions are better than the North and West divisions are in both conferences (the AFC North is somewhat exceptional, with two regularly good and two regularly not-so-good teams). I don't follow college football closely enough to have a sense of how much of a role, if any, geographic proximity to where they played in college ends up influencing where the bulk of new professional players sign, though, so maybe this is just coincidental.

AE on facebook

2011-11-22T15:08:00.001-08:00

To avoid privacy issues and still maintain an effortless archival system, I've created an Audacious Epigone facebook account. When I initially began using facebook for blog archiving, the social network still required a unique university email address to be tied to each account to keep it from becoming a myspace where spam accounts proliferated. That was sufficient (and effortless), but awhile back, the privacy settings that had kept the archives private were altered in such a way that it was impossible to continue with that method. Now that it is open to anyone to create as many accounts as they'd like to, this is the obvious solution. It's also another feed option for those who are interested in as much.

More on the demographics of mental health

2011-11-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, we looked at the likelihood to have received treatment for a mental health problem by political orientation based on GSS data. It turns out that self-described political liberals are twice as likely to have been treated for mental health issues as conservatives are, with moderates falling in between*. This spurred several intriguing comments that I'll turn to the GSS again to address.

Firstly, the inevitable racial issue. An anonymous commenter writes:

This generalization is too broad, since I'm sure Caucasian Liberals will have superb mental health compared to Caucasian Conservatives. Since there's studies that shows that those in higher Academia has the least stress and hence the best health.

It turns out he was being tongue-in-cheek, and whites are more prone to experience mental health issues than non-whites are. The percentages who have been treated for mental health problems, by race (n = 1,412):

Race	Treated
White	15.1%
Black	9.3%
Hispanic	6.8%
Asian	9.4%

As blacks are only slightly more likely to identify as liberal than they are as conservative, despite consistently voting Democratic by overwhelming margins, it's conceivable that race obfuscates the association between liberalism and mental health issues. In actuality, however, the relatively good mental health of non-whites attenuates political differences that are even more stark when only whites are considered (n = 1,033):

Whites only	Treated
Liberal	23.7%
Moderate	13.3%
Conservative	10.6%

While only 1 in 10 white conservatives have been treated for mental health problems, nearly one-quarter of white liberals have. I am not qualified to explain why this is the case, but perhaps God has something to say about it. In clearing up the confusion about his first comment, the anonymous commenter later writes:

Conservatives should be mentally healthier, because they tend to be more religious, hence making it easier for regulation of mental health.

Liberals worry so much that they actually care about people they don't even know.

Whether or not liberals have more mental issues to deal with because they want to put the weight of the world on their own shoulders, God's most ardent followers tend to come from the conservative ranks, and one of the rewards they receive in return is better mental health. To avoid racial confounding, only whites are included (n = 1,064):

Worship frequency	Treated
Weekly or more	11.0%
More than once a month	13.6%
At least once a year	16.4%
Less than once a year	17.5%

Each classification is exclusive, so the second should actually read "More than once a month but less than weekly or more", etc.

What about Jews? TAE is, loosely defined, part of the alternative right blogosphere, so the question has to be asked! Jews, after all, are as a group more leftist than white Democrats are. Again, God's hand is shown! Not just any god, but our God, an awesome God who reigns from heaven above (n = 1,405):

Religion	Treated
Protestant	11.7%
Catholic	10.7%
Jewish	17.4%
Other	21.0%
None	19.8%

Unfortunately, the GSS is understandably unable to track ethnic Jewishness among survey participants. Instead, we're looking at Judaism by way of self-described religious affiliation. As Jews are considerably more likely than other Americans to be irreligious, there is presumably a sizable contingent of ethnic Jews in the "none" category.

Another trait that requires attention is intelligence. Writes Ed Tom Kowalsky:

[There is a] need to control for IQ inasmuch as I suspect mental illness tracks with intelligence.

Disappointingly, the best GSS proxy for IQ, Wordsum score, is not cross-referenced with the mental health question so controlling for it is a difficult thing to do. Educational attainment is of course correlated with intelligence, but the relationship is far from perfect. Instead of moving out several degrees by using education to estimate wordsum performance to estimate IQ scores, let's just consider differences in rates of mental health issues by educational attainment, again among whites alone to avoid problems with racial confounding (n = 1,067):

Educational attainment	Treated
Less than high school	12.8%
High school graduate	11.9%
Some college	14.7%
Bachelor's degree	20.9%
Post-secondary education	19.7%

As was the case with worship attendance, each classification is exclusive, so the second should actually read "High school graduate but no college", etc.

While conservatives are, on average, slightly more intelligent than liberals are, white liberals have an edge over white conservatives, so the association between greater intelligence and more mental health problems might go a little way in explaining why liberals have poorer mental health than conservatives do (though for what my uninformed opinion is worth, I suspect differences in personality traits other than intelligence are far more determinative).

Silly girl contemplates the relationship between criminality, political orientation, and mental health:

I wonder whether folks who have ever been arrested or incarcerated are more likely to be liberal.

I would say that being anti social enough to end up in prison is a pretty good indicator of mental issues.

As Jokah points out, small sample size is a huge (heh) issue here, as the mental health question was only posed in one year of the survey, and the number of people who spend time in prison is in the middle single-digits range. This GSS well is dry.

For what it's worth, in Freedonomics (p182-184), John Lott--who it should be noted is clearly unsympathetic to the Democratic party--reviews multiple studies showing that to the extent that they express political preferences, felons tend to vote even more heavily Democratic than their demographic statistics (which are very Democratic) would predict.

Since we're running the conventional demographic gamut, let's look at marriage and children. To give respondents a chance to have tied the knot if their plans include as much, those under the age of 30 are excluded, while again only whites are considered (n = 926):

Marital status	Treated
Married	12.8%
Unmarried	18.5%

And finally, kids. We're looking at the number white adults aged 30 and older have had (n = 927):

Offspring	Treated
0	15.2%
1	20.2%
2+	13.2%

So, mental health issues are most commonly experienced among well-educated, unmarried, irreligious white liberals who don't procreate (or do the SWPL thing and have one kid after both parents are firmly established in their professional careers). Mental health problems are progressive, baby!

GSS variables used: MHTRTSLF, RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), MARITAL(1)(2-5), EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), CHILDS(0)(1)(2-8), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), ATTEND(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)(7-8), RELIGION

* As previously noted, the GSS item being utilized here asked respondents if they had ever received treatment for a mental health problem. That's not exactly the same as asking whether or not they had ever suffered from mental health issues, but it's pretty close.

Conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals

2011-11-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

Ed Tom Kowalsky asks:

I've often wondered if mental illness is more common among those who self identify as liberal than those who self identify as conservative. I suspect the answer is a resounding "yes," but I don't know if there is solid evidence justifying my suspicion.

I'm not familiar with the relevant science, but a bit of googling turns up some survey results showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats are to describe themselves as being in good mental health. Another commenter, JOhn, asserts that liberalism and neuroticism are correlated. From what I'm able to gather, the evidence for that is pretty mixed, but again, I'm really not qualified to speak on the subject.

The GSS is another natural place to turn to in seeking an answer, however, and I am qualified enough to report what its data show! In 2006, it asked respondents if they had ever received treatment for a mental health problem. That's not exactly the same as asking whether or not they had ever suffered from mental health issues--I'd guess, ceteris paribus, liberals are more likely than conservatives are to seek out medical treatment for perceived problems that cover all aspects of personal health, whether they be physical, emotional, or psychological--but it's pretty close.

The question is binary, with respondents simply answering "yes" or "no". The following table shows the percentages of people who report having received treatment for a mental health problem at some point in their lives by political orientation (n = 1,356):

Politics	Treated
Liberal	19.7%
Moderate	11.8%
Conservative	9.7%

So the GSS provides Ed with at least some evidence that his suspicion is correct.

GSS variables used: MHTRTSLF, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

Old Republican white men know what's going on in the world

2011-11-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

Over the last four years, I've tracked the results of Pew's "News IQ" quizzes that are periodically administered to a random sample of around 1,000 Americans. A couple of remarkably consistent results are how men are better informed than women are and that the average American is far less informed than readers of this and similar blogs are.

Unfortunately, as honest as Pew is when it comes to the reports it commissions, politically correct acts of omission are far more common than they should be, if imparting honest information to its readers is truly Pew's primary motivation. Consequently, these quizzes never provide demographic data by race or ethnicity, the categories being limited to sex, age range, educational attainment, and partisan affiliation.

In the official report accompanying the latest survey results released a few days ago, the sex category has been scrubbed as well. When something becomes as depressingly mundane as the fact that men are better informed on current events than women are, it's past time to stop talking about it.

However, sex differences are still available at the political quiz index page that is accessible once a user has completed the quiz. Same old, same old, of course--men averaged 8.5 correct answers, while women answered 6.8 questions correctly on average. Even on the item asking quiz takers to identify a picture of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, men outperformed women, although only by a 6 point margin, the narrowest of the 13 questions. The widest sex gap, of 21 points, was on the question about the number of US military fatalities that have occurred in Afghanistan. It involves war, Asia, and numbers--so no surprise there.

The second consistency remains in clear view, however. Take a minute to complete the quiz yourself. Per usual, I scored a perfect 13 of 13 because for someone who follows the news, it's not a difficult thing to do. Yet the average American missed 5 or 6 of them. Most people simply don't pay much attention to what takes place outside of their own personal lives beyond some degree of exposure to various forms of popular entertainment.

As those things are blase, let's consider another aspect of the results that inexplicably don't ever garner media attention, even though they are a lot less threatening to the egalitarian zeitgeist than racial or sex disparities are, since they involve propositional categories. That is, they are not fixed, so with more education and greater awareness, this gap can be closed! The aspect at issue here is partisan affiliation (see p5). On every question posed (including the one asking participants to identify Hillary Clinton by photo that should presumably be skewed in the Democrats' favor), Republicans outscored Democrats, by double-digit margins on a majority of them.

Race presumably accounts for much of the Republican advantage, which is why it would be more interesting to see a partisan breakdown among whites alone. As perverse as it is, in this facet of the status-mongering game, conservatives have a vested interest in ignoring HBD. Because NAMs identify by overwhelming margins more with the Democratic party more than they do with the GOP, measures of knowledge, behavior, and life outcomes inevitably cast Republicans in a better light than they do Democrats.

Finally, take a gander at the results by age range (p6). The online version of the quiz only includes 13 of the 19 items administered in the official survey, but of the full 19, younger people outscored their elders on only two: The ability to correctly identify the crescent star as being associated with Islam and the capability to point out Brazil on a map of South America. In our ever diversifying future, though, these two items are of greater importance than the rest, like who the secretary of state is, what percentage of Americans are unemployed, or where the DJIA is!

* Which, in my case, simply consists of listening to the top of the hour news updates on one of the local AM talk stations or NPR at some point during the day--that limited amount of effort is sufficient to ace these quizzes.

Sayonara sucker

2011-11-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, I experienced a personal first--a wart on the inside of my right pinky finger. Never having had to deal with such a hideous thing before, I just ignored it for several weeks. It was small and only noticeable at all when my fingers were spread out. I'd heard that the solution involved freezing it off, which isn't something I figured I'd be able to do on my own, and it wasn't something I was going to bring to the attention of anyone else if I could help it.

And help it I did! I'm happy to report that two weeks ago I placed the wart between the fingernails of my left index finger and thumb, pinched as hard as I could, and tore the sucker right off. It bled profusely for several minutes, but now it's all healed up and there is no outward remnant in the form of scar tissue or the like to show where it had been. I was worried it might grow back, but so far not even the slightest bump is detectable.

AE's doing his part to keep cosmetic health care costs in check!

Ness misses home

2011-11-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up, my family's moves around the country paralleled my dad's climb up the corporate ladder. Homesickness became an all-too-familiar status ailment of my childhood. I'd spend the first several months in a new state yearning to be back in the one from which we'd just come, and spend the last several months there dreading the next move to to yet another place. Deracinate, re-root, repeat. So I felt a pang of sadness in realizing how accurate Steve Sailer's description of homesickness is in his review of a book on the subject:

Homesickness sounds like the least important topic imaginable. In modern America, a longing for the familiar places and people we are separated from is routinely castigated as an immature character flaw barely tolerable in children at summer camp, much less in adults.

It's not something I'd previously thought about at a societal level before, at least not explicitly. But my previous experiences with uprooting and how acute the pain of relocation can be have certainly affected my adult life. I've turned down promotional opportunities that would mean relocating outside the Kansas City metro area on multiple occasions with, I suspect, far less regret than most of my peers in a similar situation would have. Whether that's from moving frequently when I was younger or from being more naturally inclined towards my old stomping grounds than others are isn't something I can definitively answer, and it's probably some combination of both. But my point is, I get homesickness.

Anyway, there is a larger purpose to this post than mere self-indulgence. In the review, Steve writes:

Human emotions probably don't change much over time, but the words we use to describe them certainly cycle, whipped by fads and social forces. For example, Matt cites a pair of contemporary psychiatrists who note that many of their unhappy patients come to them having already self-diagnosed themselves as "depressed"—a respectable 21st Century malady for which pharmaceutical firms invent and market expensive pills—"but were in fact lonely."

And he quotes the book's author, Susan J. Matt:

"[As] the longtime companion and sometime synonym of homesickness, [nostalgia] has become a less troublesome emotion, signifying a diffuse, unthreatening, and painless longing for the past. ... As an emotion, nostalgia has come to be widely celebrated, perhaps because it is now seen as harmless. Whereas the homesick may believe they can return home, the nostalgic know that moving backwards in time is impossible."

I wondered if the history of the terms "homesick" and "nostalgic" in the American library would reflect this. As the former became tainted as a sign of puerility and the latter something goofily celebrated by SWPLs, we'd expect a decrease and an increase in literary frequencies, respectively. Well, that's exactly what we get (nostalgic, homesick):

The transition began after WWI and was proceeding in earnest by the end of WWII. Today, the term "nostalgic" is three times as common as the term "homesick" is. Go forth and be fruitful, I guess.

Taxes paid and income made in the US, by quintile

2011-11-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

Recently, I created a boring graph tracing the federal tax burden over a 15 year period by income quintile. The story has been and will likely continue to be steady as she goes. There are no intended polemical points in that post or in this one--they're just outgrowths of my ignorance and curiosity.

The following table shows the share of federal tax burden as a percentage of total money income (defined here, a couple of pages down) by quintile in 2010. The bottom quintile, for example, pays 1.1% of all federal taxes and 'earns' 3.3% of total income, for a tax-share-as-a-percentage-of-income-share of 33.3%:

Quintile	Tax:Income
Bottom	33.3%
Second	60.0%
Third	70.5%
Fourth	82.1%
Top	127.7%

Tax planning aside, the federal income tax is still clearly an extremely progressive one in absolute monetary terms. For it to be regressive, the ordering by income quintile would have to be exactly reversed, which would require a seismic shifting in the current tax code that is almost unimaginable. Even a truly "flat tax", where tax burdens and income shares are perfectly aligned, is contemporarily unthinkable.

HBD

2011-11-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

... now shows human biodiversity as the first definition at Urban Dictionary. Nice work again, everyone.

White, black, and Hispanic birth rates by state

2011-11-02T19:02:00.000-07:00

In the comments of a previous post, I wondered to what extent intra-state birth rates correlated across racial groups. That is, in states where white fertility is high, are black and Hispanic fertility rates also high?

I am unable to find birth rates broken down by race at the state level, but the Kaiser Family Foundation (which maintains a fantastic, data-rich website) does provide live births by race at the state level with data as recent as 2008 and accompanying data from 2009 on population by race at the state level. From that, I was able to compute birth rates per 1,000 people for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in each state*. For the handful of states with insufficient data on black population sizes, the US Census quick facts page is used as a supplemental.

Turns out the correlations are pretty weak: White and black birth rates correlate at a statistically insignificant .14, white and Hispanic birth rates at .27, and black and Hispanic birth rates at a statistically insignificant (.03).

White birth rates (map here) are highest in the Rocky Mountain states and the Midwest, middling in the South, and lowest on the coasts. The one seeming outlier is Hawaii, which shows the highest white fertility rate of any state in the country. Hawaii's population is not young (although I'm not able to find age broken down by race, and a majority of Hawaii's population is Asian or Pacific Islander), so I'm not sure if this is the result of a data transcription error, or if the relatively large percentage of Hawaii's whites who are in the military has something to do with it. Hawaii's overall birth rate is tied for ninth highest in the nation, and its black and Hispanic birth rates are also correspondingly high, so it might be accurate. Far less surprisingly, Mormon Utah comes in at #2.

Black birth rates (map here) are highest in Upper Midwestern states where blacks receive large welfare distributions relative to whites compared to black/white welfare recipient rates in other states. I'm bemused by Maine's high rate, only being able to point out that numbering fewer than 14,000, the black population there is extremely small. The South, where the largest share of the country's black population is concentrated, in contrast, has relatively lower and more middling rates, while birth rates for blacks are lowest in Rocky Mountain states and the Southwest.

Hispanic birth rates (map here) are probably the least reliable and also the least geographically consistent due to states with small Hispanic populations not accurately accounting for the sizes of their respective illegal residents, which may partially explain why rates show up as being astronomical in South Carolina. In contrast, states with large Hispanic populations--most notably the border states--have relatively low fertility rates. It should be noted, though, that Hispanic birth rates are generally considerably higher than black and especially white birth rates across the board. Nationwide, the Hispanic birth rate is nearly double the white birth rate.

* The rates are a bit lower than I'd expect based on national figures across the board (about 80% of states come in with a birth rate among whites that is lower than the national average), for reasons I'm not exactly sure of. Take the maps in more for comparative purposes than for exacting fertility rate measurements by race and state.

Average Wordsum scores by age

2011-10-29T07:11:00.001-07:00

As a frequent user of the GSS, I spend a lot of time looking at Wordsum scores. For those unfamiliar with the Wordsum test, it is a simple, 10 question definitional vocabulary test in which respondents earn one point for each word correctly identified from a multiple choice listing of potential synonyms (to see the actual test material, click here). I frequently employ it as a useful, though imperfect, proxy for IQ.

One reason for its imperfection is that rather than measure problem solving or deductive reasoning abilities, it tests for knowledge previously attained. Unlike an IQ test, Wordsum performance can be significantly improved by preparation, even if the specific words included in the test are unknown by the test taker ahead of time. According to my college psych 101 course, this demonstrates the differences between assessing a test-taker's fluid intelligence (which IQ tests mostly do) and crystallized intelligence (Wordsum). The two are highly correlated, however, which is why Wordsum results provide a useful approximation of IQ scores at the group level.

Crystallized intelligence is said to increase with time, as the accumulation of knowledge and experience builds. But at some point, the destructive forces of aging set in and begin attacking crystallized intelligence, the assault on fluid intelligence having been well under way for several decades.

By looking at average Wordsum scores by age range, the GSS allows one angle from which to look at the decline in crystallized intelligence and when it tends to begin. The following graph shows as much. To avoid racial confounding, non-white scores are excluded. For contemporary relevance, all results are from 2000 onward (n = 4,072):

Some noise notwithstanding, there is a steady increase in mean Wordsum scores from the late teens into the mid-sixties, at which point decline sets in. People tend to enter retirement when they're minds are filled to the brim. Those who are forced to work into their retirement years are not afforded the luxury of going out on top. It must be depressing to experience a seepage of knowledge in one's chosen career after potentially having spent an entire professional lifetime accumulating it.

How nice it would be if we were able to reverse the declines aging inevitably (or evitably, perhaps?) brings.

National government spending as a percentage of GDP by country

2011-10-25T17:01:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, I became frustrated when unable to find a table of national governmental expenditures as a percentage of GDP by country. So, using data from the invaluable CIA World Factbook, I created one.

It's gathered some dust, and an update is in line, especially since something or other having to do with the global economy occurred between then and 2010, from which the most recent data come. An inquiry from an author (who I won't name but who is certainly welcome to be made known in the comments if he so desires) searching for more recent numbers served as the impetus to actually get it done. Getting out in front of the inevitable objections, a disclaimer: These data do not include all government spending and state, local, and provincial government outlays of course differ from country to country. For consistency, all figures are in exchange rate terms:

Country	GE as GDP
1. Iraq	88.1%
2. Cuba	86.5%
3. Ireland	67.0%
4. Lesotho	65.5%
5. Denmark	58.4%
6. France	55.7%
7. Finland	53.6%
8. Sweden	53.4%
9. Belgium	53.0%
10. Austria	52.9%
11. Libya	52.2%
12. Netherlands	51.3%
13. Italy	51.2%
14. United Kingdom	50.9%
15. Portugal	50.6%
16. Iceland	50.1%
17. Bosnia and Herzegovina	49.8%
18. Hungary	49.3%
19. Greece	49.3%
20. Serbia	49.3%
21. Equatorial Guinea	47.3%
22. Cyprus	46.6%
23. Germany	46.5%
24. Norway	46.3%
25. Slovenia	46.3%
26. Belarus	45.1%
27. Spain	44.9%
28. New Zealand	44.4%
29. Cape Verde	43.9%
30. Canada	43.8%
31. Latvia	42.8%
32. Bolivia	42.5%
33. Botswana	42.5%
34. Croatia	42.4%
35. Malta	41.8%
36. Eritrea	41.8%
37. Brunei	41.7%
38. Lithuania	41.4%
39. Luxembourg	41.3%
40. Slovakia	41.0%
41. Moldova	40.8%
42. Japan	40.6%
43. Romania	39.3%
44. Swaziland	38.9%
45. Estonia	38.8%
46. Bulgaria	38.0%
47. Algeria	37.8%
48. Saudi Arabia	37.7%
49. Chad	37.3%
50. Oman	37.2%
51. Macedonia	36.4%
52. Czech Republic	35.8%
53. Australia	35.7%
54. South Africa	35.6%
55. Burundi	35.3%
56. Malawi	35.3%
57. Trinidad and Tobago	35.0%
58. Georgia	34.8%
59. Switzerland	34.7%
60. Angola	34.6%
61. Ukraine	34.3%
62. Vietnam	33.7%
63. Mongolia	33.1%
64. Nicaragua	32.9%
65. Kuwait	32.9%
66. Namibia	32.6%
67. Jamaica	32.6%
68. Israel	32.4%
69. Kyrgyzstan	32.3%
70. Uzbekistan	32.2%
71. Seychelles	31.9%
72. Ecuador	30.9%
73. Papua New Guinea	30.8%
74. Aruba	30.7%
75. Uruguay	30.5%
76. Mozambique	30.2%
77. Zimbabwe	30.1%
78. Egypt	29.8%
79. Guyana	29.7%
80. Albania	29.6%
81. Jordan	29.4%
82. Nepal	29.0%
83. Lebanon	28.8%
84. Belize	28.7%
85. Colombia	28.3%
86. Kenya	28.1%
87. Gabon	27.8%
88. Panama	27.6%
89. Burkina Faso	27.5%
90. British Virgin Islands	27.4%
91. Venezuela	27.4%
92. Brazil	27.4%
93. Senegal	27.3%
94. Yemen	27.2%
95. Bahrain	27.0%
96. Azerbaijan	26.9%
97. Armenia	26.5%
98. Malaysia	26.5%
99. Turkey	26.3%
100. Morocco	26.3%
101. Tunisia	26.3%
102. Rwanda	26.2%
103. Tajikistan	26.1%
104. Ghana	25.9%
105. Tanzania	25.5%
106. Mauritius	25.5%
107. Mexico	25.4%
108. Syria	25.2%
109. Iran	25.2%
110. Sierra Leone	24.5%
111. Qatar	24.4%
112. Kazakhstan	23.7%
113. United States	23.6%
114. Argentina	23.5%
115. Russia	23.3%
116. Zambia	23.2%
117. China	23.0%
118. Sri Lanka	22.8%
119. Chile	22.8%
120. Guinea	22.6%
121. El Salvador	22.5%
122. Honduras	22.2%
123. Togo	22.1%
124. South Korea	22.1%
125. Cote d'Ivoire	22.0%
126. Haiti	21.6%
127. Benin	21.3%
128. Afghanistan	21.1%
129. Laos	21.1%
130. United Arab Emirates	21.0%
131. Poland	20.9%
132. Republic of the Congo	20.6%
133. Pakistan	20.4%
134. Costa Rica	19.8%
135. Cameroon	19.7%
136. Sudan	19.5%
137. Thailand	19.5%
138. Peru	19.5%
139. Taiwan	19.0%
140. Gambia	18.8%
141. Indonesia	18.8%
142. Cambodia	18.6%
143. Philippines	17.9%
144. India	17.5%
145. Paraguay	17.4%
146. Hong Kong	17.3%
147. Bahamas	17.2%
148. Uganda	17.2%
149. Ethiopia	16.9%
150. Central African Republic	16.5%
151. Dominican Republic	16.5%
152. Madagascar	16.2%
153. Nigeria	15.5%
154. Bangladesh	15.1%
155. Singapore	14.5%
156. Guatemala	14.5%
157. Turkmenistan	9.3%

To view a visual representation, click here.

As the Iraq war finally draws to a close, at least we were able to transfer one tenet of contemporary Western democracies in a recognizable form to Baghdad. What's that? Isonomy? Respect for dissenting viewpoints? Individual liberty? No, no, no, Don Quixote. It's big government, of course!

Outside of a few paradises like Cuba, Western Europe dominates the top spots. The US figure, in comparison, is a bit of an apples-to-oranges one, as the table is, as mentioned previously, constructed on central (that is, federal) governmental expenditures and does not directly include the spending by local, state, or provincial governments. Around 40% of government spending in the US is doled out through state and local governments, a proportion higher than just about anywhere else in the world. Consequently, the US ratio appears deceptively small.

Still, if non-federal spending is included, the US is neck and neck with Japan, well below the bulk of the rest of the Western world. As ubiquitous as government seems to be stateside, its presence is relatively small compared to Europe.

Parenthetically, Switzerland (for which the CIA factbook includes cantonal and municipal spending in addition to federal spending) , a favorite of the American alternative right, stands apart from the rest of the Old Continent. In so many ways, this beautiful Alpine country instills in pessimistic conservatives a hope for what might yet be.

As a Radio Derb votary, I've long wondered why Turkmenistan is singled out as recipient of so much love on the weekly broadcast. To an ignorant yankee like myself, it's scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the crapistans. I need wonder no longer. The Derb may claim that the president's name is the source of affection, but the table above reveals the truth of the matter!

The relative paucity of government spending in affluent East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and even officially communist China is to some extent a consequence of the absence of generous government-provided welfare systems in these places, with pensions, medical care, and the like mostly covered by employers rather than by the state, as tends to be the case in Western Europe.

There is a statistically significant but modestly positive correlation (.22, p = .01) between a country's per capita GDP and that country's amount of government spending as a share of its GDP. Correlation is not necessarily causation, of course, but with otherwise backwards countries that have enormous resource wealth (ie, Botswana and Saudi Arabia) tending towards the leviathan end of the governmental expenditures scale, to the extent that the causation arrow exists, it probably points from high GDP towards prodigious government spending rather than the other way around.

On its face, there doesn't appear to be much here that validates the libertarian view that minimizing the size of the federal government, and avoiding the consequent economic distortions its continued growth will otherwise cause, should be the exclusive goal of a society wanting economic prosperity and an overall improved quality of life. Ceteris paribus it's relevant, perhaps (I certainly think it is), but there are clearly a host of other demographic and cultural variables that are of greater importance. Who would rather operate a business--or live--in Nigeria instead of in Denmark?

Percentage of ancestral Mexicans racially self-identifying as white by state

2011-10-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Razib Khan recently posted a table showing racial self-identification among those of Mexican ancestry in the US as well as the racial self-identification of those of Mexican ancestry in a selection of states using data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey. A couple of commenters, including Steve Sailer, noticed an apparent relationship between Republican-leaning states and the percentage of ancestral Mexicans in those states who consider themselves to be white. With Idaho at the top of the list and New York at the bottom, that seems reasonable.

Presumably, the relationship would work via the more conservative, traditional ethos and culture of red states encouraging ancestral Mexicans in those states to identify more strongly with the majority rather than distinct from it, as they would tend to in places like California and Illinois.

To flesh out the accuracy of the observation, I looked at all 50 states (to see an accompanying map, click here*). There looks to be something to it, anyway. The correlation between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the vote in 2008 is a positive but modest .25 (p = .08).

One issue in attempting to discover how voting patterns correlate with various other behaviors or attributes is the fact that blacks are so politically monolithic. The common perception of Mississippi is that it is a patriotic place, but over one-third of its population is black, so despite having the most conservative white population in the country, there are other more moderate states like Alaska and Utah that show up on electoral maps in a deeper shade of red than Mississippi does. The relationship between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the non-Hispanic white vote, however, is even weaker, at .18 (p = .21).

What about ancestral Mexicans themselves? Unfortunately, state-level data on Hispanic voting patterns are only available for 13 states where the Hispanic population is substantial enough to report on. Despite that limited sample size, though, the relationship is strongest here--the correlation between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the Hispanic vote is .51 (p = .07). This appears to mesh well with the narrative presented above--the more Hispanics identify with traditional American values, the more likely they are to identify with the majority white population.

By way of the GSS, consider how well this seems to hold up on the individual level. The following table shows, among those of Mexican ancestry living in the US, political orientation by racial self-identification, with blacks excluded and extending back only as far as the year 2000 for contemporary relevance (n = 713):

Race	Conservative	Moderate	Liberal
White	29.4%	43.9%	26.7%
Other	30.9%	40.0%	29.2%

White ancestral Mexicans are only marginally less liberal than ancestral Mexicans who identify themselves as members of another non-black race are. To the extent that the effect exists, it's pretty weak.

Parenthetically, recall that among the broader American public, people are nearly twice as likely to call themselves conservatives as they are to call themselves liberals. The preceding table shows that among ancestral Mexicans, the conservative and liberal numbers are at parity. Excluding a Cuban population that is decreasing in relevance, Hispanics, irrespective of racial self-conception, are considerably more politically liberal than whites are.

ACS variables used: RACE(100), STATEICP, ANCESTR1(2101, 2102, 2110, 2111, 2130, 2183)

GSS variables used: ETHNIC(17), RACE(1, 3), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

* North Carolina really stands out as having a low percentage of ancestral Mexicans who racially identify as white. Is there an obvious explanation for why this is the case that I'm unaware of?

I wonder what she'd be like in bed and what he'd be like in the ring

2011-10-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

It's commonly joked that within the first few moments of seeing a woman, men are envisioning what it'd be like to have sex with her.

I have to confess that within the first few moments of seeing a man, I'm usually doing something similar. No, no, not that similar. I'm sizing him up, assessing whether or not I could take him. Is this normal? If not, what do guys think about first when they see other guys? How much social prestige he has? How wealthy he is? Not much of anything at all?

How about women when they see another woman? How pretty she is (without the gratuitous male imagery that accompanies it)? Her sense of style?

Changes in birth rates by age cohort, 1980 to 2008

2011-10-16T16:39:00.001-07:00

It's no secret that fertility rates in the Western world outside of Israel and the United States are below replacement level, and the populations in some developed countries like Japan and Germany have already began contracting. The US, at 2.06 children per woman, would be treading water if not for the country's net immigration level.

Sifting through new Census data, I came upon a file containing data on fertility rates by several characteristics of the mother. Although whites, blacks, and Asians have all become less fecund over the last thirty years [or not--please see Hail's comment below], their declines have been almost exactly offset by a rapid increase in the size of the more procreative Hispanic population, such that the total fertility rate in the US today is right where it was in 1980.

Also of interest are shifts in fertility patterns by age that have occurred over the last three decades. The following table shows the percentage changes in birth rates by the mother's age from 1980 to 2008:

Age	Change
10-14	(45.5%)
15-19	(21.7%)
20-24	(10.5%)
25-29	+1.9%
30-34	+60.4%
35-39	+136.9%
40-44	+151.3%
45-54	+250.0%

Women are having children later than they did a generation ago. The bulk of all birthing is still done by women in their 20s (see below), so the large percentage changes among women in their teens and thirties is less impactful on the whole that it might appear at first glance.

Educational romanticism and the accompanying societal desire that everybody receive higher education means more and more women are delaying childbirth or foregoing it entirely. The consequences are not only demographic, they are also health-related, as several risk factors for the child increase alongside the age of the delivering mother.

Now for the percentage of total births by age range of the mother in 1980 and 2008. Data are not available for women 40+ in the earlier period, so I estimated using simple algebra to get the total for the 40-44 and 45-54 age ranges, and then split that number proportionally in accordance to the most recent year in which births for women in those age ranges are recorded:

Age	1980	2010
Under 20	15.6%	10.4%
20-24	33.9%	24.8%
25-29	30.7%	28.2%
30-34	15.2%	22.5%
35-39	3.9%	11.5%
40-44	0.7%	2.5%
45-54	0.03%	0.2%

A plurality of births are now to women aged 25-29, a change from three decades ago, when women aged 20-24 gave birth most frequently. In 1980, women in their 20s accounted for 64.6%--nearly two-thirds--of all live births, while women in their 30s accounted for 19.1%, or less than one-fifth of the total. Today, at 53.0% of all births, women in their 20s account for just over half. Women in their 30s now account for 34.0%--over one-third. If these trends continue, in another generation it will be more common for babies to be born to mothers in their 30s than to mothers in their 20s.

HBD, defined

2011-10-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

Half Sigma asks "What are you doing about HBD-denialism?"

Creating definitions in the Urban Dictionary, that's what! Hey, it's something, at least. And voting these definitions to the top of their respective entries is something any reader is able to do right now, by going here and clicking on the thumbs-up for what is currently definition #7 [now at #2--keep pushing!], which reads as follows:

An acronym that stands for human biodiversity. It is the acknowledgement and study of how humans differ from each other on both the individual and group levels because of differences in genotype. Differences include, but are not limited to, personality traits, athletic ability, intelligence, height, health, and physical appearance.

"What are some things that HBD informs us on?"

"Why professional sports leagues like the NBA and NFL are dominated by people of West African descent, why blacks and Hispanics consistently perform more poorly on all forms of cognitive testing than whites and Asians do, and why the Amerindian immigrants mowing lawns in the suburbs are so much shorter than the residents of those suburbs, just to name a few."

We propelled NAM to the top in a matter of weeks, displacing the entry specifying the Southeast Asian country. The acronym for "happy birthday" is even more formidable, but I'm confident it's reign at the top is on borrowed time!

Those who don't want the world to have more kids don't have their own

2011-10-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

One of those fun troll roles to play involves telling secular leftists that irreligious Darwin lovers exhibit the least Darwinian fitness and telling pious creationists that they are winning the Darwinian race. While liberal atheists and agnostics aged 40+ average 1.78 kids, firmly theistic conservatives in the same age range average 2.69.

I suspected when it came to worries about overpopulation, however, stated beliefs would be far more aligned with actual behavior than in the case of evolution by means of natural selection. Expressed concerns about sustainability and the like aside, people who would see it as just rewards if homo sapiens go extinct in the next century hail more frequently from the ranks of those who think the human population needs to be reduced than from among those who want humanity to be fruitful and multiply.

Indeed, the GSS shows that tends to be the case. The following table (n = 1,520) displays the percentage of people aged 40+ who agree with the Malthusian concern that "the earth cannot continue to support population growth at its present rate" by the number of children they have:

Kids	Agree
0	65.6%
1	60.0%
2	54.5%
3	45.9%
4	46.6%
5+	52.7%

But maybe I'm following the wrong scent in my hunt for hypocrisy. If the rapture occurs in the near future and only those judged unworthy of heavenly entry are left behind to expire, the fulfillment of prophecy will have happily occurred and the result will be one in which the earth certainly will no longer be able to sustain it's current growth rate, yet you'd be correct to think that most believers ignore this when they fail to express concern about indefinite population growth in the future!

The following table (n = 2,392) reveals their hypocrisy by showing the percentage of people who don't think the earth can sustain current levels of human population growth by confidence in God's existence:

Belief	Agree
Atheist	68.4%
Agnostic	62.8%
Uncertain believer	62.1%
Firm believer	47.6%

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), AGE(40-89), POLVIEWS(1-2)(6-7), GOD(1)(2)(3-5)(6), POPGRWTH(1-2)

NAM as non-Asian minority

2011-10-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

... now constitutes the first entry in the Urban Dictionary. Great work everybody!

Marriage durability by state

2011-10-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

In taking a fresh look at how what Steve Sailer deems the marriage gap held up in the 2008 election, I came across an interesting US Census report on marriage rates and things related with data from 2009. The marriage gap still existed in '08, with McCain's share of a state's vote and the median duration of first marriages (age adjusted and for all races) in that state correlating at .85 (p = .00). Steve found a correlation of .91 (p = .00), though he looked exclusively at white women between the ages of 18 and 44. Those are extremely strong relationships for anything in the social sciences.

Perhaps counterintuitively at first, divorce rates also correlate strongly with voting Republican at the state level (r = .53, p = .00). That's surely not something that red state "values voters" are proud of, is it? Well, the confounding factor is that divorce rates are measured among the population at large, not just among those who are (or were) married. So in states where relatively few people get married, it's not surprising that divorce rates are going to tend to be lower there than in states where more people tend to get married. Indeed, marriage and divorce rates correlate with one another at .39 (p = .01) at the state level.

How about an attempt at measuring the durability of marriages by looking at the divorce rate in the context of the marriage rate? The following table ranks states in this way by taking the number of marriages per 1,000 people aged 15 and older that occurred in 2009 and dividing it by the number of divorces per 1,000 people aged 15 and older that occurred over the same period of time. So it's not measuring the healthiness of 'the institution of' marriage per se*, but instead how committed those who actually get married tend to be:

State	Durability
1. Idaho	3.35
2. North Dakota	3.34
3. Hawaii	3.00
4. Wyoming	2.98
5. Utah	2.90
6. District of Columbia	2.81
7. Delaware	2.60
8. Connecticut	2.55
9. New York	2.55
10. New Jersey	2.43
11. California	2.39
12. Virginia	2.30
13. Illinois	2.24
14. South Carolina	2.23
15. Nebraska	2.23
16. Texas	2.15
17. Washington	2.14
18. Iowa	2.11
19. Kansas	2.08
20. Alaska	2.08
21. Maryland	2.08
22. Wisconsin	2.07
23. Minnesota	2.07
24. North Carolina	2.06
25. West Virginia	2.04
26. Montana	2.03
27. Colorado	2.03
28. Massachusetts	2.03
29. Pennsylvania	2.01
30. Florida	2.00
30. New Mexico	2.00
32. Missouri	1.96
33. Arkansas	1.96
34. Georgia	1.92
35. Nevada	1.89
36. Arizona	1.88
37. Louisiana	1.87
38. Oklahoma	1.86
39. South Dakota	1.84
40. Oregon	1.82
41. Indiana	180
42. Michigan	1.79
43. Ohio	1.78
44. Kentucky	1.76
45. Mississippi	1.74
46. Vermont	1.71
47. Tennessee	1.70
48. New Hampshire	1.65
49. Rhode Island	1.60
50. Alabama	1.59
51. Maine	1.04

There is a bit of a generational issue here, as we're gauging to some extent how eager relatively young people are to get married with how likely older married people are to get divorced. Theoretically, younger people in a given state who are getting married today could be entering into much stronger (or weaker) marriages than their divorcing parents did when they were married compared to what is taking place in another state could make states where marriage is suddenly getting much stronger or much weaker stand out less with the old strength (or weakness) negating the new weakness (or strength). Or, the marriage rate in a state may be undergoing a major shift, with relatively few (or more) of its younger people getting married compared to what has taken place in the state's past. It's difficult to account for these differences, although states undergoing the most demographic changes are the most likely to be effected.

There aren't any clear correlations with things like political leanings or IQ that emerge (both are statistically insignificant, with only slight positive relationships existing with higher IQ and voting Democrat), as this accompanying map illustrates. Mountain states tend to do the best, while the upper Northeast and South fare the worst.

I suspected that among states where marriage rates are higher matrimony would be more superfluous than in states where fewer people get married in the first place, as if the relatively few people who actually do get married in states like Maine and Rhode Island actually mean it, whereas in states like Wyoming where everybody ties the knot, there are plenty of marginal people with lots of slack in their strings. Not so, however--the correlation between the marriage rate and marriage durability at the state level is a healthy .52 (p = .00). Marriages tend to be more durable in states where more people get married in the first place.

* In DC, for example, the marriage rate is on the low end among all the other states, but the divorce rate is the even further down the list, second from the bottom. Consequently, marriage durability in the nation's capital is actually quite high.

Illegals playing hooky in and leaving Alabama

2011-10-06T19:22:00.001-07:00

Alabama's new immigration law, deemed the toughest in the nation, has been in effect for a week after surviving legal challenges brought forward by the Department of Justice . In those first few days, some 2,000 Hispanic students--presumably the children of illegal immigrants if not illegal themselves--did not show up for school:

Federal courts have struck down large parts of similar legislative attempts by other states, but Judge Blackburn allowed key provisions in the Alabama law to stand, saying they passed constitutional muster because they reinforced existing federal law [now dwell on the fact that the Department of Justice is leading the charge against Alabama].
Teachers unions and Hispanic advocacy groups, as well as the Obama administration, have filed an appeal, but the law began to take effect this week. Some 2,000 Hispanic students did not show up to school Monday, according to state education officials. That figure amounts to about 7 percent of the state's Hispanic student population.

Of course the parasitical educrats hate this. School districts receive funding based on enrollment and attendance, so fewer students means less money to squander. I think it's fantastic.

Many illegals are already heading to other states. This reveals, yet again, that the tripe about not being able to deport XX million illegals without turning the nation into a police state is a canard. When the state shows a willingness to enforce the immigration laws it is entrusted to enforce, most of the lawbreakers head for the hills (or in this case, the Rio Grande).

Such an outcome is hardly unprecedented. When the Eisenhower administration put Operation Wetback into action, it is estimated that for each illegal immigrant forcibly removed, 7 or 8 voluntarily left the country of their own volition.

Cliched as it sounds, the national question is one of political will and nothing else.

Parenthetically, the grand architect of both Alabama's and Arizona's immigration enforcement laws is Kris Kobach. I've met him multiple times, and the guy is razor sharp, propelled by an unrelenting desire to protect the national sovereignty of the United States. He's up there with Steve Sailer and Charles Murray among the public figures I admire the most.

That's so not cool

2011-10-03T20:02:00.000-07:00

Parenthetical to this post by OneSTDV comes results from the GSS showing that smokers have fewer friends than non-smokers do, (medians of 4 and 5, respectively; means of 6.9 and 7.7, respectively). These items are only able to be cross-referenced in 1986 (n = 1,463). Smoking wasn't cool then, and after a couple of decades of visceral crusading against it, it's now something mostly reserved for low-class, antisocial types to do in shame, away from everyone else.

So it's almost certainly even less cool now than it was then. We probably have to go back a generation before that to find a time when smoking was hip, rather than immaturely rebellious, as it was in the 80s and early 90s, or prolish as it is today.

GSS variables used: SMOKE, FRINUM

Peace is so SWPL

2011-10-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Economics and Peace compiled a peace index ranking the 50 states (see the map here) earlier this year. The index uses five indicators in making the peace score calculations--homicide rates, violent crime rates, incarceration rates, per capita police officers, and the availability of small arms.

At first blush, the last indicator seems to reveal an unsatisfying leftist outlook in the report as less densely populated, politically conservative flyover states tend to have less restrictive legal gun ownership requirements than Northeastern and West Coast states do. That's probably a more-or-less accurate read into the authors of the report. However, gun ownership rates are estimated rather bizarrely by the percentage of suicides in each state committed by the use of a firearm, so while this is surely influenced in some degree by the availability of guns, it's difficult to dispute that a relatively high percentage of people ending their lives by blowing their brains out instead of overdosing on sleeping pills proxies for the violent tendencies of the residents in question reasonably well. Anyway, this factor was assigned the least weight of the five, representing only 1/15th of the peace index total.

Using incarceration rates and the number of police officers per capita is a bit problematic as well. Throwing increasing numbers of people who commit crimes in prison and holding them there is arguably one of the primary reasons criminal activity has decreased in the US over the last couple of decades. Similarly, relatively large police forces could be seen as a necessary response to a violent population, but could also be viewed as an expression--not necessarily related to the actual prevalence of violence--of how high a priority that population makes deterring crime and capturing criminals.

A few years ago, I computed a strictness index that ranked states by how many people they incarcerated relative to the amount of crime that occurred. South Dakota comes out as the most 'draconian'. This is notable because the report contains a "case study" on New York and South Dakota, the former being the state where the peace index has increased the most over the last 20 years and the latter being the state where it has decreased the most over the same period of time. Singling out South Dakota as a state that has slid backwards since 1991 highlights why incarceration rates and police presence are suboptimal measures of peacefulness--homicide and other violent crime rates are almost exactly where were 20 years ago, but because the incarceration rate and the per capita police presence have both increased markedly over that period of time, South Dakota looks bad. As a law-abiding citizen, if more thugs are in jail and more patrol cars are out than they were when I was a kid, but the frequency of crime has been held in check, I'm not complaining too much. These changes are certainly preferable to even a modest uptick in the crime rate.

These qualifications notwithstanding, state-level correlations with indices like these are rarely uninteresting. So without further ado, here are some of them. Positive correlations indicate the variable in question is associated with more peace, negative correlations with less of it:

Mean IQ -- +.62
McCain's share of the '08 vote -- (.31)
McCain's share of the '08 white vote -- (.58)
Median age -- +.28*
White population % -- +.48
Black population % -- (.56)
Hispanic population % -- (.34)
NAM population % -- (.67)
Male:female sex ratio -- +.26*

* Not statistically significant at 95% confidence

The only surprise is in the sex ratio, with relatively more men being modestly correlated with more, not less, tranquility. Crime is a young person's game, so it's hardly shocking that states like Maine and Vermont, where the median age is over 40, are among the nation's least violent.

As always, higher IQ is positively associated with a higher quality of life. And also as always, ugly a fact as it is, the more black and Hispanic a place is, the lower that place's quality of life tends to be.

Although the report, at 52 pages in length, delves deep in discussing the results and implications of the index, and the racial composition of a state is apparently the single most determinative factor in how that state fares, there is not a single mention of race in the entire thing. Those of us interested in human biodiversity are often accused of being obsessed with racial differences. Well, race matters. It matter a lot. Reports like this, in which the most influential variable is inexplicably ignored, illustrate that rather than HBDers being excessively focused on race, the majority of people are tragically ignorant of it (or at least profess to be so) whenever paying attention risks casting non-whites in a bad light.

It's plausible to think that in places where crime is an acute problem, whites react by tending towards political candidates, generally Republican, who take a tough-on-crime approach, and that is reflected in the strong inverse correlation between peace and the percentage of whites who voted for McCain. Whites in the South vote heavily Republican--at rates in Alabama and Mississippi that nearly mirror black support everywhere else for whoever the Democratic candidate is--and the South, unsurprisingly, is rated the least peaceful in the country.

Arab Americans are racially profiled

2011-10-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

While I've seen Steve Sailer point to then Texas Governor George W. Bush's complaints about racial profiling of and the use of "secret evidence" against Arab Americans on several occasions, I was a sophomore in high school at the time and so predictably not paying attention to US national politics. Consequently, I have no recollection of any of it. Fortunately, C-SPAN, the network that carried the debate in which Bush made the remarks, archived the event. To view the comments in question, follow this link, scroll down to the transcript section, and then find and click on the 46:37 mark to jump the video forward to that point in the debate.

Go along to get along, ladies

2011-09-29T15:45:00.001-07:00

A post where OneSTDV asserted that women, credulous creatures that they be, are largely to blame for the medical industrial complex and social hypochondria (his phrases) made me wonder what the GSS has to tell us about sex differences on questions relating to the willingness to speak openly without regard to the sacred cows that may be impaled as a consequence, personal health, and what Half Sigma deems the Gaia Cult. I didn't make the time to investigate at the time. Ah well, better late than never.

When it comes to rocking the boat by making provocative statements, women are more inclined towards biting their tongues for the sake of social harmony than men are. The GSS posed the following question: "Some people think that it's important to stand up for your own opinion even if it makes others around you uncomfortable. Others think that it's better to keep your views to yourself if they would make others around you uncomfortable. Which position comes closer to your view?" While 44.2% of women said it was better to keep views to oneself, only 35.4% of men did.

Parenthetically, ideals and actions are not in perfect alignment here. A slim majority of women and a sizable majority of men claim to think it is better for a person to be honest than accommodating, yet the people who actually put this into practice when the issue is something combustible like racial differences in intelligence constitute a tiny minority, at least when in public.

Gauging sex differences in susceptibility to what OneSTDV describes as Big Pharma's attempt to scare people into taking psychiatric drugs for a motley mix of symptoms including headaches, insomnia, fatigue, backache, dizziness, lightheadedness, and low appetite that might be symptomatic of depression is a little tricky because what the survey provides in width, it lacks in depth. It is rare for the questions to reach the necessary level of complexity.

I found one that comes reasonably close to getting after what we want, though. It asks respondents how likely they would be to take doctor-prescribed psychiatric medication because they are feeling depressed, having trouble falling asleep and concentrating, and feeling worthless. Among men, 40.8% reported being either somewhat or very likely to take the drug, while 48.6% of women did.

As for the Gaia Cult, most of the iconoclastic views are held by men, as 38.1% of them agree or strongly agree with the statement that "many of the claims about environmental threats are exaggerated," compared to 28.1% of women.

This is hardly a novelty. Men are consistently more skeptical of sacred claims than women are, and Gaia worship is vying with diversity for becoming the official religion of the Western world. To determine what a society holds sacred, simply find out what is utterly closed to questioning of any kind. It's not Christianity, which is certainly not above reproach. By branding CAGW skeptics the new racists, Al Gore is opening the divine door to both the Gaia Cult and diversity by grouping together those who question the holiness of either of them.

GSS variables used: SEX(1)(2), STANDUP(1-2), GRNEXAGG, PSYCMED3

Graph of federal tax liabilities by income quintile

2011-09-26T16:45:00.001-07:00

In a post where he presents a table from the CBO showing the share of federal tax liabilities by income quintile in the US from the beginning of the 21st century to a few years into the future, Randall Parker points out how much taxes would have to increase on the top 20% of income earners to close the 2012 federal deficit:

How much would taxes have to increase on the top 20% to balance the budget? For 2012 the projection is for $2.627 trillion total revenue, $3.729 trillion total expenditures, and $1.01 trillion deficit (and I think it will be worse than that due to Peak Oil Recession II). Well, if the top 20% really pay 63.1% of total federal taxes (see table above 2012 column) then they are paying 0.631*$2.637 trillion or $1.66 trillion. Their total taxes paid would have to rise about 66% in order to close the federal budget deficit.

Making the same calculation for the other 80% of the population, we find that their collective tax contributions would have to increase 104%--that is, more than double--to close the single year deficit. That, of course, wouldn't get us out of the financial hell hole (of debt) the country is in, it would just mean we'd momentarily set the shovel down. And, in actuality, such enormous increases in tax liabilities would lead to shrinkage in the private sector, lower incomes, and thus a smaller economic base to tax from.

Randall also comments on how little the tax burden has shifted by income over a decade and a half. Even more apparent than the table he presents makes it, the following graph shows the stasis:

So, the top 20% does most of the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Those in the second quintile from the top, in the 60%-80% range, pull their own weight, and the bottom 60% are dragged along by those earning more than they do.

Homo nest invaded

2011-09-24T06:49:00.001-07:00

In an interesting article on Obama's "evolving" position on same-sex marriage, Jack Cashill describes how the progressive left's feelings towards homosexuals has similarly evolved since the Stonewall Riots that putatively got the gay ball rolling. The New York Daily News, providing me with yet another example* of why it can be so much fun to revel in print media from the past before the vise of political correctness had become as suffocatingly tight as it is today, headlined the incident "Homo Nest Invaded, Queen Bees are Stinging Mad". The Village Voice called it the "Great Faggot Rebellion".

I have a hazy conception of the gay rights movement coming a couple of decades after the civil rights movement, sometime during the eighties as AIDS exploded onto the scene and provided homosexuals with the perfect vehicle to ride to Victimhood. People my grandparents' age do not show sufficient sensitivity to the concerns of either Negroes or sodomites. People my parents' age are better when it comes to blacks and Hispanics, but they don't take queers seriously enough. My generation treats African-Americans, Latinos, gays, and lesbians with more civility. Even we still have a long way to go though, of course!

So when did gay rights enter the American lexicon? Google's Ngram viewer gives some idea:

The phrase was almost non-existent until the late sixties (the Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969). It blew up in the mid-eighties before periodically cresting a decade later at the time the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted. After descending a bit, its ascent has resumed. With the legalization of same-sex marriage across much of the US a seeming inevitability sometime in the near future, the growth trend will likely continue.

* My dad, who is a professor of marketing, collects magazines and newspapers from 40s, 50s, and 60s. Flipping through them always brings a chuckle, albeit one tainted by melancholy. Aw, the way we was.

Planeswalker points

2011-09-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

The following contains a discussion relating to the the world of M:TG, the card game. For the vast majority of readers it will consequently be of no interest, so if you are among them, please don't waste your time.

---

Wizards of the Coast had made no secret of the company's desire to change the worldwide DCI rating system that will be getting scrapped in the coming weeks. The new "Planeswalker points" system that will replace it is already running live, with retroactive calculations for all previous playing history having been made.

To put it bluntly, I'm extremely disappointed by the new system. The original DCI rating system simply copied the Elo rating system used in a host of other one-on-one competitions, most prominently in chess. The higher your rating relative to your opponent, the more less you standed to gain and the more you stand to lose in matching up against him.

The problem, as WoTC (officially) saw it, was that this kept professional players away from all but the biggest events--with a rating of 2000+, a loss to 95% of active players meant a rating dive equivalent to the full k-value of the event in question, while a win meant only a single point increase in rating. An FNM event in which a top player went X-0-1 led to a drop in that player's rating. Since suffciently high ratings are the key to tournament invitations and coveted Grand Prix byes, top players didn't mingle competitively with the masses.

There is a solution to this problem within the framework of the old rating system--merely allow players to create multiple DCI accounts. If the fear of proliferation getting out of hand (ie people ditching their new accounts after a couple of poor event showings) is an issue, limit it to two per person--one for competitive play, the other for experimentation, themes, or the like. This would allow pros to play more casually as frequently as they wanted to without having to be concerned about inadvertently knocking themselves out of pro tour contention.

More realistically, WoTC made the change because the old rating system essentially rewarded people for garnering a high winning percentage, while the new system rewards them for everything--not just winning, but also simply for playing. And the old system, of course, punished people for losing. The new system doesn't. At all. Points are simply gained, never lost.

What does this mean? The more a person plays, the 'better' a player he becomes. A person who goes to four tournaments in a week, ending at 2-3 and failing to make the top 8 cut in each of them has a higher rating than the guy who goes to one tournament the same week and cruises to a 7-0 finish, no splits. If a rating system is supposed to be a proxy for a player's abilities--as it was under the old system--this new system is patently absurd.

The monetary benefit for WoTC and participating event hosts is obvious. Players are going to have to grind* away to qualify for professional events, but these events will be filling up with people who play often, not necessarily people who play well (and believe me, while there is some overlap between the two, they are definitely not synonymous).

My take is especially caustic because I'm exactly the kind of M:TG player who loses the most from this rating remodel. The frequency of my play is pretty low, averaging an event or two every couple weeks. But I'm a competitve rogue player, having steadily maintained an 1800+ rating for the two years I've been back in the game, always keeping me in the top 5% of players. So I've always been on the cusp of professional play (though I've yet to actually pursue it because of time commitments and my stubborn refusal to ever sleeve up a top-tier build). That will no longer be the case. Unless I devote what I deem an inordinate amount of time to sanctioned events, my high win percentage won't get me there.

* "Grind" is a fitting verb here, as the new points system parrots MMOs, with levels and associated ranks ranging from "prodigy" at the low end to "archmage" at the high end. It doesn't matter how good your play is, if your character isn't--er, if you aren't--sufficiently leveled, there is nothing you can do to "win". The stigma of M:TG being more-or-less the same as Dungeons and Dragons, though obviously incorrect--M:TG being much more closely related to poker than to D&D--is not getting any easier to answer for.

Black-white and Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state

2011-09-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, an updated visualization of black-white incarceration rate ratios by state was provided. I have no good reason as to why a corresponding table was not included to go along with that, so here it is:

State	B:W
1. Iowa	13.59
2. Vermont	12.49
3. New Jersey	12.38
4. Connecticut	12.00
5. Wisconsin	10.64
6. New Mexico	10.29
7. North Dakota	10.05
8. South Dakota	10.02
9. Rhode Island	9.62
10. New York	9.35
11. Wyoming	9.24
12. New Hampshire	9.22
13. Pennsylvania	9.15
13. Utah	9.15
15. Minnesota	9.14
16. Illinois	9.06
17. Nebraska	8.34
18. Montana	8.24
19. Massachusetts	8.13
20. Maine	7.60
21. Kansas	6.99
22. Colorado	6.65
23. California	6.50
24. Washington	6.42
25. Ohio	6.38
26. Delaware	6.36
27. Virginia	5.89
28. Oregon	5.84
29. Arizona	5.58
29. West Virginia	5.58
31. Michigan	5.49
32. Maryland	5.48
33. Indiana	5.46
34. North Carolina	5.40
35. Missouri	5.25
36. Kentucky	4.98
37. Texas	4.74
38. Louisiana	4.69
39. Nevada	4.65
40. South Carolina	4.47
41. Florida	4.45
42. Oklahoma	4.39
43. Alaska	4.33
44. Idaho	4.25
45. Tennessee	4.12
46. Arkansas	3.86
47. Alabama	3.54
48. Mississippi	3.46
49. Georgia	3.32
50. Hawaii	1.88

The proximity-to-the-Canadian-border phenomenon is detectable. It's plausible to think that to some extent this is a consequence of whites behaving better the further north we go, while blacks are blacks, wherever they are. I'm skeptical, though, because it's not just whites who fare better as we head north--blacks do so as well, and the latitude-performance correlation is virtually identical for both races.

When Steve ran the numbers, he found a vigorous correlation of .62 between the 1997 black-white incarceration rate ratio and Kerry's share of the 2004 vote. As La Griffe du Lion has explained, this is largely attributable to stricter sentencing for criminal activity in red states than in blue states.

That remains the case with the fresher data, although the relationship has weakened. The correlation between the 2005 black-white rate ratio and McCain's share of the 2008 vote is .34 (p=.02). If red states were full of racist whites who wanted to irrationally throw large numbers of blacks in jail and blue states full of SWPLs who did not, we'd expect the correlation to run in the opposite direction. When it comes to closing the jail gap, red states do a better job of it than blue states do.

Fortunately for community organizers and activists everywhere, there is a silver lining in the (disgraceful!) nationwide trend towards tougher sentencing laws that has more people in the US behind bars now than ever before--the jail gap narrowed between 1997 and 2005 in a full 45 states. In only five lily white (and thus racist!) places--Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming--did it widen.

As someone who is keenly aware of the Hispanic tidal wave crashing onto our shores from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern end of our coastal border with the Pacific ocean, I would be remiss not to present a table showing Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state. Unfortunately, data were not available in eleven states--AL, KS, ME, MD, MN, NM, NC, SD, VT, WI, and WY--that apparently do not inquire about (or at least publicly report on) whether or not prisoners are Hispanic:

State	H:W
1. Connecticut	6.64
2. Massachusetts	6.11
3. Pennsylvania	5.62
4. New York	4.47
5. New Hampshire	3.68
6. New Jersey	3.32
7. Rhode Island	3.30
8. North Dakota	3.18
9. Nebraska	2.55
10. Iowa	2.47
11. Idaho	2.45
12. Utah	2.14
13. Colorado	1.98
14. Montana	1.95
15. Illinois	1.86
16. Arizona	1.82
17. Ohio	1.78
18. Delaware	1.72
19. California	1.70
20. Kentucky	1.35
21. Washington	1.34
22. Indiana	1.25
23. Texas	1.24
24. Virginia	1.23
25. Mississippi	1.21
25. Missouri	1.21
27. Tennessee	1.15
27. South Carolina	1.15
29. Oregon	1.14
30. Oklahoma	1.12
31. Nevada	0.99
32. Michigan	0.96
33. Georgia	0.92
34. Alaska	0.76
35. Florida	0.65
36. Arkansas	0.60
37. West Virginia	0.54
38. Louisiana	0.47
39. Hawaii	0.41

As Peter explained in the comments of a previous post, Puerto Ricans (virtually all of whom are Hispanic) in the US are heavily concentrated in the Northeast and fare especially poorly among Hispanic immigrants and their descendants in the US. That is clearly evident above, as the Northeast takes all the top spots.

Florida's Cuban population, while no longer constituting a majority of the state's Hispanics still comprises a sizable chunk of it, presumably makes the state look great on this ranking.

Hawaii's combination of a large military presence and relatively unintelligent whites help to place it at the very bottom of the list. Accounting for the fact that the Aloha state's Asian/PI population is distinctly less prosperous than Asians in the US as a whole, it's probably the most racially egalitarian state in the country.

The biggest surprise to me is Nevada, where Hispanics and whites are incarcerated at almost identical rates. Excepting New Mexico for which data are unavailable, Hispanics in the border states predictably all end up in jail more frequently than whites in those states do. Any ideas as to why Nevada bucks this trend? Michigan is also unexpected.

Excluding Alaska (there are Hispanics in Alaska? Yes, though fewer than 40,000 of them), the rest of the states where Hispanics are better behaved than whites are in the South, where whites are more prone to criminal activity than they are in the Midwest, Northeast, or Old Northwest.

Black-white ratios on TANF usage and incarceration rates

2011-09-12T15:55:00.001-07:00

The indispensable Steve Sailer made the following suggestion in the comments of the recent post that looked at black and Hispanic TANF utilization rates by state:

There's a bias in these ratios depending on how large a percentage blacks make up of the whole state. For example, if Mississippi is, say, 40% black, then the maximum possible ratio for Mississippi would be 2.50 (100%/40%), while if Idaho is 1% black, then the mathematically maximum possible ratio would be 100.00. (Indeed, the ratio in Mississippi is only 2.22.)

I think it's better to compare blacks to whites than blacks to the entire population, even though there's still the problem of whites differing between states (e.g., CN v. WV).

That's a great point. The problem is even greater when attempting comparisons of white TANF utilization rates to the extent that it is almost impossible to do meaningfully, which is why it was not attempted in the original post.

There's a way around this, though, by calculating utilization rates for blacks and comparing them to utilization rates for whites in the same state. So if in Mississippi for example, blacks represent 95% of total TANF usage (2.38 in the table), and the remaining 60% of the population that is white (for argument's sake--those aren't exact figures) contributes the remaining 5% of TANF usage for a value of .08 in the original table. Dividing the black by the white figures yields 29.8, a figure for which a higher value indicates relatively higher black TANF utilization while 'adjusting' for the absolute sizes of each state's black and white populations.

Why I didn't think of this before is unimportant. Go brush up a little on your vocabulary, and it'll make more sense.

Anyway, the following table ranks states by the level of black representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is black (black TANF % / black population %) divided by the level of white representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is white (white TANF % / white population %), expressed as an index in which 1.00 would represent exactly equal utilization rates by race, while index scores higher than that indicate what might be thought of loosely as the slavery tax multiple:

State	B:W
1. Wisconsin	27.75
2. North Dakota	23.40
3. Minnesota	23.15
4. New Jersey	17.97
5. South Dakota	16.50
6. Pennsylvania	15.81
7. Nebraska	15.00
8. Illinois	12.55
9. Iowa	11.30
10. Michigan	11.10
11. Maryland	9.71
12. Nevada	9.52
13. Connecticut	9.03
14. Idaho	8.80
15. Indiana	8.78
16. Delaware	8.75
17. Arizona	8.56
18. Louisiana	8.34
19. Arkansas	8.24
20. Mississippi	8.14
21. New York	8.13
22. Utah	7.56
23. Wyoming	7.45
24. Texas	7.35
25. Kansas	7.26
26. Virginia	7.22
27. Montana	7.17
28. Maine	7.02
29. Oklahoma	6.94
30. Oregon	6.72
31. California	6.51
32. Ohio	6.49
33. North Carolina	6.48
34. Alabama	6.44
35. Massachusetts	6.30
36. Florida	6.19
37. Tennessee	6.12
38. South Carolina	5.88
39. Missouri	5.73
40. Georgia	5.71
41. Vermont	5.27
42. Rhode Island	4.93
43. Washington	4.73
44. Alaska	4.52
45. New Hampshire	4.41
46. New Mexico	4.15
47. Kentucky	4.01
48. West Virginia	3.45
49. Colorado	2.75
50. Hawaii	1.39

Black Mississippians looked pretty good in the original table, but as Steve noted, it was more of a statistical artifact of the useful but limiting method I originally employed. This method turns out similar results (the two correlate at .68), but they are more useful, and a few states where the black population is particularly large, like Mississippi and Louisiana, shift upwards quite a bit.

An accompanying visualization is available here (Adobe/Java required).

Several years ago, Steve wrote an article entitled "Mapping the Unmentionable: Race and Crime", where he looked at the ratio of black and white imprisonment rates by state based on data from 1997. Surprisingly, moderately liberal states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, were where the black-white imprisonment gap was the widest, while being narrowest in the South.

If the purported racism of conservative whites manifested itself in incarceration patterns, we'd expect the black-white ratios to be the largest in the South and the smallest in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, almost exactly the opposite of what Steve found to actually be the case.

A more plausible explanation might be that softer sentencing standards in blue states (Steve found a correlation of .62 between Kerry's share of the 2004 vote and the size of the black-white imprisonment ratio) leads to a greater black-white incarceration ratio than stricter sentencing standards in red states do. To comprehend why, imagine a 'draconian' state in which the slightest legal infraction lands a person in the slammer. A full 90% of blacks might spend time behind bars in a state like this, but so would half of that state's whites, producing a ratio of only 1.8. On the other end of the extreme, imagine a do-as-you-please state where the only thing that carries a jail sentence is murder. Blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder than whites are, so in this state, the ratio is 7.0. [Addition: A commenter mentions La Griffe du Lion's 2006 discussion and explanation for why this occurs, more-or-less validating what I was getting at in a much fuller and more convincing way.]

Comparing the table above with the maps in Steve's article, the two seemed to me to trend in a similar direction--states where blacks milk the welfare system a lot more than whites do also appear to be states where blacks get thrown in jail a lot more than whites do, while in states where black and white welfare use is more equitable, the incarceration rates are similarly more equitable.

Fortunately, I was able to track down fresher data from 2005 on state level imprisonment rates by race. The correlation between the black-white TANF utilization ratio and the black-white incarceration rate ratio is .46 (p = .00). That's a reasonably strong relationship for seemingly unrelated social science data sets.

The motto for Wisconsin's blacks: On the dole or in the cell. If you're looking for a more positive example of black behavior, check out the great state of Hawaii. That shouldn't be too surprising. After all, the tropical paradise has become known for producing brothas of presidential timber! Halfrican and from one of the most racially equitable states in the country--no wonder he's forever insecure in his blackness!

For those interested in the material covered in Steve's article, here's an updated visualization of the black-white imprisonment ratio by state.

Also, if you haven't already, check out Steve's reflections on the material at hand.

* There are no data available for Wyoming and New Mexico in the 2005 data, so for those states I substituted 1997 figures, adjusted for the nationwide increase in the incarceration rate over the eight year period.

Diversity is Strength! It's also ... inequality

2011-09-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

I'll justify ripping off VDare's recurrent article naming theme by segueing into congratulating the site for getting a much needed aesthetic makeover, and I'll even do so upon discovering that this humble blog has apparently been dropped from VDare's roll as, I hope, an incidental consequence of the revamp. Anyway, I wanted to publish a few odds-and-ends correlations, so instead of cramming them all into the title, I'll just filch it.

At its essence, to celebrate diversity in the contemporary West is to celebrate the portion of the population that is non-white. Contingent upon context, it might also refer to the portion of the population that is non-heterosexual, non-Christian, non-Western European, etc. But in its most recognizable form, diversity is basically synonymous with non-whiteness.

Using that as the definition, the correlation between diversity and income inequality (as measured by the gini coefficient) at the state level in the US is .43 (p = .00).

More than that (much more than that, actually), though, diversity is also poor academic performance. The correlation between NAEP science and math test scores (that I used to estimate average state IQ numbers) and diversity is a vigorous .77 (p = .00).

Parenthetically, one of my earliest recollections of the formation of a personal partisan leaning was after my dad outlined for me the basic differences between the two major parties. I concluded something to the effect of "So, if people are happy and do well, Republicans should do well, too. If they're unhappy and struggling, Democrats should do well." Relative equality isn't sufficient for happiness, but it's probably necessary. And red states are modestly more egalitarian than blue states are--the correlation between McCain's share of the vote and inequality is an inverse .31 (p = .02).

Black TANF utilization by state

2011-09-04T13:33:00.001-07:00

In a column for Taki's Mag, John Derbyshire highlighted an interesting table from the Department of Health and Human Services showing the state-level distributions of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) by race. The piece considers the so-called "slavery tax" and whether it is something we can--or should--continue to pay (or collect--though "pay" is the far more accurate verb to describe Derb readers), and the table's relevance comes from his making the point that as soon as one starts delving into the subject of welfare, race inevitably becomes an issue:

As soon as you start to look at the numbers, though, you come up against the race issue. Here are the 2007-08 TANF tables—that’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal program—broken up by state and race. So for example, in the state of Maryland, which is 30 percent black, 80 percent of TANF-receiving families are black.

Aside from the table naturally catching my attention, I wondered if the Derb fished for and then used an especially startling example of black overrepresentation to make his point. Less than one-third of the population but four-fifths of the active TANF cases? That certainly makes blacks look bad!

The following table ranks states by the level of black representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is black (black TANF % / black population %), expressed as an index in which 1.00 represents exactly proportional usage, anything less than 1 indicates lower utilization and anything greater than 1 indicates disproportionately high utilization:

State	TANF
1) Wisconsin	9.04
2) Minnesota	8.90
3) Nebraska	7.92
4) Idaho	7.33
5) Iowa	7.23
6) North Dakota	6.83
7) Maine	6.67
8) Utah	6.00
8) Wyoming	6.00
10) Oregon	5.65
11) Pennsylvania	5.48
12) Vermont	5.20
13) Indiana	5.02
14) Kansas	5.00
15) Nevada	4.96
16) Michigan	4.47
17) Illinois	4.46
18) Oklahoma	4.45
19) New Jersey	4.27
20) New Hampshire	4.25
21) Ohio	3.91
22) Arkansas	3.85
23) Arizona	3.77
24) Missouri	3.71
25) Connecticut	3.47
26) Alaska	3.38
26) Kentucky	3.38
28) Montana	3.33
28) Tennessee	3.33
30) Washington	3.30
31) Delaware	3.29
32) Massachusetts	3.25
32) South Dakota	3.25
34) Florida	3.23
34) West Virginia	3.23
36) Virginia	3.19
37) California	3.06
38) North Carolina	2.87
39) Maryland	2.81
40) Alabama	2.65
41) New York	2.56
42) Georgia	2.45
43) Louisiana	2.43
43) South Carolina	2.43
45) Texas	2.39
46) Colorado	2.38
47) Mississippi	2.22
48) Rhode Island	2.11
49) New Mexico	1.70
50) Hawaii	1.06

A visualization of the black data is available here.

Rather than cherry pick a state that made blacks look especially bad, the Derb chose from near the bottom of the list, a state that is closer to racial parity in TANF usage than the country as a whole is. He wasn't trying to pull any punches--in fact, he probably just randomly selected a state that where the figures happened to be round and easily comprehended.

With the exception of Hawaii (where many blacks are in the military and are consequently relatively intelligent and prosperous), blacks receive a disproportionately large share of TANF benefits in every state in the country.

The upper Midwest is the nation's most racially unbalanced region, with blacks using welfare at rates far higher than non-blacks. The South, in contrast, is its most balanced. It is often argued that as a place becomes less white, white support for welfare programs that come to increasingly transfer white wealth not from affluent whites to poor whites but from affluent and middle class whites to non-whites will decrease. This by no means debunks that argument, but it is worth noting that the rankings don't shake out the way such an argument might predict, with whites in states where blacks receive especially disproportionate amounts of welfare benefits voting more strongly Republican than they do in states where welfare benefits are more equally distributed. There is no correlation between the two.

And TANF utilization relative to population share for Hispanics:

State	TANF
1) Massachusetts	3.61
2) Connecticut	2.78
3) Pennsylvania	2.40
4) Minnesota	2.19
5) New York	2.13
6) Nebraska	2.01
7) New Hampshire	1.89
8) Rhode Island	1.78
9) Arizona	1.78
10) Utah	1.69
11) Idaho	1.69
12) Wyoming	1.62
13) Washington	1.62
14) New Jersey	1.55
15) New Mexico	1.54
16) Texas	1.50
17) North Dakota	1.50
18) Wisconsin	1.42
19) California	1.35
20) Iowa	1.34
21) Indiana	1.33
22) Montana	1.31
23) Colorado	1.24
24) Oregon	1.22
25) Vermont	1.20
26) Kansas	1.13
27) Missouri	1.11
28) Ohio	1.10
29) Michigan	1.09
30) Nevada	1.09
31) Oklahoma	1.03
32) Delaware	0.96
33) Alaska	0.93
34) Maine	0.85
35) Hawaii	0.74
36) Florida	0.74
37) North Carolina	0.70
38) Virginia	0.67
39) Illinois	0.60
40) Arkansas	0.59
41) Tennessee	0.59
42) West Virginia	0.50
43) Louisiana	0.43
44) Kentucky	0.42
45) South Dakota	0.41
46) Alabama	0.36
47) Georgia	0.35
48) Mississippi	0.30
49) South Carolina	0.29
50) Maryland	0.21

A visualization of the Hispanic data is available here.

Not surprisingly, Hispanics in states with small black populations appear to be especially heavily welfare users. That's because in these states, their TANF utilization is being compared mostly to white TANF utilization rates, whereas in the South, Hispanics are being compared to a black-white mix, and consequently look less disproportionate (and actually quite admirable in many places). Looking at the preceding table, it's not surprising why Arizona has a restrictionist reputation--that Alabama does so as well is less predictable.

Qaddafi

2011-09-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

With the long-time leader of Libya apparently taking precarious refuge in Algeria, his time in the limelight of Western media is nearing its end. When he's captured and then again as legal proceedings of some form progress against him (and the nature of those proceedings is contingent upon who ends up nabbing him), he'll momentarily be back in the news, but the peak of his media fame is surely in the past.

As a sendoff, I decided to delve into the very overdone subject of the romanized spelling of his name. There are several pieces that categorize the various spellings different media outlets have adopted over the years, but it's a little difficult to quantify New York Times does it this way, Fox News does it this way. So, here is a graph that tracks the six most common spellings of his surname in books published in the US over the last four decades (click on the image to enlarge it):

1) Qaddafi
2) Gaddafi
3) Qadhafi
4) Gadhafi

5) Kadafi (which appears to me the most phonetically intuitive spelling)

6) Gathafi

"Qaddafi" is the variant used most commonly by the federal government, while news media generally prefer to use "G" rather than "Q" to begin the name (probably because some number of English majors end up as journalists, and failing to follow a "Q" up with an "A" is perceived by them to be of poor form!).

Around 8% of computer programmers are black

2011-08-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

Half Sigma writes:

As far as I know, no employer of computer programmers has ever been sued for discrimination, even though there are no black people working in programming. OK, that’s a lie, there was one black computer programmer. But he was not a typical black man, he was actually a black Hispanic; he was born somewhere in Central America and moved here when he was a young child.

He's obviously exaggerating to make a point, but having a very good friend who is a systems and network administrator, I've heard stories from a frustrated narrator about more than a handful of incompetent black programmers who this friend "knows" to be beneficiaries of affirmative action policies (though because he cannot specifically identify these policies, he refers to the process as one of "soft" affirmative action). So I was skeptical about the claim that there are virtually no blacks in the programming profession.

Using ISCO88 occupational classifications, the GSS reveals the following racial distribution among computer programmers (n = 144):

White -- 75.6%
Black -- 8.1%
Other -- 16.3% (most of whom are Chinese or Indian; breaking the numbers down by ancestry, 7.6% of all programmers are of Chinese descent and another 8.2% are of Indian descent, for a Chinese-Indian combined total of 15.8%. Tangentially, none are of Mexican ancestry.)

Seems like the threat of sex discrimination charges would be a greater worry for employers of programmers than complaints about racial discrimination would be, as 71.6% of GSS programmer respondents are men (and the GSS slightly over-samples women).

GSS variables used: RACE, ISCO88(2132), ETHNIC, SEX

NAM, defined

2011-08-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

The Steveosphere has created some catchy and useful acronyms, but they're mostly just used in-house, otherwise unfamiliar to the broader public. Well, one way to induce thinking about HBD is to raise awareness* of some of its unique terminology. I've created the following entry for NAM in the Urban Dictionary:

An acronym that stands for non-Asian minority, usually used to more accurately describe a person who is referred to as a member of a minority group in mainstream media or popular discourse. It is necessitated by the general success and prosperity of Asians in the United States, who do as well or better on a host of social indicators than whites do. Thus when a media figure discusses the economic or educational struggles of a minority, he is almost always referring to a NAM, or a non-Asian minority.

"The minority income gap in the US has only gotten worse since the recession!"

"You mean the NAM income gap has gotten worse. Asians are actually doing even better relative to whites than they were before the recession."

It's competing with nine other definitions. Most of them are garbage, but one of them--the Southeast Asian country--is the formidable king of the hill. If you feel so inclined, help knock it from the head of the heap and propel the non-Asian minority definition to the top by dropping in and clicking on the thumbs-up icon, currently the fourth entry shown.

* Happily, SWPL is already firmly established at UD.

AE in the WSJ

2011-08-28T16:36:00.001-07:00

... via an op/ed (fourth paragraph, referencing this post) by City Journal editor, author, and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Steven Malanga on the disconnect between the leftist advocacy and financing provided by union leadership and the sentiments of far more centrist due-paying, rank-and-file union members.