Inductivist

 A follower on Twitter indicated that he is not Christian and wondered what percent of Americans under 40 are. Well, you know I'm a sucker for that kind of question. The General Social Survey asked people about their religious affiliation in 2018--the latest published data. Here are the results: 

If we add up the numbers for Christians, we get 59%, and it's probably closer to 60% since I did not include "Other", which, for example, probably includes quite a few Mormons, who consider themselves Christians and restorationists, not Protestants. If we we create a table with adults 40 and over we get this:

Added up, 78.2% of older Americans are Christians, so the percentage among young people is dramatically lower. It's not a coincidence that many young people also favor socialism.  

We know that IQ only has a moderate correlation with income, and it looks like much of this is due to the fact that intelligent people are very diverse in terms of earnings: some are super rich but many aren't very interested in money and pursue other things. I, for example, don't make more than my dad who was a maintenance man and belonged to a union. I could have pursued high-paying business jobs like my brothers, but I was drawn to academics (unfortunately!).

But does the correlation vary with age? Perhaps the earning capacity that comes with IQ becomes more and more evident with the accumulation of years.

Using General Social Survey data, I calculated Pearson correlations between IQ and personal income. Here are the correlations by age group and gender:

Correlation between IQ and income

Men
Ages  18-24  -.03
          25-34   .14
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .26
          55-64   .27

Smart men ages 18 to 24 actually make slightly less than their less intelligent counterparts. Smarter guys are more likely to be in college and thus not earning much money. But we can see the correlation grows with older age groups, and it peaks only in the decade before retirement age.

Women
Ages  18-24   .03
          25-34   .20
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .22
          55-64   .24

We see the same basic trend with women.

These findings are consistent with individual difference research in general: Traits matter more over the long-term and less in any particular situation.

I wondered which factor most strongly predicts men having sex frequently: youth, money, looks, or being married?  Here are the statistical results (GSS data, sample size = 685 men, standardized OLS coefficients, all effects stat. sig.):

Factors predicting frequent sex

Youth  .32
Income  .14
Good looks  .09
Being married  .16  

Being young is by far the most important factor.  Older guys don't have sex nearly as much.  Next in importance is being married.  I imagine many men think you get more sex when you're unattached.  You might get more variety, but not more sex.  A big paycheck comes in third, but good looks is least important for men.

So if you like lots of sex, don't get old.

I've been distributing a questionnaire to students which, among other things, asks them their religion. Quite a few have answered "atheist" which makes me wonder if skepticism is on the increase among young people. It would not surprise me, given the success of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins.

The General Social Survey has been asking about belief in God most survey years since 1988. Here are the percentages for men and women ages 18-29 for the 90s and the past decade:

Percent skeptical--1990s

Men (n = 470)
Atheist 4.9
Agnostic 7.7

Women (n = 571)
Atheist 2.5
Agnostic 3.9


Past decade

Men (n = 644)
Atheist 5.3
Agnostic 10.2

Women (n = 824)
Atheist 1.6
Agnostic 5.3

All categories appear to have increased except for female atheists.

The idea that youth brings happiness is a common belief. After all people usually enjoy the greatest health, attractiveness and freedom while they are young. The graphs below show that older men and women are not less happy. In fact, male happiness peaks in the late 60s and early 70s and then drops. For women, the pattern seems more or less flat. There's a little increase in the 20s and a decline after 70.

Men, n = 22,129



 
Women, n = 28,065

The graph below shows 1999-2009 suicide rates by age group (CDC data):

Rates (not shown) are stable for children, adolescents, and younger adults, but suicides have been increasing for middle-aged people. By contrast, they have been dropping among those 75 and over.

Age and race in the presidential race: Some folks don't think it's fair to focus on McCain's age--ageism they call they it. Even though I want Obama to lose, I think it's a reasonable concern. According to CDC stats, people in McCain's age group have death rates five times higher than those Obama's age.

But if it's legitimate to worry about troubling events correlated with age, why is it not legitimate to worry about risks associated with race? For example, the Uniform Crime Reports shows us that blacks are 3.4 times more likely than whites (with Hispanics added in) to commit the crime of embezzlement, even though they are under-represented among people in the position to be guilty of this crime. If it's okay to worry about a dead president, why isn't it okay to worry about a live, corrupt one?

Age and atheism: Eyeballing the 11,000 responses given by participants in the General Social Survey to the question about belief in God, it looks like the percent who are atheists begins to drop in the 50's age range. But visual inspection isn't very trustworthy, so let's divide people up into under age 50 (N= 6,819) and 60 plus (N = 2,594).

What we get is 2.6% for the younger group (CI: 2.2-3.0) and 1.9% for the older group (CI: 1.4-2.4). Now the confidence intervals do overlap a bit, but readers know that I don't fret too much about statistical significance on this exploratory blog.

If we regress confidence in the belief in God on age, we see a small positive relationship (B .01, Beta .08, T-statistic 7.84, p = .000, R-squared = .01). So it looks like atheism slips a bit as one begins to approach that Great Beyond. It's probably due to fear and hedging one's bets, but I suppose it could be a reconsideration of views developed during one's audacious youth.

(By the way, I didn't realize the percent of Americans who are atheists (of whatever age) was quite this low. I thought it was on the order of 5%, but perhaps surveys throw in agnostics.)

Old people don't like diversity: The other day, Steve Sailer wrote a VDare piece that included, among other things, the idea that many white college-age students long to get away from their boring surroundings to more ethnically diverse and thus more exciting environments. He then wondered in the comments section if a desire for diversity peaks during that age. Well, the General Social Survey doesn't interview children, but we can look at 18 plus. People were asked about the ethnic changes that will happen in the next 25 years, and their answers ranged from a very good thing (=1) to a very bad thing (=5). (Notice how everyone assumes the changes are inevitable, like they have already happened.) Here are the mean scores by age for whites:


"The growing diversity is bad" mean score--whites

Ages 18-25, 2.87
26-35, 2.91
36-45, 2.99
46-55, 2.95
56-65, 3.07
66-75, 3.25
76-85, 3.17


So, enthusiasm for diversity declines with age, especially from the mid-50s on. But I'm not sure if the correct interpretation here is that getting older turns you into a conservative, or if multi-culti messages have found fertile ground in impressionable youths. I suspect that the experience of having children turns many people's minds to safety issues, and what once looked stimulating now looks scary.