Inductivist

Clearly, anyone who believes that astrology is scientific doesn't understand what science is, but how common is this belief, and what's the statistical profile of a believer?

The General Social Survey asked respondents the question with answers varying from "very scientific" to "not scientific" at all (sample size = 5,548). 36.6% of people said astrology was at least sort of scientific. That's a lot of dummies.

Here are the factors that predict belief (standardized OLS coefficients):

Predictors of thinking that astrology is scientific

Female   .09
Black   .13
Other race    .04
Age   -.07
IQ   -.17
Educational level   -.11
Church attendance   -.04
Political conservatism   -.04

All of the coefficients are statistically significant at the p < .01 level (or higher, two-tailed test).  So the profile looks like this: female, black (vs. white), other race (vs. white), young, unintelligent, uneducated, non-churchgoer, and liberal. The coefficients indicate the strength of the prediction: IQ is the best predictor of thinking astrology is not scientific.

Michael Barone on U.S. demographic trends:

Since 1990, Americans have been moving out of California to other states in large numbers. The Golden State's population growth in the last two decades has reached the national average only because of Latin and Asian immigration.

That immigration, to California and elsewhere, is one of the two big demographic trends that have reshaped the country over the last 40 years. The other is the movement of vast numbers of people from high-tax states in the Northeast and industrial Midwest to lower-tax and more economically vibrant states elsewhere.

Both these movements have halted, at least temporarily. American mobility is near an all-time low. As in the Depression of the 1930s, people tend to stay put in hard times. You don't want to sell your house if you're underwater on your mortgage.

And immigration has plunged. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that from 2005 to 2010, more people have moved from the United States to Mexico than the other way around. I suspect that reverse migration is still going on.

The question is whether those trends will resume when -- if? -- good times return.

My prediction is that we won't ever again see the heavy Latin immigration we saw between 1983 and 2007, which averaged 300,000 legal immigrants and perhaps as many illegals annually.

Mexican and other Latin birthrates fell more than two decades ago. And Mexico, source of 60 percent of Latin immigrants, is now a majority-middle-class country.

Asian immigration may continue, primarily from China and India, especially if we have the good sense to change our laws to let in more high-skill immigrants.

But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya.

Continued domestic out-migration from high-tax states? Certainly from California, where Gov. Jerry Brown wants to raise taxes even higher. With foreign immigration down, California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population.

Fortunately, governors of some other high-tax states are itching to cut taxes. The shale oil and natural gas boom has job-seekers streaming to hitherto unlikely spots like North Dakota and northeast Ohio. Great Plains cities like Omaha and Des Moines are looking pretty healthy, too.

It's not clear whether Atlanta and its smaller kin -- Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville, Jacksonville -- will resume their robust growth. They've suffered high unemployment lately.

But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you've just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America.

Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter century. One in 12 Americans lives there.

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that's one trend that I hope continues.

Some readers, I'm sure, think I have some odd interest in Mexican Americans. Well, it's not odd--it's simple math. New from Pew:
















31.8 million people is roughly TEN million more people than all Americans who say they are of English ancestry. TEN million more!! (2006-2008 American Community Sample)

Peruvians are fascinating people, but who cares?

GSS participants were asked about their confidence in the scientific community. Forty-three percent answered "a great deal," fifty percent said "only some," and 7 percent said "hardly any."

To identify predictors of confidence, I lumped the second and third answers into one low-confidence category, and conducted binary logistic regression analysis. Here is my list of predictors:

Logistic regression coefficients (sample size = 1,435)

Age .00
Female -.31*
Black -.57**
Hispanic .14
Education .09**
IQ .08*
Income .00
Church attendance -.05*
Conservatism -.09*

* statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, two tail test
**statistically signficant at the 99% confidence level, two-tail test

Keep in mind that these are net effects--the impact of each predictor after the influence of the other predictors has been removed.

Females, blacks, conservatives and religious people tend to have less faith in science than their counterparts.  By contrast, people who are smart and educated have more confidence.  Age, Hispanicity, and income do not matter. The strongest predictors are race and education. There is a large difference between blacks and whites. Adjusting for the other factors (e.g., IQ and education) blacks are still more skeptical of science. This might be due to their greater religious fundamentalism and fear of scientific abuse. Or the explanation might be as simple as greater suspicion of (white) institutions in general.

This study I linked to in the last post is interesting. Based on trends in fertility, immigration, secularization, conversions, and religious fundamentalism, the authors project that the modal American voter 30 years from now will describe himself as a conservative Democrat. (Of course, the large projected growth in Catholic Hispanics contributes significantly to such a conclusion). The authors also estimate that in the U.S. the total number of Muslims will surpass Jews in a decade or so.   

Pew recently asked 1,003 adults 12 questions about political news information. Here are the percent who answered each correctly:















Let's look at the percent answering correctly two of the most "difficult" questions.



















The political news dummies: women, blacks, young adults, folks with no more than a high-school degree, and Democrats. And the overall score:























Same pattern. You can add low-income folks to the list as well.

How about you can't vote without at least a passing grade?  I have low standards.

Likelihood of voting favors Republicans: I'm interested in how the likelihood of voting varies across groups. From highest to lowest, here are the percentages of Americans who voted for president in 2004, according to the Census:


Percent who voted in 2004

White males 65-74 73.9
White males 75+ 72.8
White females 65-74 71.0
White females 45-64 69.9
Black males 65-74 68.2

White males 45-64 67.4
White females 75+ 65.6
Black females 45-64 65.3
Black females 65-74 64.9
Black males 75+ 62.4

Black females 75+ 60.2
Black males 45-64 59.2
Black females 25-44 58.9
White females 25-44 56.9
White males 25-44 51.2

Black females 18-24 48.7
Black males 25-44 48.0
White females 18-24 45.5
White males 18-24 39.8
Black males 18-24 39.0


You can see that age is the biggest factor: the elderly are much more likely to vote. Race and gender are less important. More women vote at young ages, but more men do at older ages.

I estimated OLS coefficients where the dependent variable is voting in 2004, and a number of predictors are included (General Social Survey data):


Standardized OLS coefficients, N = 2,349

Education .28*
Church attendance .18*
Age .14*
Income .05*
Sex .03
Political orientation .02
Race .01

* p < 05, two-tail

The person who is most likely to vote: educated, frequent churchgoer, older, and higher income. These factors favor Republicans. Not so sure about the educated? Here are the percentages for 2004:

Voted for Bush in 2004

Less than high school 41.6
High school 49.7
Junior college 52.1
Bachelors 54.5
Grad 39.0

The pattern holds for the lowest four categories, with post-baccalaureates being the exception.