Inductivist

 

Some people argue that blacks do not perform academically as well as other groups because they lack a culture that places a high value on education. Is such a view supported by General Social Survey data? In 2021, respondents were asked, "Please show for each of these how important you think it is for getting ahead in life . . . c. Having a good education yourself?" Answers ranged from 'essential' to 'not important at all.' 

The table displayed below shows the distribution of responses for blacks (raceacs = 1) and non-blacks. 46.2% of blacks say education is essential, compared to only 31.8% of others. This contradicts the claim that African Americans do not value getting an education as others do. 

You might respond that blacks have been taught the importance of education, but many only pay lip service to the idea and have not internalized the attitude. If true, this points to the impotence of attempting to improve performance through teaching and stressing certain values.   

 Someone at Twitter, I forget now, wondered if IQ or one's social class was more important for adult success. Well, the General Social Survey can help with this. I threw in basic demographics as controls. 

Here are OLS results for income:

Looking at the betas, you can see that IQ is more strongly predictive of income than father's socioeconomic status (PASEI). Notice how race is not statistically significant when IQ is included in the model. 

And job prestige? 

IQ is much more predictive of job prestige than father's PASEI. 

The results for education should be even stronger for IQ:

 

The beta for IQ is much larger than for dad's social class. How far one goes in school depends much more on brains than dad's wallet (or his other influences). 

 In "The Son Also Rises," Gregory Clark presents historical data that suggests that French Americans are an underprivileged minority. They have been underrepresented among doctors and lawyers, for example. 

Do General Social Survey data support this view? 

Here are mean years of schooling for the French versus other white Americans:

No difference in education. Here's median income in 1986 dollars:

A lower median income for Americans of French descent. And mean job prestige:

The French have a slightly higher mean job prestige. And IQ?

Basically the same mean IQ.

Clark predicted to the French would eventually move to average levels. It looks like they've made it.  

The question was raised on Twitter the other day about whether more education causes increases in IQ. The General Social Survey can help a little with this. Below we have a chart of the mean years of schooling completed since 1977. The mean starts out at 11.71 and ends in 2018 at 13.89 years of education. Over the period, that is an increase of 19%. 

By contrast, here is the trend in IQ. In 1978, it was 97.45, and in 2018 it was 97.80--an increase of 0.3%. Basically, no change. US trends are consistent with the view that keeping people in school longer does not make them smarter. 

The last post was incomplete because we were unable to see the percentages of whites who could be considered racist. The General Social Survey did not label most of the numbers, but let's assume the 6 means slightly racist, 7 is somewhat racist, and 8 is considerably racist. 

You can see that 14.5% of white dropouts are at least somewhat racist. Compared this to those with graduate degrees: only 3%. So, as I wrote in the last post, anti-black racism is concentrated among white dropouts. Cold feelings towards a race of people is not good, but these are people at the bottom of society. They don't have the power to deny someone an education or a good job. They are nobodies, and yet who do elites love to hate more? 

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.

Scientific progress is crucial for the problems we humans face, but what types of people know science the best?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked respondents 12 basic science questions. A random example is, does the father determine the sex of the child? One problem with the list of questions is that they are a bit too easy; the mean number correct is 9.5.

Shown below are OLS standardized coefficient for a number of factors I thought might predict scores on this science quiz (sample size = 203):

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Male  .09
Age   .01
Black   -.19**
Other race   .00
Years of education   .32***
Believe in God   -.19**
Church attendance   -.07
Political conservatism  -.06

**p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test

According to the results, basic scientific knowledge is predicted significantly by being white; having more education; and being skeptical about the existence of God. The other variables are not predictive.

But you might be thinking, hey, this is a HBD blog--where's IQ?  Well, I wanted to throw it in last to see how it changes things:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients--IQ added to model

IQ   .35***
Male  .20
Age   -.10
Black   .08
Other race   .04
Years of education   .08
Believe in God   -.33**
Church attendance   -.04
Political conservatism   -.01

**p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test


Education and being black drop to non-significance when IQ is added to the equation.  In other words, the reason why more education people know more science is because they are smarter, not because they were exposed to more information than less educated people, and blacks score lower because they are, on average, less intelligent.

By contrast, skepticism about God strongly predicts scientific knowledge even after taking IQ into account. This suggests that, at least under current conditions, skeptics take to science more than believers, even after controlling for differences in IQ.

UPDATE:  I discovered that fewer people were asked the last science question, so I dropped it to get the sample size up to 1,039--much bigger. Here are results for the final model:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients--IQ added to model

IQ   .29***
Male  .14**
Age   -.02
Black   -.12***
Other race   -.03
Years of education   .22***
Believe in God   -.16***
Church attendance   -.12***
Political conservatism   -.07*

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test

We now have the statistical power to see smaller effects.  IQ still dominates the model, but now we see that the following traits predict knowledge: male, white, more education, disbelief, not attending church, and liberal political orientation.

After IQ, education is most important, followed by skepticism, gender, race, attendance, and political orientation. Keep in mind that these factors matter even after taking IQ into account. For example, and man whose IQ is the same as a woman's is likely to know more science than she does.

Using the General Social Survey (GSS) data, I looked to see which factors best predict that a woman will decide to have a large family.

I thought women from the South would have more kids, but they didn't differ from Northerners, and while conservative women have larger families, the impact is not large. IQ also predicts fewer children, but the effect is small.

I found that: 1) ideal family size, 2) church attendance, and 3) educational level, in particular, are the strongest predictors of the total number of offspring.

I'll present two women to illustrate.  The first woman says that seven children is the ideal family size. She attends church more than once a week, and she went no further than high school. The data predict that she will have 3.7 children.

The second woman says zero kids is the ideal size for a family.  She never goes to church, and she has 20 years of education.  The model based on the data predicts she will have .56 kids.  The first woman is predicted to have 6.6 more children than the second woman.

Again, the most powerful predictor by far is education.  It's even more predictive than what a woman says about ideal family size.

UPDATE:  Looking at older data, I found a predictor even more powerful than education: age at marriage.  Women who are younger when they get married have significantly more kids.

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

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

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

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

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

Percent who did not go far enough

Whites      14.5
Blacks        7.4
Other race  7.6

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


Percent who went too far

Whites         7.8
Blacks       10.1
Other race   9.8

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

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

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

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


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

Education
Middle IQ  2.4
Top IQ  2.5

Job Prestige
Middle IQ  12.6
Top IQ  14.4
Political Orientation
Middle IQ  1.3
Top IQ  1.6

Church Attendance
Middle IQ  2.7
Top IQ  2.8

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

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

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

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

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

In the last post, we looked at ethnic differences in whether the environment or genes are thought to be more important for a variety of traits. Now let's see which factors predict choosing nurture over nature.

Using GSS data, I estimated linear regression models (OLS) with each of the four questions as dependent variables, plus a scale of all four of them summed.  I included all demographic predictors I could think of, including: sex, age, race, southern region, immigrant vs. native-born,  educational level, income, church attendance, number of children, and political orientation. I list below the significant effects (beta weights are shown):

Obesity
Black  -.15
Education  .10

So blacks, compared to whites, and less educated people think environment is less important. Race is the more powerful predictor.

Alcohol Abuse
Female  -.08
Education  .07

Females and the less educated think genes are more important for alcohol abuse.

Altruism
Female  -.06
Black  -.06

Women and blacks are shifted toward seeing genes as important for altruism.

Athleticism
Education  .06
South  -.07

For athletic ability, Southerners and the less educated tend to see genes as being more important.

Nurture over nature scale
Black  -.11
Education  .11

When the scores for all four questions are added together to make a scale, blacks and the less education are shifted toward genes having the most impact.

Not surprisingly, people exposed to more education tend to believe in the power of the environment. After years of getting the same message from liberal teachers, what do you expect?  It is a surprise, though, that blacks, after adjusting for education, give higher estimates to the power of genes.

UPDATE: It might surprise you that political orientation (liberal vs. conservative) is unrelated to one's view of the importance of genes. 

UPDATE II: I wonder if the race difference comes from the fact that blacks are more fatalistic than whites, and people tend to assume (wrongly in my view) that genes imply determinism but environment does not. Whites might embrace nurturism because it sounds compatible with the idea that we can take control of our lives and improve things.  

You might assume that a person's knowledge of basic science is merely the result of education or IQ.  But when I calculate Pearson correlations with a 10 question quiz on basic science (e.g., "Who determines the sex of the child -- the mother or the father?") the education/science and IQ/science correlations are of moderate size (.37 and .41, respectively).  Some people simply take to science better than others. I like to call this Sci-Q.

I was curious about how this knowledge differs by race and ethnicity. The numbers displayed below are the mean for any group with 10 or more respondents (GSS data, total sample size = 3,737):

Mean Scientific Knowledge Score

Yugoslav  8.20
Scottish  7.82
Swedish  7.87
Japanese  7.77
Russian  7.55
English/Welsh  7.54
Swiss  7.48
Chinese   7.45
Norwegian  7.42
Polish  7.42
Hungarian  7.41
Austrian  7.40
Lithuanian  7.40
Jewish  7.38
Danish  7.30
French  7.25
Czech  7.22
Irish  7.22
French Canadian  7.17
Greek  7.15
Asian  Indian  7.14
Netherlands  7.11
German  7.10
Italian  7.10
Finnish  7.08

US Total  6.92

Spanish  6.89
Arab  6.88
Portuguese 6.71
American Indian  6.49
Filipino  6.12
Mexican  5.88
Puerto Rican  5.88
Black  5.86
West Indian  5.77

GSS data has the old category of one's family coming from Yugoslavia.  These people are in first place with a very high mean of 8.20.  We can see that Eastern Europeans, in general, tend to do well, as do Northern Europeans and Northeast Asians. 

On the low end, you see blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Arabs.

The gap between the highest and lowest groups is almost 1.4 standard deviations -- a huge difference. 

America's future depends on having lots of people who "take to science."  We need high-scoring groups to grow--through their having larger families and/or moving to the United States.

Steve Sailer speculated on Twitter yesterday that "American Jewish total fertility rates are higher than for white gentiles of similar education level and location."  The General Social Survey can help a little here if we are willing to use data from 2000 to 2016. I calculated the number of offspring for white women ages 40-55.  There aren't enough cases to look at Jewish women with less than a four-year degree, or to look at location:

Total number of offspring by religion

Four-year degree (N = 628)
Jewish  1.30
Protestant  1.72
Catholic  1.75

Graduate degree (N = 346)
Jewish  1.96
Protestant  1.49
Catholic  1.62

At the bachelor's level, Jewish is fertility is lower than of white gentiles, but this reverses at the graduate degree level.  It's an atypical, eugenic trend to see Jewish women with graduate degree having, on average, 2/3 more kids than Jewish women with a four-year degree.

It's been about a decade since I analyzed current fertility patterns in the US, so I plan to do that in the next few posts, and to look at correlates I've never examined before.

The figure below is taken from an October 2018 CDC report. It shows large drops in US fertility over the past decade. Whites from counties of all sizes are now well below replacement. White women in large metro areas average about 1.6 kids each. These are pathetic European levels. People in the developed world want their trips to Aspen, not the hassle of raising kids. And don't give me the excuse that people can't afford kids. My grandfather had eight children on a maintenance man's wage. They lived simply, that's all.  I have six kids, and our household income is average.

And if you're celebrating because this is a sign of progress toward a sustainable global population, think again. Current trends just mean a shift away from whites and Asians and toward blacks, God bless them. We need thriving scientific populations, not exploding, perennially poor ones.

By the way, it's ironic, but Michelle Obama might save the day. She is pushing for much more female education in Africa. What works in one population doesn't necessarily work in another, but if history is any guide, nothing dries up a woman's uterus better than staying in school.

Here's the abstract from a new genome-wide association study on social mobility. Sounds about right to me: 

A summary genetic measure, called a “polygenic score,” derived from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of education can modestly predict a person’s educational and economic success. This prediction could signal a biological mechanism: Education-linked genetics could encode characteristics that help people get ahead in life. Alternatively, prediction could reflect social history: People from well-off families might stay well-off for social reasons, and these families might also look alike genetically. 

A key test to distinguish biological mechanism from social history is if people with higher education polygenic scores tend to climb the social ladder beyond their parents’ position. Upward mobility would indicate education-linked genetics encodes characteristics that foster success.  

We tested if education-linked polygenic scores predicted social mobility in >20,000 individuals in five longitudinal studies in the United States, Britain, and New Zealand. Participants with higher polygenic scores achieved more education and career success and accumulated more wealth. However, they also tended to come from better-off families.  

In the key test, participants with higher polygenic scores tended to be upwardly mobile compared with their parents. Moreover, in sibling-difference analysis, the sibling with the higher polygenic score was more upwardly mobile.  

Thus, education GWAS discoveries are not mere correlates of privilege; they influence social mobility within a life. Additional analyses revealed that a mother’s polygenic score predicted her child’s attainment over and above the child’s own polygenic score, suggesting parents’ genetics can also affect their children’s attainment through environmental pathways. Education GWAS discoveries affect socioeconomic attainment through influence on individuals’ family-of-origin environments and their social mobility.

This table was taken from this article titled, "Deconstructing White Disadvantage." These are percentages of 25-year-olds in England having a college degree. Please show me where the famous English white supremacy is?

Family class background	White	Black	Mixed	Indian	Pakistani, Bangladeshi	Any other	Total
Prof / mgnr	38%	41%	39%	67%	55%	68%	40%
Intermediate, routine	17%	39%	26%	43%	34%	39%	20%
Others	21%	41%	18%	46%	21%	28%	24%
Total degree	25%	40%	29%	49%	30%	48%	27%

Here's a table from a new AEI study that shows the US 2016 Bachelor's degrees by major and gender. My nieces and the female teens at my church were all encouraged to go into a STEM field, but I guess some sinister, mysterious force is hypnotizing girls to major in Family Sciences. Notice how almost 300,000 more girls than guys graduated with a degree. Oh how the Patriarchy is CRUSHING these girls!

I'm tired of the old Democrat myth that the Republican Party is the party of elites. Looking at General Social Survey data, it's not surprising to see that only 24% of high school dropouts voted for Romney in 2012, but how many people with advanced degrees voted for him? A whopping 32%. Most highly successful people vote Democrat because their competitors aren't the poor. Their enemies are America's Middle. They seek an alliance with the poor so they have the numbers to subjugate ordinary Americans.

I was curious if college liberalizes students. Common sense tells me it does, but I have seen research that throws doubt on the idea.

Listed below are the mean conservatism scores by year of college for those attending college since 2000 (General Social Survey data).

Mean conservatism

Freshmen  4.04
Sophomores  3.71

Juniors  3.62
Seniors  3.69

Students tend to get more liberal as they move through college. The shift from the freshman to junior year is almost half a standard deviation, which means it is a fairly big change.  So it does look like academics are somewhat successful at their goal of turning our youth into progressives. They seem to have the most luck in the first three years--the seniors are no more liberal than juniors.

Man, it's weird dusting this thing off.  I still don't have time for a blog, but the Presidential election cycle always gets me jazzed up and wanting to see what the data have to tell us about interesting questions, often political questions.

With the Trump phenomenon, the old "Republicans are stupid people" is back with a vengeance, but the politically correct twist I've heard more of lately is that they are "uneducated."  So is that true?

The General Social Survey asked people who they voted for in 2012.  Here's is the mean vocabulary score--a decent proxy for IQ--for the two groups:

Mean Vocabulary Score

Voted for Romney (n = 421): 6.45

Voted for Obama (n = 615): 6.23


Romney voters were slightly smarter than Obama voters. Now, let's look at mean education:


Mean Years of Education

Voted for Romney (n = 421) 14.45

Voted for Obama (n = 615) 14.23

Again, Romney voters are slightly more educated. It's pretty clear that Trump fans are more working-class than others planning to vote Republican, but liberals constantly make the mistake of thinking that "no more Muslims" is a sign that someone is dumb, when in fact it is a sign that a person happens to not be part of the crowd that is convinced that liberal ideas are a signal of intelligence and enlightenment, and therefore must be adopted. Liberals think these people are sheep, but as Noam Chomsky once said, no group is more sheepish than liberals.