Inductivist

Someone claimed on Twitter that the mean IQ of American Jews has been falling due to intermarriage. What do General Social Survey data have to say? Here are mean IQs by decade since the 1970s:

No evidence of a decrease here. 

 Another IQ issue arose on Twitter today: Does IQ explain the disproportionate number of Jews in high positions in the new Biden administration? Or is there some other factor? The General Social Survey can't answer this specific question, but we can look at job prestige in general. The table below shows that at the same IQ level, Jews tend to have noticeably higher average prestige scores than non-Jews. 

So, according to GSS data, Jews tend to have characteristics beyond IQ that boost their job prestige. What would those be? I'd be guessing, but in the case of Biden, it might not be a coincidence that most Jews are Democrats and are a key presence in the Democrat Party. My impression is that Jews are very achievement-oriented and are drawn to centers of power. In addition to that, I suspect that a Jew is also likely to enjoy the benefit of being born into a social network of high-achieving people. Connections matter.  

This year is the 15th anniversary of the publication of The Jewish Century, a very honest and insightful book by Jewish scholar Yuri Slezkine. Among many other things, Slezkine claims that the Jewish diaspora, compared with majority national groups, has identified more with the tribe and the international community and less with the nation-state.  According to him, when Jews tried to become nationalists, they dominated the highest rungs but, in the end, were rejected as interlopers. 

So, what's the situation in the US now?  Compared to other Americans, do Jews identify more as global citizens and less as Americans?  In 2014, General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked, "How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I feel more like a citizen of the world than of any country."  I excluded immigrants (sample size = 1,065).  Answers ranged from "strongly disagree" (scored as a 1) to "strongly agree" (scored as a 5).  Here are the means by religious affiliation:

Mean "Citizen of the World" Score

Buddhist   3.00
No affiliation   2.81
Catholic  2.67

Total Sample  2.66

Christian   2.63
Protestant  2.61
Jewish   2.12

Of the groups large enough to include in the list (10 or more respondents), Buddhists and the unaffiliated have the highest globalist scores, while Jews are actually at the bottom of the list.  The gap between the highest and lowest groups is nine-tenths of a standard deviation.  That's a large difference.  According to GSS data, Jews are real patriots.

I showed recently that Americans overwhelming select someone of the same race for a best friend.  Friendship is a good measure of how well groups are mixing, or, on the other hand, how much they cluster.

In this post, let's focus on religion. Does your best friend share your religious affiliation?  I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to answer this question (sample size = 1,932).  Here are the percentages who indicated a religious match between themselves and their best friend:

Percent whose best friend belongs to the same religion

Jews  75.6
Protestants  74.5
Catholics   59.4
None  42.3

Jews emerge as the group that clusters the most.  You might respond that Protestants have basically the same number, but we would expect a high number for a such a large group.  According to the latest GSS, 48.9% of Americans are Protestant, 23.3% are None, 21.2% are Catholic, and 1.7% are Jewish. If Protestants picked their friends at random, their best friend would also be Protestant around half the time. For Jews, a random process would give a Jewish best friend less than 2 percent of the time, and yet the number is over 75%.  This shows an intense level of clustering among Jews.

Since Orthodox Jews have more kids than other types of Jews, some assume that they are quickly becoming the modal category.  Not so fast. This table show trends since the 1970s (GSS data, sample size = 737):

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 human biodiversity community knows that Jews are the smartest whites, but are they, really?

Using the General Social Survey's IQ measure, here are the top five white IQ groups by religion:

Mean IQ (N = 22,242)

Buddhist  110.9
Other Eastern religion  109.4 (n is only 13)
Jewish  108.1
Episcopalian  107.7
Hindu  106.3 (n is only 6)

Jews actually come in third behind Buddhists and whites following other Eastern religions.  Plus, Episcopalians are pretty close to Jews.  Hindus are smart, on average, too (although we shouldn't make much out of such a small sample).

In case you're curious, whites with no religion have an average IQ of 102.8.

The declining religiosity of Americans is discussed a lot, but less attention is given to the shrinking and shifting of non-Christian groups. This graph shows that into the 1980s, Jews were just about the only non-Christian game into town. Jews as a share of non-Christians began to drop precipitously in the 90s, and is now under 50% (General Social Survey data):
















Of course, some of this is due to the immigration of non-Jews, or Jews dropping out of the religion, but the number of offspring for those ages 40-64 has been dropping since the 70s (with an interesting reversal in this decade):
















Orthodox Jews have helped fertility from falling further by having more kids than other Jews, especially in the last couple of decades:
















On the other hand, Orthodox Jews are a fairly small minority within the Jewish community, and those who are some "other type" of Jew are growing, and they tend have few children.

In terms of religious affiliation, Jews are the smartest, right?  Not so fast.  I'll use the vocabulary quiz from the General Social Survey again as a proxy for IQ. I calculated the mean score for whites--IQ is affected a great deal by the racial composition of the group--but will only list selected religions. (The GSS continues to piss me off for not asking if one is Mormon--my favorite group.)


Mean Vocabulary Score

Buddhist 7.82
Jewish 7.60
Episcopalian 7.38
Hindu 7.17
United Presbyterian 6.98
None 6.70
United Methodist 6.31
American Lutheran 6.34
Catholic 6.21
Christian 5.88
Southern Baptist 5.65
Orthodox Christian 5.47
Muslim 4.73

The Buddhists kick butt.  Jews come in second.  America's former ruling faith--Episcopalian--is third. Ouch, poor Islam is at the bottom of the pack.

The question came up over at Steve Sailer's blog if Jewish women are more likely than other women to be lesbian. It wouldn't surprise me since data reported on this blog indicate that lesbians tend to be smarter than average, and they are more likely to come from wealthy homes. According to GSS data, here are the percentages of women by religion who say they are lesbian (sample size = 10,981):


Percent lesbian

Protestant 1.8*
Catholic 1.6*
Jewish 1.4
No religion 4.0

*significantly less than the no religion group


No evidence here for more Jewish lesbians.

From what I hear, straight Jewish women are plenty good at denying men sex.

OneSTDV and Half Sigma have been writing about the link between Jews and vegetarianism. That made me wonder if: 1) Jews as a group are more sympathetic toward not eating meat; and 2) if so, is it simply a reflection of their liberalism. Back when I was a liberal in college, I was a vegetarian for two years. (It sucked.)

Following Half Sigma, let's look a the GSS question, "And how often do you refuse to eat meat for moral or environmental reasons?" (This is a weird question. Most people avoid meat for putative health reasons.)

I reverse-scored the answers and regressed the numbers on whether someone is Jewish or not (sample size = 2,882). The standardized regression coefficient is .049 (p < .01) which means that Jews refuse to eat meat more often than others. Next, I looked to see if, among Jews, the tendency is related to religious commitment. The beta is .165 which suggests more abstaining with more religious service attendance (but the relationship falls short of statistical significance, probably because of the small sample--only 70 people) .

Finally, I added a measure of political orientation as a control to the model with the full sample.

Standardized Regression Coefficients

Jewish .041*
Conservatism -.097*

*statistically significant


Including political orientation does little to reduce the link between being Jewish and favoring vegetarianism, so the correlation is not just a reflection of liberalism; it appears to be a cultural difference.

By the way, I despise having to reassure people (I HATED Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate because he defended himself every other sentence) but I don't blame Jews collectively for anything, not even for Howie Mandel.

Another by the way--I really can't be too opposed to vegetarianism as an Orthodox Christian. I'm supposed to abstain from meat and dairy every Wednesday and Friday, and during fast periods like Lent. (I suppose I could blame the Jew Jesus for fasting 40 days.)

I estimated OLS models for Big Five personality traits with self-esteem and whether or not you are Jewish as predictors (sample size = 3,915--94 Jews):

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Extraversion
Jewish .03*
Self-esteem .40*

Negative emotionality
Jewish .04*
Self-esteem -.51*

Agreeableness
Jewish .02
Self-esteem .17*

Conscientiousness
Jewish .01
Self-esteem .37*

Openness to experience
Jewish .03*
Self-esteem .39*

Controlling for self-esteem, Jews are significantly more extraverted, negatively emotional, and open to experience. They are not more conscientious or disagreeable (as I thought they would be).

By the way, Jews do not differ from others in self-esteem.

Using GSS data, I showed that religious Christians like Jews more than their irreligious counterparts.  Next, I want to see how religiosity is related to warmth toward Muslims. Here are the correlations:

Pearson correlations

White Protestants -.05
White Catholics -.03
Jews -.86 (n = 8)
Black Protestants -.13

Religiosity is either unrelated to liking Muslims, or it predicts dislike.


Means 

White Protestants 45.7
White Catholics 51.5
Jews 21.9
Black Protesants 52.7

Not surprisingly, Muslims get lower warmth scores than other groups, especially from Jews.

As a follow-up to the last post, I wondered what the relationship is between religiosity and warmth toward Christians among Jews.

Pearson correlations (sample size = 83)

Religious attendance-warmth toward Catholics .05
Religious attendance-warmth toward Protestants .02

While more religious Christians tend to like Jews more, religiosity among Jews does not predict liking Christians.

While we're at it, let's look at means among Jews:

Mean warmth

Protestants 60.1
Catholics 61.9

The mean for white Protestants toward Jews is 61.9; it's 65.4 for white Catholics. So Christian-Jewish warmth is similar in both directions.

The source of antisemitism is Christianity, right? Just look at medieval Europe.

GSS respondents were asked on a scale of 0 to 100 how warmly do they they feel toward Jews. I correlated this measure with frequency of church attendance for various race-religion combinations:


Pearson correlations

White Protestants .12
White Catholics .17
White Christians .23
White Others .20
Black Protestants .14
Black Catholics -.20
Mexican Catholics .10 

Greater religiosity is associated with greater warmth. Another approach is to compare means:

Mean warmth toward Jews

White Protestants 61.9
White Catholics 65.4
White Christians 57.5
White Others 53.6
Black Protestants 60.4
Black Catholics 57.1
Whites--no religion 51.2
Blacks--no religion 46.0
Other race--no religion 50.0
Mexican Catholics 55.1

Same story. The fact is that irreligiosity predicts antisemitism. It ain't the 12th century.

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.   

The World Values Survey asked people all around the world the following question: "On this list are various groups of people, could you please sort out any that you would not like to have as neighbors?" It was a long list of many religions and ethnic groups. Here are the percentages by religion who mentioned that they did not want to live next to Muslims (sample size = 102,674):


Percent mentioning Muslims

Hindu 31.8
Buddhist 28.6
Ancestral religion 25.0
Orthodox 24.1
Jain 21.6
Independent African Church 21.3
Seventh Day Adventist 21.3
Pentecostal 19.5

World 19.3

Protestant 18.8
Roman Catholic 18.0
Evangelical 17.0
Born-Again 15.9
Muslim 15.6
Jew 15.1
C&S Celestial 15.0
Other 14.9
Non-denominational 14.0
Church of Sweden 13.6
Jehovah's Witness 13.5
Independent Church 11.9
Mormon 9.9
Baptist 8.4

Do I detect a tendency for those who intereact with more Muslims to be less in favor of living by them? If so, that goes against the PC doctrine that to know the other is to love the other.

This is further confirmed by the fact that nine religions -- one of them being Jews -- like Muslims more than Muslims do. Amazing.

Jews approve of abortion more than almost any demographic group in America. Using GSS data, I calculated that 75 percent of Jewish women believe a woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason. I don't have data on the percentage of unwanted Jewish pregnancies that are terminated with abortion, but it should be higher for a group of people who don't see anything wrong with it. This might help explain why 23 percent of Jewish women ages 40 to 59 have no children (GSS data).

Our country needs all the scientifically gifted people we can get, and Jews contribute disproportionate numbers of talented people. It's a shame that almost a quarter of Jewish women fail to have even a single child.  

The World Values Survey asked participants, "To which of these geographical groups would you say you belong first of all? Locality, region, country, continent, world." I calculated the percent who answered "world" for two groups: 1) Jews in a particular country, and 2) all people in that country. Results are listed in the table. 

Jews are a little more likely than their fellow countrymen to identify as world citizens, but only in France is the difference large.   

Americans were asked on the World Values Survey: "Terrorism is everyday news. In principle, most people are against it, but there is still room for differences of opinion. Which of these two statements do you tend to agree with?  A) There may be certain circumstances where terrorism is justified.  B) Terrorism for whatever motive must always be condemned."

Seventeen percent of respondents answered A; 80 percent gave B as an answer; and three percent said neither.

Looking at people by religion, Muslim Americans were most likely to answer A--34 percent. The second-most supportive group was Jews at 32 percent. (Warning: sample sizes are small).