Inductivist

 According to the General Social Survey, 28% of American men under 30 report not having sex since they turned 18. I was baffled by that and wanted to know what predicts virginity among young men. 

Using General Social Survey data, I looked at a long list of possible predictors but found that most factors are unrelated. As you can see below, being younger predicts virginity (not surprisingly). More educated men are more likely to be virgins which cuts against the claim that high-status men are the ones who get sex. (Income and job prestige were not predictive.) 

Never going to bars and not watching an X-rated film in the past year predicted virginity. So porn doesn't look like a substitute for sex: sexually active men are more likely to watch porn. Perhaps celibate men tend to have lower levels of testosterone? Men who go to bars are more likely to have sex, so men who make an effort or who are more social are more likely to have sex. 

The GSS doesn't have many personality-type questions, so I wasn't able to look at traits like introversion or social awkwardness, but if you've got other ideas for unconventional variables, let me know. 

The liberal instinctively idealizes and sympathizes with the man at the bottom of society (although liberals are becoming so crazy these days, it's getting hard to characterize them coherently.)  By contrast, a certain brand of conservative might be tempted to idealize the successful man: Effort or perhaps good genes get a guy to the top.

Reality seems a little more complicated than that.  Brains and discipline help a person rise, but so can Machiavellianism.  I suspect that successful people tend to be a mixed bag.

Let's test the idea that there is moral virtue in successful people by looking at marital infidelity.  I divided personal income into 5 levels and created graphs for white and black men (sample sizes = 7,959 and 894):

Black Men
















White Men















Among black males, you see a spike in cheating among the highest income group.  It's a smaller increase among high-earning white males.

So successful men are a little more likely to be unfaithful. You might attribute this to the greater attractiveness that comes with money or to greater social opportunities, but whatever the case, there is no indication here that successful men are more moral than others.  It's important that we stick to reality and not ideology.