Inductivist

In the last post, it was mentioned that high IQ people are VERY diverse in terms of income. Many are not particularly interested in pursuing lots of money. But let's look at the other end: Few people would want to be poor, so does IQ keep one out of poverty?

Using General Social Survey data, I looked to see how many people in the highest IQ category (125+) are found in the lowest 10% of income earners (sample size = 16,626). For men, it's 3.4%. So smart guys have a low rate of poverty, but not all escape it. I imagine these men have serious physical or mental health issues.

For smart women, it's 8.0%. Their rate is lower than average, but not by that much. In addition to the health issues that men might face, some intelligent woman are likely to be stay-at-home moms who don't earn much.

This graph from Pew shows that if the poverty rate is adjusted for such items as medical expenses, tax credits, and non-cash government benefits, Hispanics become the poorest large group of Americans. Over the past 45 years, we have imported a population which is now bigger and poorer than the black community. Our worst enemies could never have done this to us.

Here's more evidence that Hispanics are indeed assimilating... to black norms. More of them than ever--61 percent--believe that discrimination is a major problem for Latinos in preventing them from succeeding the U.S. It's just too tempting to put the blame on whitey.

Black finger-pointing has forced us to advertise the fact, no, you're not poor because the White Man hates you; you're poor because you lack general intelligence, probably for genetic reasons. I'd prefer it if this knowledge were implicit and, out of a desire to be considerate, we didn't have to make a big deal about it.  But our hand has been forced.  It is now clear that we are forced to speak out about Hispanic IQ as well (which averages about 90 or so).

Percent Hispanic predicts poverty better than percent black: I'm putting together Census data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000 as of 2000. Allow me to list some interesting findings. First, it turns out that percent Hispanic is positively correlated with a measure of income inequality (GINI index). And the correlation becomes stronger with percent black added in:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/inequality .39
percent black/inequality .34
percent poor minority/inequality .58

Liberals are so concerned about inequality, they created an entire discipline--sociology--devoted to its study. Somehow in their thousands of studies, sociologists failed to report that mass Latino immigration is growing our inequality problem, and immigration restrictions will make America more equal.

Next let's look at the percent poor:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/poverty .56
percent black/poverty .36
percent black-Hispanic/poverty .74


Blacks are the stereotypically poor group, yet a Hispanic presence predicts poverty even better. I don't recall the researchers telling us that a key approach to fighting poverty in America is to shut the door on Latino immigration.

Finally, let's look at the unemployment rate.


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/unemployment .57
percent black/unemployment .07
percent poor minority/unemployment .53


Once again, unemployment brings to mind young blacks hanging on the steet corner, yet the percent of the county that is black does not predict the unemployment rate. (This is the only correlation in this post that is not statistically significant at the .05 level). Having lots of Latinos around, however, is a good sign that many people are without jobs. (Perhaps some of the unemployed are native-born people who have lost jobs to immigrants).

This, of course, contradicts the liberal claim that the American economy would come to a dead halt without the heroic labors of Latino immigrants. And would I sound repetitive if I mentioned that our beloved professors have not pushed reduced immigration from the south as an important way to reduce unemployment?

More on my county data: I'm collecting data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000.

Which of these counties would you guess has the most poverty? Perhaps Hinds, Mississippi (Jackson) which has the highest concentration of blacks--65.2%? Wrong--the poorest county is Hidalgo, TX. Almost one-third of the residents (31.7%) fall under the poverty line. What could explain all that poverty, even more poverty than the Bronx (25.4%)? Could it be that 89.4% of Hidalgans are Hispanic?

Everybody's a sociologist when it comes to teen marriage: Let me follow-up on my last post with a comment on today's article in the NYT on teenage pregnancy. They took news of Palin's daughter's pregnancy as an opprtunity to remind readers how teenagers, especially girls, are doomed if they get married and have babies when they're teenagers.

What has happened to Bristol is not the best way to go, but let's use our brains for a second. First, early marriage was widespread 20 years before the divorce explosion of 1965-75. Most divorces take place in the first few years of marriage. If I get time, maybe I can look at this more closely, but I'm guessing that the divorce rate among those who married at 18 in 1950 was lower than those of people marrying at 30 nowadays. There isn't something inherent in early marriage that is conducive to divorce and failure.

Second, so many of these studies on negative outcomes assume that those who have babies as teens are in all important ways the same as those who don't. I haven't seen these studies typically control for things like IQ, talent, farsightedness, self-contol, industriousness, persistence, etc. I have read studies that have indicated that teens who have babies would have turned out poor even if they hadn't gotten pregnant.

To use a personal example, as I did in the last post. My brother got a girl pregnant when both of them were 16. He and the girl were excellent students, but their strict religious upbringing led them to have sex without confronting head-on what they were doing and what needed to be done to prevent pregnancy. (Plus, my bro was unhappy at home and irrationally thought a pregnancy might be a way out).

So the girl got pregnant. Most kids in their shoes would have gotten an abortion, but our type of people is a tad uncomfortable with slaughtering children, especially our own. Our parents and her parents pushed for adoption, but my brother and the girl told them all to go pound sand. They got married in our church 5 months before the baby was born.

Fast forward two decades. My brother has almost finished his MBA, he is the regional director over a number of large assisted-living facilities, and he makes probably three times what I make. His wife got her B.A. and was a very popular local TV news anchor for several years. Double careers were a little too much for them, so she scaled back her career a bit.

They have four beautiful children, and the oldest (the one conceived out of wedlock) has earned a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to a university where the average ACT is close to 30. He is majoring in math, and his college GPA is just about perfect.

Now, of course the sociologists would have predicted disaster for my brother and his wife. So why was the prediction wrong? Because sociologists, along with America's elites, believe that you are the product of your circumstances. If you get zapped with a baby at 17, you're done for. My bro and his wife made it because they are industrious, talented, relentless people. They would have been successful without the early marriage; they were successful with it.

If a sociologist says so, you know he can't be completely right.

Hunger in America? Americans are so fat and rich, I assume that no one ever lacks food here. That's not exactly right. According to the General Social Survey, here are the percentages of those who have been unable to purchase food they needed sometime in the past year by sex and ethnicity:


Percent unable to buy food they needed (first men, then women in parentheses)

Blacks 6.9 (9.3)
Mexicans 7.1 (8.5)
American Indians 0.0 (12.3)
Germans 5.6 (5.5)
Scotts 2.4 (8.8)

USA 3.4 (5.6)

English/Welsh 2.4 (3.4)
Italians 0.0 (5.2)
Irish 2.9 (1.4)

For most groups, this hardship hits women more than men. Many of these women are single with dependent children. Few two-parent households are this poor. These are the fruits of feminists telling us that men are not essential to the household: women's natural abilities and Papa Government can do the job.