Inductivist

Which region is the most corrupt? The Blagojevich scandal has reminded us how corrupt Chicago politics is, but is it a problem endemic to the region?

The General Social Survey asked 1,513 people, "In the last five years, how often have you or a member of your immediate family come across a public official who hinted they wanted, or asked for, a bribe or favour in return for a service?" Answers ranged from "never" (1) to "very often" (5). Here are the means by region:


Corruption mean score

West South Central 1.31
East South Central 1.29
New England 1.26
Mountain 1.23
Middle Atlantic 1.21

USA 1.19

South Atlantic 1.16
Pacific 1.16
East North Central 1.16
West North Central 1.10

SD 0.59

First, 87% of respondents answered "never" (number not shown) which backs up the idea that the U.S. is a low-corruption country.

You can see that the Midwest, especially the western half, has the lowest levels of corruption. States from Texas and Oklahoma to Kentucky and Alabama have the biggest problem, and yes, New Orleans immediately came to mind. The difference between the best and worst regions is a third of a standard deviation.

These numbers match up with this USA Today corruption conviction map to some extent, but the conviction data show the Dakotas to be corrupt.

The state-by-state map, of course, gives a more detailed picture, but I trust survey data more since convictions depend on many factors and thus are a more indirect measure of corrupt behavior.

There's the stereotype of the "old boys network" in the South, but I've heard that a lot of those little Mexican towns in Texas are notoriously corrupt.

Let's look at America's scIQ: In 2006 the General Social Survey asked 437 respondents eleven basic science questions. The first one, for example, was whether the earth's center is hot. I gave each person one point for answering a question correctly, and then summed the scores. My next step was to convert these totals so they resemble IQ scores. I set the white mean at 100, and the standard deviation at 15. Here are some averages:


ScIQ mean scores

Whites 100.0
Blacks 80.3
Hispanics 90.0

Males 99.2
Females 94.9

Less than high school 82.4
High school 94.2
Junior College 96.8
Bachelor 101.2
Graduate 103.1

Protestant 94.1
Catholic 98.7
Jewish 109.3
None 102.8

Never attends church 101.1
Attends more than once a week 87.4

New England 101.4
Middle Atlantic 98.0
East North Central 96.8
West North Central 103.6
South Atlantic 92.8
East South Central 95.7
West South Central 94.3
Mountain 101.8
Pacific 100.9


Interesting stuff. Blacks are well over one standard deviation below whites. This doesn't quite square with all the black doctors and scientists we see on TV. Women are about one-third of a SD below men--score one for Larry Summers.

Educational degree is no surprise; neither is the high Jewish mean. Anyone who completes high school should have been exposed to the information needed to answer the questions correctly. Many of those who finished high school and even attended college missed some of the questions, indicating that people are not understanding or retaining the information.

ScIQ differentiates churchgoers from non-attenders better than IQ does. I calculated Pearson correlations between scIQ and church attendance, and then the latter with IQ: the estimates are -.26 and -.08, respectively. Scientifically-minded people are less likely to go to church than people who are smart in a more general way, which supports the notion that there is intellectual friction between science and religion. By the way, scIQ correlates with IQ at .46.

It is also interesting that the West North Central region (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota) is at the top of the scIQ list, considering that New England tops the IQ list based on GSS data. Is it all the nerdy white folks who live in those parts? The uncool Mountain States are not far behind.

The South is the most pro-military region of the country, right? Wrong. The General Social Survey asked 1,453 people the following question: "There are different opinions as to what it takes to be a good citizen. As far as you are concerned personally on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is not at all important and 7 is very important, how important is it to be willing to serve in the military at a time of need?" I calculated the means for each of the nine regions of the country, and listed them below:


Mean pro-military score

Mountain 5.96
East South Central 5.80
South Atlantic 5.50
West South Central 5.48
West North Central 5.48

USA 5.45

East North Central 5.43
Pacific 5.27
Middle Atlantic 5.21
New England 5.15


Yep, it's the Mountain states--a part of the country I really like, and not just for the mountains.

Now, maybe you're smart and are thinking, "Well yeah, the South has a lot of blacks who, as a group, are not so pro-military." Nice try, Pointdexter--here's the list with blacks omitted:


Mean pro-military score--whites

Mountain 5.95
West South Central 5.92
East South Central 5.86
South Atlantic 5.79

All whites 5.62

East North Central 5.53
West North Central 5.50
Middle Atlantic 5.42
Pacific 5.36
New England 5.12


Removing blacks did increase the overall mean, and it moved regions up that have substantial numbers of blacks, but folks in the Intermountain West are still more pro-military than white Southerners.

As a side note, the regional pattern suggests that political orientation has a lot to do with attitude toward serving. Of those who said it is very important to serve in a time of need, 65% voted for Bush in 2000, and only 34% went for Gore. By contrast, if the answer was not important at all, 80% voted for Gore and 20% went for Bush.

These numbers support the contention that, compared to conservatives, liberals are allergic to military service.

Black and white IQs are moderately correlated across regions: General Social Survey (GSS) data show that mean IQ increases for whites in America as we move north. The same is true for blacks: the lowest average is in the East South Central region (ESC), while the highest is West North Central (WNC). I wanted to look at the relationship more closely, so I calculated the Pearson correlation for black and white mean IQs across the nine GSS divisions. It turned out to be .473. The correlation is lowered by the fact that, while whites in the Intermountain West are smarter than average, for some reason blacks are not.

Could it be that smarter southern blacks migrated to the west coast (blacks are above average there) while their duller counterparts got no farther than service jobs in Nevada? (I doubt that blacks are more than 1 or 2 percent, except for places like Vegas and Phoenix).

So how do we explain the moderately strong relationship between black and white IQs? Is there some kind of environmental factor that lowers intelligence in the south? If so, what would it be? (I'm sure Agnostic could help us out here). Or is it migration--more ambitious blacks and whites heading north to pursue better opportunities? (But how many low IQ blacks have been attracted to northern states with generous welfare programs?)

The differences are by no means trivial. The New England/ESC gap for whites is 8 points--more than half a standard deviation. For blacks, the IQ difference between the WNC and ESC regions is also about 8 points. The gap is so wide, ESC whites surpass WNC blacks by only 1 IQ point. (Keep in mind that the IQ test is based on vocabulary, and the GSS overall black-white gap for this kind of test is only 10 IQ points.)

The least intelligent region in America: In an earlier post, I used the General Social Survey (GSS) to show that mean IQ is lowest (94.2) in the East South Central Division, which includes Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Now, part of the reason for the low average is that a large number of blacks live in the region: 22% of the total population, according to the GSS. In the table shown below, the black mean in the region is 87.5, almost 10 points lower than for whites. But the white IQ is also below-average (96.1), so the question arises whether this low mean is due to smart people leaving for higher-opportunity regions. Here are the numbers:


Mean IQ--East South Central Division

Total 94.2
White 96.1
Black 87.5
Other 99.4

Whites
Stayers 91.2
Leavers 99.6
Comers 101.4

Blacks
Stayers 87.4
Leavers 89.2
Comers 87.4

It doesn't surprise me that whites who move out are smarter than the stayers, but it is a bit of a surprise that whites who have moved into that part of the country are just as smart as the leavers (in fact a bit smarter) and are almost as numerous (14.1% of the total regional population versus 16.6%). So, basically the leavers and the comers cancel each other out in terms of IQ. Those who move out lower the IQ, only to have it raised to the previous level by those moving in. This, by the way, is the same thing I saw when I looked at New England in the earlier post.

The pattern for blacks is also a surprise. Stayers are about as smart as leavers or comers. So blacks, as a group, don't appear to move because their brains would profit them more in another region.