Inductivist

According to Steve Sailer, the mass shootings committed by disciplined, skilled killers are on the rise because fewer young men fear there is a hell waiting for them. Do the data support this? 

The General Social Survey asked respondents, "Do you believe in hell?" I lumped those who answered "definitely yes" and "probably yes" into one group, and the same for the no's. Here are the results for men ages 18-29:

The percent not believing in hell bounces around a little 1991-2008, but it jumps up to 47% in 2018.  

Here is a graph of the trend in high body count mass shootings in America--the type usually committed by the kind of men Steve is talking about:

The rate accelerates around the same time we see a jump in skepticism about hell. 

Mass shootings always get people talking about the causes of violence, but these are rare acts that in some ways are atypical.  For one thing, most homicide involves a single victim, and the perp typically has a specific beef with the victim.  Mass shooters often shoot "symbolic" victims: more or less random members of a class of people they have a grievance against.

Women are usually murdered by a man they have they have a current or former relationship with. With the rise in recent years of "play choking" in pornographic scenes, I thought I could test the psychologists' hypothesis that witnessing images of acted-out violence, even play violence, can put ideas into the heads of people, especially violent-prone individuals, that increase the risk of homicide.

The CDC has a great website that allows you to generate trends on specific causes of mortality.  I was able to make a chart of the rates of homicide by choking among female victims since 1999.
























Over this period, this type of homicide has fallen from 3.3 to 1.8 deaths per 1 million females, so the pornography hypothesis is not supported.  While the rate has flattened over the past several years--the years where play choking has gotten more popular--there is no increase as the hypothesis would predict.

Urban Americans worry quite a bit about violence in their cities.  Many of these places will rack up hundreds of homicides per year.  Urban black men face a pretty decent chance of being murdered.  So it was weird to read Richard Wrangham's new book The Goodness Paradox with its central claim that humans are very peaceful.

How could he have this view?  Well, he has studied chimps for decades.  Contrary to stories told by liberal primatologists in the 1960s, it turns out that chimps are mean bastards.  If you stuffed 200 of them into Boeing 737, by the end of the flight many would be murdered.  The human homicide rate is a tiny fraction of that seen among chimpanzees.

Wrangham then sets out to develop a theory to explain why we are so slow to lose our cool and attack others.  He claims that when our ancestors developed the ability for fairly sophisticated language about 300-500k years ago, men in a group began to handle their antisocial members by plotting to murder them.  Chimps will sometimes gang up on a cantankerous alpha and take him out, but it is spontaneous.  No planning is involved.

Men gained great power over individuals by using premeditated, coalitionary aggression against not only bullies but eventually against all non-conformists.  Over evolutionary time, this selected for humans who were motivated to get along with others and who were particularly interested in pleasing tribal elders--the men who had the power to kill them if they become sufficiently annoyed.

In developing his theory, Wrangham did exactly what I expected from a PC biologist: He avoids discussions of why human groups currently vary so much in their levels of homicide.  Some educated person reading his book wants to know why his neighborhood is so much safer than the black neighborhood on the other side of town. The homicide rate in Colombia, for example, is scores of times higher than in Japan.  Why?  Wrangham is silent on this type of issue.  He makes it sound like humanity has experienced the exact same selection pressures for hundreds of thousands of years, and that we all arrive at 2019 exactly the same in terms of genetic propensity for violence.  He admits that the speed of selection probably increased in more recent millennia, but is silent about what that means.

Wrangham also fails to discuss the scholarship of Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Peter Frost which suggests that pacification of some human groups has happened over the past few thousand years. I guess I would be silent on such topics, too, if I valued my lofty perch at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

I doubt the Hispanic crime rate is similar to that of whites. Let's put aside police statistics and victim surveys because both depend on someone reporting the crime, and immigrants are notorious for failing to report crimes out of fear of authorities.  And arrest data also depend on law enforcement policies.

Criminologists understand that homicide is a good measure of serious violent crime because corpses advertise crimes loudly.

The CDC has a neat website for analyzing mortality data.  I looked at homicide rates for 2017, the most recent year available. Here are the rates per 100,000 in the specific population:

Homicide Rate
Black  23.0
American Indian  9.7
Hispanic  5.3
White  2.8
Asian  1.7

Not surprisingly, blacks are at the top with a rate that is 13 1/2 times the Asian rate.  American Indians are second with a rate that is 5.7 times that of Asians.  This reminds me of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending's hypothesis (if I remember correctly) that Native Americans never got pacified by centuries of the state weeding out the most violent.  Henry and Peter Frost published a paper three years ago that found that the English proclivity to execute criminals with abandon resulted in a country with a homicide rate that is a tiny fraction of what it was a 1,000 years ago.

Criminologists excuse black violence by blaming criminogenic urban environments. If living in a big city is the key to violence, why are rural Indians so murderous? Genes explain better than sociology.

When it comes to homicide, Hispanics resemble their racial reality: they are somewhere between American Indians and whites. Looking at Latin America, I'm pretty sure crime is a more serious problem for Hispanics than it is for whites.

Author Philip Roth provides a good example of the how the Left feels about sex.  In his novels, he celebrates infidelity.  He loves it, and says that the man who invented faithfulness should never be forgiven.

He's probably not smart enough to see it, but he who loves cheating evidently loves murder, too, because infidelity is a major cause of homicide. The case of the murderous jealous partner is only too common.

Cheating and murder are problems for all populations, but they are particular problems among blacks.  The General Social Survey asked participants, "Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?" Here are the percentages who answered yes (sample size = 20,205):

Men
Blacks  33.8
Whites  21.9
Relative risk  1.5

Women
Blacks  18.6
Whites  13.5
Relative risk 
Relative risk  1.4

So black men are 1.5 times more likely to cheat than white men; the black/white gap for women is similar.

The black homicide rate runs about 8 times that of whites, and some of this difference is due to greater infidelity among blacks. (The data here only addresses marriage, but I assume the racial difference in cheating between single blacks and whites is similar).

Do liberals secretly desire the destruction of blacks?  They've helped destroy the black family by subsidizing single motherhood, they favor abortion on demand which eliminates a much higher rate of black babies than whites, and they favor sexual deviance which encourages murder.

From this article:

Gab, the social network scrutinized following the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead, went offline as service providers suspended accounts and threatened to shut the website down. 

A message on Gab.com said the website would not be accessible for a period of time as the site shifts to a new hosting provider.  In a statement, hosting provider GoDaddy confirmed it has given Gab 24 hours to switch providers after claiming the website violated its terms of service.   

'GoDaddy investigated and discovered numerous instances of content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people,' read a statement from GoDaddy.  Medium, an online publishing tool, suspended Gab's account, which was used to release statements including one right after the synagogue attack on Saturday... 

The accused Pittsburgh shooter, Robert Bowers, appeared to have an account on Gab where he posted multiple anti-Semitic messages. 'I can't sit by an watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in,' read a post on the account right before the shooting. 

I'm a bit reluctant to help American elites, but instead of shutting down Gab, why don't you exploit it?  A wide open forum attracts all types, including lots of crazies. Give them a comfortable platform so they blab about their plans, and then intervene before they commit crimes. You really want to shut these people up so you know less about them? Our elites seem to be stupid about everything.

New from the Journal of Research in Personality:

Past research indicates that men are more physically aggressive than women, but very little research has examined mediators of this gender difference. Indeed, the only established finding to date is that one plausible mediator – namely trait anger – shows no reliable gender difference whatsoever. Drawing on sexual selection theory and social-learning theories, we predicted that revenge may mediate this gender difference even though anger does not. Three studies using both personality questionnaires (Studies 1 and 2) and objective laboratory measures of aggression (Study 3) provided support for this contention. The results provide some of the first evidence for a reliable mediator of gender difference in physical aggression.

And here their version of sexual selection theory is spelled out:

Sexual selection theory is the most prominent evolutionary explanation of gender differences in physical aggression. According to this theory, men are typically under greater evolutionary pressures to behave aggressively than women. Because women are sometimes unavailable for reproduction due to pregnancy, women are argued to be a more valuable reproductive resource for which men must compete. Men can do so by aggressively excluding other men from mating opportunities or by seeking to attract women. Evolutionary theorists have traditionally argued that men mainly seek to attract women by establishing a more dominant position in the social hierarchy.

According to Daly and Wilson, these factors have converged and made men more prone to aggressive retaliation in the face of minor provocations. In order to deter male rivals from aggression and to achieve a dominant status, men need to establish a reputation for “toughness” (i.e., that they are not vulnerable to mistreatment by others). Thus, even minor insults demand swift and forceful retaliation.

Consistent with this, crime statistics and laboratory experiments have both shown that men are more likely to respond to trivial provocations with extreme retaliation. A large proportion of murders can be attributed to men responding to minor provocations, but similar incidences are exceedingly rare among women and. Moreover, laboratory experiments show that priming status goals leads men (but not women) to be more physically aggressive in the face of minor provocations.

In this WHO study of ever-partnered women in 10 countries, Ethiopia has the highest percent ever being physically or sexually assault by a partner--71 percent. Japan has the lowest with 15 percent. The authors chalk it up to differences in economic development. I'm not so sure.

BBC News is making a big deal about the high rate of child abuse deaths in America. Michael Petit, president of Every Child Matters, gives a long list of liberal explanations for the problem. For all his expertise, he somehow forgot to mention race. According to CDC data, the deaths of 0-4 years olds per 100,000 by race for the 1999-2007 period are as follows: Asians 1.6, non-Hispanic whites 2.5, Hispanics 3.2, American Indians 6.6, and blacks 8.3.

Petit, I'm sure, is privately aware of the racial differences, but he might not know about regional differences among non-Hispanic whites:

New England 1.3
Mid-Atlantic 1.7
Pacific 2.0
S. Atlantic 2.5
West North Central 2.6
East North Central 2.8
East South Central 3.0
Mountain 3.1
West South Central 3.1


Coastal whites are less violent.

The high rate of violence by blacks is commonly explained with the fact that African Americans are poorer than whites. Ordinary folks don't think about it any more deeply than that. They never ask, for example, why blacks are poor. They never ask, is there some common denominator that makes them poor and violent.  Or they never ask, why a lack of resources would make a person assault somebody. A quick glance at the statistics reveals that people rarely kill each other for money. 

This superficial level of thinking is found even among professional sociologists and criminologists. I once told a sociologist that, according to Marvin Wolfgang's famous study of Philadelphia crime, middle-income blacks were more violent than low-income whites. The guy was completely discombobulated. He asked me, how do we explain it and said sarcastically, "Is it the amount of melanin in the skin?" I told him that I didn't really know (I didn't at the time).    

The ironic fact is that everyone thinks poverty explains black violence, but there are few studies that actually assess the hypothesis.  In 2010, if there is a big hole in the research literature, it is not an accident.

We can take a step to plug that hole by looking at Add Health data. Based on Wolfgang's study, I'm confident enough to predict that the violence of high-status blacks is at least as high as that of low-status whites.  There is no perfect measure of social class, but I will use mother's education. "Low-status" is having a mother who, at most, finished high school or got her GED. "High status" is some college all the way up to grad school. Most of the black sample has mothers with at least a 4-year degree. (By the way, this analysis showed me that ADD Health selected for high-end blacks, so the overall black-white difference in violence in the real world is surely larger than that indicated by Add Health data). Here are the percentages of teenagers who admit to committing the act at least once in the past year:

The authors found that college students could look at photos of sex offenders for only two seconds and then predict whether the person was a violent or non-violent offender. 

Analysis revealed that students were focusing on signs of testosterone and masculinity (e.g., heavy brows, apparent physical strength, youth). 

Women were more likely than men to perceive the the offenders to be violent. The authors concluded that results support the view that humans have evolved the ability to quickly size up the physical threat of another person because heavy costs would accompany the inability to do so, and that women would be particularly likely to perceive a man as a physical threat because of the risk of sexual violence. 

These stereotypes find their way into fiction all the time. Marv in Sin City (shown above), played by Mickey Rourke, might be a good example from the past few years. Someone who looks like Marv might actually be a pussycat, but I'm not going to call him an asshole to his face.  


UPDATE: Two other points: 1) Non-violent sex offenders are typically depicted as small, weak weasels. Think of the pedophile played by Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children. 2) The study deliberately avoids race, stating that research indicates a bias against photos of non-whites. But the study's findings can easily be used to explain the fear that people feel toward blacks. African Americans are perceived as having higher levels of testosterone as indicated by physical traits. Size and apparent physical strength; hard muscle tone; narrow hips and broad shoulders; long limbs--all are masculine characteristics.

John Manning in The Finger Book also claims that dark skin is a sign of testosterone. Men are darker than women, and he presents the case that abundant melanosomes and melanin inhibit the invasion of bacteria and fungi through the outer surface of the skin and are found in people whose immune systems are weakened by high levels of testosterone. 

Nurturists would explain the perceived dangerousness of blacks as a myth taught to kids by prejudiced parents and peers. But Asians are racial outsiders: why don't whites have any fear of them? Why are blacks afraid of blacks? Why are race-virgin immigrants--white or Asian--afraid of blacks?    

From American Renaissance:

LSU Sociology Professor Edward Shihadeh and Ph.D. candidate Raymond Barranco have published a study titled “Latino Employment and Black Violence: The Unintended Consequence of U.S. Immigration Policy,” in the March 2010 issue of Social Forces, the field’s preeminent journal.

The study confirms that Latino immigration and dominance of low skill jobs have displaced blacks from low-skill labor markets, which in turn led to more violence in urban black communities. According to their analysis, this is traceable to U.S. immigration policies over the last several decades.

Before the United States/Mexico border was militarized, Latino immigration was a two-way trip; immigrants, mainly from Central America, moved to the United States temporarily to finance a project in their home country. But in response to U.S. public pressure, border security was intensified. Tall fences were built, cameras installed and the border was patrolled relentlessly by well-armed guards. As a result, Latino immigrants in the United States stopped returning home for fear that they could not repeat the trip. This increased the number of Latino workers in the United States competing for jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and construction. Blacks lost that competition in many cities, and where that occurred, murder rates went up.

“{snip} We do not advocate restricting the flow of Latino migrants in either direction. This is what triggered the flow of events in the first place. There is no reason to deprive this country of the rich contributions made by Latinos. Our study simply describes how immigration policy opened a new chapter in the history of the U.S. labor market and how that harmed black communities,” [said Shihadeh].

Blacks and the subculture of violence:  In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell argues that the South developed a violent culture because of Scotch Irish immgrants.  Blacks supposedly absorbed these values from their white neighbors and still have them, regardless of what region of the country they now live in. Among the values is a touchiness on matters of honor and manhood. If someone offends you, you don't walk away. You teach him a lesson. Sowell points to culture and thus avoids any biological explanations for the higher rate of violence among blacks.

General Social Survey data, however, don't back up his assertion.  Of course, it would be nice if respondents were asked a long list of questions about the appropriate use of violence, but we have at least one question: is it okay--yes or no--for a man to hit a drunk who bumped into his wife on the street?

A violent orientation among white Southerners should be most concentrated among the lower classes, and I would expect attitudes to differ from American norms most in the East South Central (ESC) part of the South which includes Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.  15.5% of these people agree with the statement about hitting a drunk man.  It's 18.9% if only men are included.

How does that compare to low-status blacks who live anywhere in the country? Only 7.9% of them said yes to the question, and the number for males is only 9.1%.  The number for all blacks does not differ significantly from the estimate for all Americans: 8.6%. By contrast, low-status whites from the ESC region are significantly more likely (at the 95% confidence level) to hold this violent attitude when compared to other Americans or to poor blacks.

So, it's possible that white Southerners are more prone to assault than Northerners because of their views toward the appropriate use of violence, but how do we explain the high level of violence among blacks? Liberal researchers will instruct us that a racist society makes blacks angry, and anger leads people to vent physically.  A biological explanation is an obvious possibility--I mean, racist whites, and the Scotch Irish for that matter, don't live everywhere blacks do around the globe--but it hasn't been investigated much because it might be true.        

Attack an insider, kill an outsider? I've read that animals as a rule exhibit non-lethal violence toward members of the in-group and lethal violence toward outsiders, and I wondered if it might apply to human races.

I found rates of within- and cross-race aggravated assaults and homicides for 2006 and looked to see if assaults turn into murders more frequently if the attacks are cross-race. Here are the ratios of aggravated assaults to homicides for different combinations:


Ratio of aggravated assaults to homicides

White-on-white 172.0
Black-on-black 55.1
White-on-black 148.5
Black-on-white 108.7

Just to make sure you're interpreting those numbers right, using the first one, read it as, "For whites attacking whites, you'll have 172 aggravated assaults for every murder." So the lower the number, the more likely someone ends up dead.

So, you can see that black-on-black violence is the deadliest; white-on-white the least so. The second deadliest is black on white, so the chance of death is highest when the perpetrator is black.

Whites are somewhat more likely to kill a black victim than a white one, so this is consistent with the hypothesis, but a black attacker is much more likely to finish off the victim if he is also black--a non-supportive finding.

I should mention the important fact that a great deal of serious violence is mutual combat. The story here seems to be that black participants in violence--whether they end up the victim or the aggressor--are more intensely violent than whites. Have two whites go at it, and you get few deaths. Insert a black as the victim or especially the offender, you get more deaths. Insert two blacks, and the chance of murder jumps even higher.

Does this seem right, or are there other ideas?

Moron density and violence: I haven't been particularly impressed with IQ's power to explain criminality. The effect always seems to be very modest.

One problem is that criminologists never examine macrolevel relationships. I cannot recall a single published study that assesses the relationship across geographical units. (I'm sure they are out there somewhere--I just haven't seen one).

I used Audacious' estimates of state-level IQs and correlated this with homicide rates averaged over the years 1999-2005. (Homicide is a rare event--criminologists routinely aggregate over several years).

The size of the Pearson correlation? It's -.80!!! That means that 64% of state-level homicide rates is explained by average differences in IQ. Even percent black explains only half the variance.

For example, New Hampshire has a mean IQ of 101, and 0.6 homicides per 100k population per year. By contrast, Louisiana's IQ is 95, and the homicide rate is 9.7.

So why are these results so much stronger than those found in individual-level studies? Well, macrolevel studies typically reduce measurement error, thus strengthening the correlation. In addition, studies typically focus on minor offenses, like delinquency, and it might be that IQ plays a more important role in serious crime.

According to research, most violence is mutual combat, so it won't usually happen unless two idiots cross paths. The higher the density of morons, the more frequent the occasions where conflict escalates into violence. Plus, a community of dolts might generate of culture of aggressiveness which would exacerbate the problem.

Unfortunately, mass immigration from low IQ countries is increasing moron density, so in the long run we can expect a more criminal society.

More on Native Alaskan crime: In an earlier post, I provided evidence that Native Alaskans are much more criminal than their white counterparts who, in turn, have crime rates somewhat higher than whites in the lower 48 states. American Indians (AIs), by contrast, are not arrested much more often than whites.

Some readers suggested that native Alaskans are not more criminally prone than AIs; rather, many crimes committed by AIs do not result in an arrest because the law is underenforced on reservations.

The General Social Survey asked thousands of Americans if they have ever been threatened or shot at with a gun. I define as American Indian those people who say their primary ethnicity is Indian and that their race is non-white (in order to eliminate whites who say their main ethnicity is AI). Here the percentages:


Percent having ever been threatened or shot at with a gun

American Indians 18.1
Whites 18.7
Blacks 25.2

I'm assuming that most attacks are intra-racial. (The white offense rate is probably lower since the National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that a substantial share of attacks on whites are perpetrated by blacks. This should not be the case with the more rural and segregated American Indians.) These numbers indicate that gun violence is not higher--or not much higher--among AIs than among whites. This pattern is consistent with arrest statistics.

So native Alaskans still look much more violent than Native Americans.

The General Social Survey asked 6,599 men if they had ever been threatened with a gun or shot at. Here are the percentages by ethnic group:


Percent ever threatened with a gun or shot at

American Indian 44.9
Mexican 42.3
Blacks 42.1
French 35.9
Protestant Irish 34.8
Czech 33.3
Russian 32.4
German 32.0
Jewish 31.7

USA 31.5

Catholic Irish 31.4
Scottish 30.0
English/Welsh 29.2
Austrian 27.5
Danish 26.9
Swedish 26.3
Polish 26.0
Italian 24.3
French Canadian 22.7
Dutch 15.5
Asian 12.5

My first reaction is the frequency of this type of victimization: almost 1/3 of all males. I must hang out with the right kind of people because this has never happened to me or anyone I know. (The numbers might be inflated a bit by reports of military experiences). Seconds, NAMs (non-Asian Minorities) inhabit the most violent worlds. Amerindians face a higher risk of victimization than either blacks or Mex-Ams. Whites are in the middle, and Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino) are not surpisingly at the bottom. These numbers suggest that being a victim is corrrelated with being a perpetrator: assaulted one day, assaulting the next. Even though Asians tend to be urban, they have very low rates of victimization. Why? Well, they don't provoke others, and much of the time they are moving among other Asians--a group whose members rarely point guns at people.

College girls are routinely instructed by social science professors that wife beating is a very common phenomenon, and when it comes to violence, the home is one of the most dangerous places for a woman. The not-so-subtle message is that a woman should think twice before getting married. The only problem with this advice is that, compared to the never-married, married females face only a fraction of the risk of being assaulted. According to the General Social Survey, 5 percent of never-married women were attacked in the past year. That's 5 times the risk that married women have. Marriage does not lead to violence; it protects against it. You know this if you follow common sense. You don't know this if you listen to your sociology professor.

Are homosexuals attacked more than straights? Stories like that of Matthew Shepard are used to teach Americans that homophobia is rampant, and that it is often manifested in hate crimes. Homosexuals are attacked, we are told, because they are hated. If this is true, gay men and lesbians should have higher rates of being attacked than straights, since they face more than the usual number of reasons for being victims of violence. So what does the General Social Survey say?


Percent ever punched or beaten up

Straight men 56.0
Gay men 47.1
Staight women 27.4
Gay women 57.9

Now, you might look at the numbers for lesbians and conclude that homophobia is rampant since their rates of violent victimization are more than double that of straight women. But such an interpretation doesn't hold up, because if it were true, gay men would be assaulted more than straight guys.

This pattern of numbers is consistent with the fact that most violence is mutual combat that starts with verbal aggression and escalates. Victims often provoke violence, and straight women and gay men are less aggressive than their counterparts. If homosexuals are attacked, chances are it is motivated by the same kinds of things that cause attacks against heterosexuals: you tell some guy that his girlfriend is an ugly slut, and you get punched in the face.

According to the GSS, Mex-Ams have the highest rate of assault: In previous posts that relied on survey data, I showed that Mexican-Americans have high rates of street crime, even higher than blacks in some respects. (For example, the risk of gang membership is probably higher). Well, some folks don't believe me, so let's come at it another way. Research has documented that most criminal violence is intra-ethnic, so victim rates parallel those of assailants. General Social Survey respondents were asked if they have been the victim of a personal assault in the past year. I limited the analysis to groups with a least 50 sampled people. Here are the percent who answered yes:


Percent assaulted in the past year

Mexican 5.6
Blacks 4.8
Italian 4.6
German 3.3
American Indian 3.3

USA 2.7

Irish 2.1
Scots 1.3
English/Welsh 0.7

These numbers square with with my other posts: rates are highest among Mex-Ams and blacks, above average for Italians (and southern Europeans in general), and low for those from northern Europe. These numbers also square with global patterns. Latin America has, overall, high rates of violent crime.

Keep in mind that some of the white numbers might be inflated because other data indicate that black-on-white attacks are more likely than the reverse.