Monday, August 31, 2009

More on teachers' IQs: Here's a follow-up to the last post. I calculated mean IQ for different types of teachers. Keep in mind that samples sizes are low:

Mean IQ

High school teachers
Whites 108
Blacks 91

Women 107
Men 105

Teaches math 114
Teaches art, drama, or music 116
Teaches English 119
Teaches foreign languages 121

Elementary school teachers
1980s-90s 106
This decade 105

Kindergarten and pre-k
1980s-90s 99
This decade 102

The most striking finding is that IQs for black high school teachers are so much lower than for whites. I included specific types of high school teachers with large enough samples to calculate a mean. The numbers are all high. Elementary school teachers are not less intelligent than high school teachers, but people who teach little kids are.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

What is the typical teacher's IQ? Reader David made an interesting comment on the post about the breadwinner family that with homeschooling your child is taught by someone with a IQ higher than that of the typical teacher (not to mention having the right politics).

What is the level of intelligence of today's high school teacher? Looking at GSS data, I calculated mean IQs for the 1980s and 1990s combined (N = 107) and for this decade (N = 68) . For the early period, the average was 107. Now it's 104. I'm not impressed.

Infidelity and length of marriage

Males, N = 1,172

Females, N = 1,732

The graphs show the percent of married people who have cheated on their spouse by the number of years they have been married. With the men, prevalence gradually increases up to about 30 years, then goes down perhaps a bit. For the women, the increase is similar but at a lower level, but then there is a collapse after 30 years of marriage.

There is more than one way to interpret the data, but my guess is that: 1) infidelity for both sexes is to some extent a function of opportunity, and the chance that an tempting opportunity presents itself accumulates gradually over the course of a marriage. It's so gradual, people married 30 years are more likely to have cheated than those married 20 years. 2) The drop-off after 30 years is due to fewer unfaithful people among those married before 1960 (the question about infidelity was asked in the early nineties). The decline is not clear for men, but it's dramatic for women.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Advantages of a breadwinner family

In the last post, I showed that close to 20 percent of white moms are married homemakers. Here's a graph of whites moms of all work statuses and marital statuses over the past four decades (N = 8,209). It's not a surprise that the breadwinner family took a nosedive in the 70s, but things have stabilized pretty much since 1990. If fact, you can see that the share of moms who work full-time has dropped a bit in this decade--it's less than 50 percent.

There is a good case to be made for the breadwinner family. There are married moms who have to work out of economic necessity, but "necessity" is often stretched to ridiculous proportions. I'm surrounded by families with $50,000 SUVs and huge homes that are a pain in the ass to clean and maintain.

In my home, we live modestly and take pride in the fact that we don't give damn what the neighbors think, and my wife gets to do whatever she wants. Her staying at home makes a large family much easier to pull off. Research says a woman will be happiest if she's doing what she wants to do.

If I were a mom, I would opt for homemaking because I could do all the things that are important to me; things that a job would make difficult. First, I could have a large family much more easily and thereby increase my chances of having one child who turned out not to be a disappointment (joking). Little kids are a lot of work, but once they're in school, I'd have plenty of time for reading and blogging--something I don't have much time for with a full-time job. You might respond that employment is so meaningful and rewarding and blah, blah, blah. If that's the case for you, great, we need dedicated people.

Some might think that being a professor is the kind of job that would be at the center of one's life. It may be for some. For me it's a paycheck. Ninety percent of the students hit the mental delete key after completing my final exam. The whole process is hardly worth the time. And if I want to have success publishing, I have to play the whore and give liberal editors what they're looking for. And committee work: oh my God, what a waste of time. Endless gasbaggery. At my institution, we spend 80% of our time trying to figure out how to make students with 95 IQs understand what guys with 140 IQs are talking about.

And I imagine that my job is much better than most. Do you women really want to push paper in some little gray cubicle just so you can keep up with the Joneses? All that stress and hassle? Many look at homemaking as servant work or something, but working women have to do all the stuff at home too, plus everything at work. How did women get conned into working so hard?

Housewifery is a bit like the life of an aristocrat. I mean, how did those folks live? They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You know, socializing, playing cards, and maybe a little charity work sprinkled in. Isn't that the old sterotype of a housewife? Myself, I'd use my time to read and write, but that's the point: you don't have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it. You choose how to spend your time.

And guys, do I have to convince you that there are benefits to having your wife stay home? Yes, your standard of living will drop some, but my wife saves a lot of money too by doing the things that other people have to pay to get done. I'll confess that it gives me an old-fashioned feeling of pride to be the breadwinner, and a wife feels more for a man that she depends on.

But let's cut to the chase. Do you really want your wife spending her day working under a guy who is probably more manly than you are? Bad idea, especially if you two are having problems. Over the years, I've known several unhappy wives at school who have given me inappropriate attention. Is it some mystery that when you put vulnerable women and authoritative men together, you sometimes get sex? (Don't get me wrong, I've always behaved myself.) I know housewives can be bad too, but exposure matters, and the world of housewives is typically other women and children. Just as I like it.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Which is more common: single moms or married homemakers? In the debate concerning sex, marriage and family, I'd like to avoid the extremes of folks who say on one side that the diversification of family life is to be celebrated and those on the other side who claim that traditional family life is dead and Armageddon looms. Big themes like this have to be addressed with data in pieces, so here's my first installment.

Using General Social Survey data (N = 1,872), I calculated the percentage of all white moms ages 20-45 in this decade who have a least one child who: 1) have never been married; or 2) are married homemakers. Which group do you think is larger? Out all of these moms, 11.4% are never-marrieds; 18.9% are married homemakers. When I was a undergraduate almost 20 years ago, I read that the number was close to 20%. It hasn't changed. The American family is becoming de-institutionalized: absent social pressures and economic incentives to conform to the traditional ideal, people are pursuing personal preferences. Behavior is now reflecting individual personalities more, so the future is likely to be a real mix of arrangements, but many people, like my wife who is a homemaker, will choose a traditional (and societally constructive) lifestyle because it suits them. Of course, I'd prefer to see a traditionalist revival, but I'm not that optimistic.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Trends in attitudes toward Affirmative Action for women

Males, N = 1,490

Females, N = 1,808





Monday, August 24, 2009



Saturday, August 22, 2009

One glorious bastard: "Inglorious Basterds" left me decidedly unimpressed save for one thing: Christoph Waltz. (I lie: Tarantino is a good dialogist, and the farmhouse scene was good). It's been downhill since "Pulp Fiction." Why the nerds over at IMDb currently rate it the 106th best movie ever, I'll never know. Oh yes I do--they're nerds.

You guys get to serve as the pal I turn to as I leave the theater and say, "That kinda sucked," because I see so many movies alone. Even "Julie and Julia" was too violent for my wife cuz Amy Adams had to bone a duck. Vive la difference!
Universalism for us, tribalism for them: There seems to be a subtle way in which whites folks think they are better than blacks. Most whites feel that tribalism is for losers. Blood-love is primitive, atavistic. But then they think there is something wrong with blacks when they aren't loyal to each other.

The recent example that comes to mind is Bill O'Reilly on his show berating Al Sharpton's defense of Michael Jackson as a black icon. Bill said, how can blacks admire Jackson when he chose a white man to be the father of his kids? The implication is that it was an act of race betrayal, and betrayal of this sort is beyond the pale for anyone to be considered a black hero. A good black has to be a tribalist, according to O'Reilly. He seems to be saying that race loyalty is just what blacks do, and good for them.

I imagine he doesn't see the problem, but he simultaneously believes, I'm sure, what I described before: as a general principle, tribalists are inferior people. It sounds like a form of "the soft racism of low expectations." Racial universalism is a standard only whites can rise to. "True, many blacks are tribalists, but what can you expect from them?"
More on trust: As a follow-up to the last post, I wondered about the level of trust in Asian and Muslim countries. Based on World Values Survey data, here are the percent who say that people can generally be trusted:

Percent who say you can trust people

World 29.6

Iran 65.3
Saudi Arabia 53.0
Indonesia 51.6
Iraq 47.6
Egypt 37.9
Pakistan 27.9
Morocco 23.5
Bangladesh 22.2
Azerbaijan 20.5
Turkey 12.6
Algeria 11.2

China 55.2
Japan 42.9
Taiwan 38.2
Vietnam 41.1
India 37.9
South Korea 32.1
Philippines 7.0

Muslim countries are all over the place--they are about as diverse as the whole sample of countries. Numbers like that in Iraq surprise me, given what Steve Sailer has written about how consanguinity in Muslim countries undermines trust beyond the family.

India is the trusting one among South Asian countries. The Phillipines is the exception in Southeast Asia, and East Asia is trusting.

Thursday, August 20, 2009



Percent who say people can be trusted

Dominican Republic 26.4
Nigeria 22.1
South Africa 19.1
Zimbabwe 11.9
Tanzania 8.1
Uganda 7.6

Mexico 28.9
Chile 22.5
Argentina 20.3
Venezuela 14.8
El Salvador 14.6
Puerto Rico 12.4
Columbia 10.8
Peru 8.2

Mex-Am incomes are rising but still way behind: One way to assess an immigrant group's progress in terms of assimilation is to look at trends in income. Readers are aware that I am most concerned about Mexican immigrant since the group is large, lacking in human capital, and concentrated in one region--the Southwest. I'm currently reading Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan by UC Riverside professor Armando Navarro. It looks like another case of a white guy trying to prove he's not by adopting radical, idiotic positions. I've lived in the Southwest before but was under the mistaken belief that it belonged to the United States. These brown nationalist types have their ideology all worked out--the book is around 700 pages long--but the question is, will Mexican Americans have enough success in America to reject this kind of nonsense.

Using GSS data, let's look at mean family income in 1986 dollars across four decades. The sample doesn't capture any Warren Buffets, so I think we're okay using means:

Mean family income for Mexican Americans in 1986 dollars (N = 1,325)

Seventies 20,331
Eighties 19,512
Nineties 25,365
This decade 24,874

You might be thinking that the increase is due to larger households, but those have shrunk not grown for Mexican Americans over the past four decades. I see progress here, but let's compare these numbers to other immigrant groups:

Mean family income in 1986 dollars

Chinese Americans (N = 162)
Seventies 39,894
Eighties 41,772
Nineties 41,095
This decade 61,976

Filipino Americans (N = 171)
Seventies 31,909
Eighties 33,026
Nineties 32,300
This decade 42,593

Indian Americans (N = 145)
Seventies 38,105
Eighties 28,473
Nineties 39,072
This decade 45,661

So the good news is that Mex-Ams are improving, but the bad news is that they are lagging significantly behind other groups. The gap is not closing with other immigrants or whites (data not shown), and that's a problem.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009


Percent with red hair who were arrested

Black 10.9
White Hispanic 10.9
White 6.7
All cases 8.0

Percent with salt and pepper hair arrested

Black 7.8
Black Hispanic 8.7
White Hispanic 9.1
White 7.8
All cases 8.0


I charge the NYPD with gingerism--prejudice against redheads.
Watch out for people with green eyes: In 2006, the NYPD recorded data on over 500,000 stops in order to estimate how much of a problem officers have with racial bias. Here are the percent of stops that resulted in an arrest:

Percent of stops resulting in an arrest

Asian/Pacific Islander 4.4
Black 4.0
American Indian 3.0
Black Hispanics 4.5
White Hispanics 4.3
Whites 4.8
Other 2.6

I see zero evidence here of bias against non-whites. This, in spite of the fact Hispanics and especially blacks are much more belligerent than other groups.

But the more interesting part. For every racial category with sufficient numbers, people with green eyes are significantly more likely to be arrested. The overall arrest rate is 4.1 percent, and here are the percent with green eyes who are arrested:

Percent of people with green eyes who are arrested

Black 7.3 (N = 820)
Black Hispanic 7.2 (N = 207)
White Hispanic 7.0 (N = 1,626)
White 7.4 (3,802)
All cases 7.1 (N = 6,787)

People with green eyes, regardless of race, are 1.7 times more likely to get hauled in. Does anyone have an explanation for this?

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Skin tone and IQ among blacks: The General Social Survey recorded the skin tone of 495 black respondents from very light brown (1) to very dark brown (5). I calculated correlations between this measure and a number of variables:

Correlation with light skin tone

Wordsum .16
Years of education .17
Father's years of education .12
Mother's years of education .20
Spouse's years of education .13

All positive, but small. Then again, this is crude measure of genetic variation. Measurement error lowers the correlation. So I do take this as evidence that genes help explain the race-IQ link since whether the individual is light-skinned or dark, what white folks see is a black person. If whites determine black outcomes, there should be no correlation with skin tone.

I also wanted to see if blacks were lighter in the North as I had read before. Here are the means:

Mean lightness of skin

West North Central 3.00
East North Central 2.98
West South Central 2.83
Middle Atlantic 2.78
East South Central 2.73
Pacific 2.62
South Atlantic 2.55

Blacks in the mid-Atlantic region do not have a high average, but those from Ohio to North Dakota do.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

What is racism? Recently, One Standard Deviation wrote about how human biodiversity doesn't accept any of the premises found in the following definitions of racism:

3: hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

I would like to go in another direction. Some words come to have strong emotions attached to them. "Racist" delivers the message that you are an illegitimate person. You are outside the bounds of respectability. You should be drummed out of polite society. It's the emotional equivalent of calling someone a criminal.

That being the case, it's my position that 1(a) and the first part of 1(b) are underhanded attempts by liberals to demonize ordinary people who see the evidence differently, and especially to marginalize hereditarian researchers. Believing the races are genetically different is a belief about facts, and an incorrect belief about the facts is not illegitimate. If I believed that phlogiston causes combustion, that makes me mistaken, not evil.

And frankly, I don't even see how a belief that one race is better than another is criminal either. If someone believes that blacks are the best race, I would ask myself how they come to that conclusion and how do we determine what is best, but it's only the contempt for other races or mistreatment correlated with, but not the same as, beliefs in superiority that are destructive and wrong. If you treat me fairly, what do I care if you think my race is not as accomplished as yours? So you have a goofy belief? So what.

And in 1(b) the belief that genes determine cultural achievement is made illegitimate. You're on outlaw if you think that way. I say nonsense. It's the same as before: it's not immoral to have a mistaken belief. And what if it turned out to be true? Then it would be criminal to believe true things, by that definition.

In my view, the only things worth passing judgment on are: 1) having ill will toward a race of people; and 2) favoring the unjust treatment of them. So all the haters of any race are racists in my book. Of course, the problem is that liberals see hatred in every conceivable thing, so even this more narrow definition is commonly abused. People hate when they say they hate. If you hate and deny it, you're like everyone else and accept that hatred is wrong. You just have a problem you need to fix. To wish ill will on others and to embrace it proudly is true racism.

Exploiting another race is also unacceptable. Slavery is bad; second-class citizenship is bad. Equality under the law is what every non-racist favors. Now all this is clear. What is less clear is that the desire for special treatment and double standards by minorities is racist. Favoring one thing for my race and another for yours is racist. Racial preferences for mine and racial discrimination for yours is racist. Favoring the interests of my race over the interests of yours is racist. That being the case, racism in America today is most concentrated among non-whites. Our current president is a high-profile example of a racist. He believes the law should favor blacks over whites in college admissions and jobs. This for us, that for you. Racist.

Friday, August 14, 2009

"If you want a punch in the face, call me Gerry": I took a look at Geraldo Rivera's book HisPanic. This is a guy who was a beret-wearing radical lawyer as a young man, who says that he has worn a mustache his whole adult life to proclaim his Hispanicity, and says he will punch you in the face if you call him Gerry. (To him, being called white is like being called a faggot).

His father was Puerto Rican, his mother was Jewish, but Geraldo aggressively identifies with his Puerto Rican side, probably because it is the least white of the two. He devotes page after page to celebrating the mass movement of Latinos into the country; he instructs us on how wonderful they are; he pooh poohs concerns about assimilation; and he vilifies the Malkinses, Buchanans, Tancredos, and Dobbses in the immigration debate.

He looks with great relish to one hundred years from now when there will be more Hispanics in the country than white people. It's obvious where Geraldo's heart and loyalties lie: with his Latin brethren. His primary concern in not what is in the long-term interests of America, but in promoting the interests of his co-ethnics. More stuff and more power for my brown homies and me.

Then, then, the bastard has the nerve to demonize the anti-illegal immigration movement by charging it with white racialism. He writes that we wouldn't give a damn if Northern Europeans were illegally pouring in through the Canadian border. I can't speak for others, but I will confess that while illegality does bother me, this blog shows that my main concern is the long-term well-being of the country. If illegals made the country a better place, I probably wouldn't get too worked up about it. Many of us on this side of the debate don't worry too much about Chinese immigrants, and last time I checked, they weren't white.

But it never occurs to the Mustached One to ask the question about what is best for the country. It's clear that, just as I love my little family of a few individuals, he loves his Family of hundreds of millions, and he wants us to provide a home for his illiterate uncles, his forever poor cousins, and his gangbanging nephews. You don't turn away relatives just because they're bad.

So we're back to the perennial double standard. Geraldo is a hero for standing up for his people; Jared Taylor is Satan in a Suit for defending his. And folks like me who condemn the brown juggernaut for what it's doing to America are called Nazis. The trip through Alice in Wonderland continues....

Thursday, August 13, 2009

An open invitation: Since I've devoted so much time on this blog providing evidence that massive Hispanic immigration is not good for the country, I've wanted to take the other side, acknowledging that most social change has benefits as well as costs. The problem is that I keep coming up with pretty lame ideas. The only two important findings I've posted that are positive are that Hispanics work about as hard as the average American, and, while their mean IQ is significantly lower than whites, averages have been rising for Mexican Americans over the past couple decades.

Beyond that, my thoughts are kind of lame. For example, I've thought that more bodies means more economic and military power for America. Hispanics work and are willing to fight, so doesn't America benefit from increased size? But then I think that since these folks are not especially productive, more of them means more poverty and thus less economic might. Yes, they can fight, but aren't we too adventurous militarily already? I'm sure that more Hispanics mean more ethnic politics, which means more corruption and less government effectiveness. And more people means more traffic and pollution, and I hate all that urban stuff.

Then I think compared to Americans, Hispanic immigrants are slightly more Christian, so they will work against the trend away from Christianity. Now a Catholic church on every corner might benefit me when I'm traveling and looking for a place to attend mass, but are more Christians of Hispanic ethnicity going to improve the country? I don't see it. Plus, Christianity as practiced by minority folks seems to be very compatible with modern liberalism. Jesus just gets used to push for bigger government, anti-racism, and open borders.

Then I return to everyone else's lame arguments. I like Mexican food, and Hispanics will give you a glass of orange juice when you visit, while white folks will give you nothing.

Can anyone out there offer better arguments? And we know all the moralistic arguments like America is an immigrant nation and all that. I'm asking how America benefits. If no one can give me a good answer, then why the hell are we doing it?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

More on IQ diversity among NAMs: Reader Jokah Macpherson pointed out in the post on IQ heterogeneity that it seems to be inversely correlated with IQ. This is no accident: the coefficient of variation (CV) divides the standard deviation by the mean, and it is appropriate when comparing populations with different means. If, however, we stick with the plain old standard deviation we get:

Wordsum standard deviation

Puerto Rican 2.48
American Indian 2.25
Mexican 2.05
Polish 2.01
Scottish 1.99
Spanish 1.98
English 1.97
French 1.95
Italian 1.95
Blacks 1.94
Irish 1.94
German 1.92
Russian 1.91
Norwegian 1.87
Dutch 1.86
Swedish 1.86
Danish 1.85
Czech 1.84
Jewish 1.83

There's some shuffling around here, but the most noticeable change to me is the drop of blacks from high to middle. The CV for blacks is so high because their mean IQ is so low. But for the most part the message is the same as the last post: NAMs (non-Asian minorities) are diverse in terms of intelligence. This time, my sociology professor was right: they're not all the same. It's the Jews who are all the same. (That's a joke, son.)

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Major Intelligence Gene Tied to Myopia: A Review Jon L. Karlsson Institute of Genetics, Reykjavik, Iceland

Data are reviewed which clearly support the conclusion that axial myopia is an inherited condition following a recessive pattern of transmission. Nearsighted persons excel in terms of intelligence, several studies in developed countries having indicated a gain of 7 IQ points over the general population. It also appears that visually normal heterozygous carriers of one myopia gene enjoy brain enhancement, probably of a somewhat lower degree than occurs in homozygous myopes. It is concluded that the proposed myopia gene is primarily an intelligence factor (Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3-4, Spring-Summer 2009, pp 280-291).
Ethnicity and IQ heterogeneity: I was curious about IQ diversity among American ethnic groups. Selecting GSS groups with at least 100 respondents, I calculated the coefficient of variation, a normalized measure of dispersion, for Wordsum scores. Here are the numbers:

Coefficient of variation

Puerto Rican .491
Mexican .415
Black .381
Amerindian .359
Spain .338
Dutch .315
Polish .312
French .307
German .306
Italian .304
Irish .302
Scottish .294
English/Welsh .289
Czech .281
Swedish .280
Norwegian .280
Danish .270
Russian .264
Jewish .239

Racially mixed groups are the most IQ-diverse, and Scandinavians and Jews are the most homogeneous (many of those Russians are Jews).

With Mexican Americans especially, we should avoid talking about them like they are a monolithic group.
"He doesn't value me": Students sometimes mistake professors for therapists. A woman broke down after class the other day, telling me all her marital troubles. She told me that her husband of seven or eight years didn't value her.

This brought to mind my recent post suggesting that women are the more boring sex. I'm surprised no one commented that men are the more interesting sex to men. The way I see it, one big sex difference that poses a big challenge to relationships is that men find women to be absolutely fascinating sexually. But if a woman lacks sexual attraction, I suspect most men don't give the typical woman two thoughts.

I have always disliked this quality in myself, but I don't seem to be able to avoid psychologically placing a lower value on a woman if she is unattractive. Now, if she happens to be really funny or charming, that changes, but interesting personalities just seem much more common in men.

And much of the problem is what people like to talk about, too. More often, men are fascinated with politics or sports or some hobby that involves speed, danger, and/or violence. Now, I could talk to Judith Harris Rich about kids all day long, but most women are not analytical about kids and family.

So back to my sobbing student--I suspect her husband thought she was fascinating when his mind was on having sex with her. Now that sex has gotten old, all he hears is blah, blah, blah when she starts talking about having a family, and his mind wanders to his Harley in the garage and how it needs a good polish.

Now, I imagine that you folks know all this stuff, but what is important here is, how do we resolve the problem? My answer is, acknowledge human biodiversity. Something our culture simply does not do well.

To you wives, as Tennessee Williams wrote, men were built to love and to hunt. Not to worship your soul. Don't put men at the center of how you feel about yourself. They love you, they want to be good husbands, but there are biological limits. Lower your expectations. That phrase is a wise one in many areas of life, but it sounds so un-American or something.





Friday, August 07, 2009

Dramatic declines in whiteness among Mexican Americans

American-born Mex-Ams N = 843

Mexican immigrants, N = 466

You can see in the two GSS graphs that the percent of Mexican Americans who say they are white has fallen precipitously over the past four decades. This is true of those born here and for immigrants. In the 70s, 100% of respondents said they were white; by this decade, only 43% of U.S.-born and a third of Mexican immigrants did.

Steve Sailer has written about how recent immigrants from Mexico are more Amerindian and less white. I'm sure this explains much of what we see in these graphs. But since Mexicans have large amounts of both European and Native American ancestry, I wonder how much of the change in racial identity we see is cultural.

Many of the students I see every day could easily describe themselves as white or "other" depending on their preference. All the Mex-Ams I knew in the seventies when I was a kid looked like Mexicans to me, but they saw themselves as white racially. If my suspicion is correct that more Mex-Ams are now rejecting a white identity, that is BAD news for people like me who worry about assimilation. This is on top of Steve's point about the changing biological composition of Mexican Americans.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

To all the Oreos: This post is for all the non-white Americans who are criticized for being dark on the outside and white on the inside. Maybe you don't speak Spanish, or you think that calling women bitches and ho's is stupid? Maybe you enjoy school and are proud of your good grades? Perhaps you're ambitious, but your neighbors accuse you of thinking you're better than them?

You feel like you have no identity? All these other guys call each other bro, but you don't feel part of that? Well, you do have an identity, but you just don't know it. It's called an American. It may not be a perfect badge to wear, but you could do worse. Trust me.

What might surprise you is that you and I are in the same boat. Like you, I have no people but America. And yes, if you think about it, that makes you and me brothers. That's got to be a painful thought--you and Ron playing on the same team. We Americans may be different. We may disagree about a lot of things. You might get mad, and God knows I do, but we're brothers, and we're in this thing together.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Sex among the married



Remember this scene from "Annie Hall"?


Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often?

You hear all the time about how married couples have sex three times a week. I always thought that sounded a bit high because there is a woman involved. (In the case of "Annie Hall", three times a week sounds high with a man involved who looks like Woody Allen).

Based on more than 11,000 GSS cases, I generated the two graphs above. The top one--whites--shows that 2-3 times a week is modal for couples in their twenties, but "weekly" becomes modal by the time the couple is in their forties. and even when it's modal, it's still well under 50%. And even among twenty-somethings, there's a detectable number who have sex once a month or less.

You can see even more of those types among blacks (lower graph). But, on the other hand, 2-3 times a week is modal until married blacks are retirement age.

I also looked to see if men were giving different stories than women. For whites, the only difference was that elderly men are less willing to admit they never have sex. For blacks, more men of all ages report that they have sex four or more times a week and fewer admit to having sex once a month or less. This could be evidence for male cheating--the question asks about frequency of sex, but does not specify with one's spouse--or just exaggeration.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Owls might look smart, but night owls really are

Here's the conclusion from an interesting research article:

The Savanna–IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals, while general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values and preferences. An earlier study (Kanazawa, 2010) has shown that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be liberal and atheist, and more intelligent men (but not women) are more likely to value sexual exclusivity, than their less intelligent counterparts. In this paper, we have extended the Hypothesis to circadian rhythms.

While studies show that there is some genetic component to individuals’ circadian rhythms (Hur, 2007), heritability of these phenotypes is far from 1.0 and thus there is room for individual choices and decisions. Survey of ethnographies of traditional societies shows that routine nocturnal activities were probably rare in the ancestral environment and are thus evolutionarily novel. The Savanna–IQ Interaction Hypothesis therefore predicts that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be nocturnal than less intelligent individuals.

Our analysis of Add Health data supports the prediction derived from the Hypothesis. Net of age, sex, race, marital status, parental status, education, earnings, religion, whether one is currently a student and the number of hours worked per week, childhood IQ significantly increases nocturnal behavior in early adulthood. More intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be nocturnal adults who go to bed late and wake up late on both weekdays and weekends (Kanazawa, S., Perina, K. Why night owls are more intelligent. Personality and Individual Differences. 2009).