The sex gap

I was recently reading Sexual Behavior in the United States: Results from a National Probability Sample of Men and Women Ages 14–94. At N ~ 6,000 it’s a large sample of American sexual behavior around 2010. There was one descriptive result which I thought was interesting, though not surprising. Before the age of 25 it [...]

American Born or Raised Indian American outmarriage rates don’t change

In the early-to-mid 2000s I had a discussion with friends who were involved in the Sepia Mutiny blog about the trends for outmarriage rates in the Indian American community. Now that we have Census 2010 data we can compare. US … Continue reading →

American Born or Raised Indian American outmarriage rates don’t change

Are the Republicans the socially conservative party?

Charles Murray ruminates on why Asian Americans are not Republicans. Many of his observations are broadly consonant with my supposition that Asian American disidentification with the Republican party has to do with cultural markers (i.e., Asian Americans have become less Christian, the Republican party has become more self-consciously Christian). But Charles finishes with a curious [...]

What is the distribution of offspring per individual?

A commenter below notes:
Also, in modern society, doesn’t just about everyone reproduce, such that not only is any particular advantage competing against other countervailing pressures as you note, but also that the “less fit” genomes are not rem…

Women wanted more children in 2000s, but had fewer

As someone with mild concerns about dysgenic (albeit, with a normative lens that high intelligence and good looks are positive heritable traits) trends, I’m quite heartened that Marissa Mayer is pregnant. Of course she’s batting well below …

Higher vocabulary ~ higher income

Prompted by a comment below I was curious as to the correlation between intelligence and income. To indicate intelligence I used the GSS’s WORDSUM variable, which has a ~0.70 correlation with IQ. For income, I used REALINC, which is indexed to 19…

Attitudes toward genetically modified crops & science

In the further interests of putting quantitative data out their instead of vague impressions, I noticed two GSS variables which might be of interest. One queries the impression of effect on the environment of genetically modified crops. The second asks…

Left vs. right in anti-science

In the comments Chad says:
The Right is not inherently anti-science. Yes there are some morons out there who glorify in their ignorance, but lets recognize them for who they are, extremist idiots. This does not describe the majority of those on the Rig…

Trust in science, 1998 vs. 2008 (no difference)

A weeks ago Robert Wright had a post up, Creationists vs. Evolutionists: An American Story. Here’s the crux:
A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology clas…

Education encourages integration?

It is sometimes fashionable to assert that higher socioeconomic status whites are the sort who will impose integration on lower socioeconomic status whites, all the while sequestering themselves away. I assumed this was a rough reflection of reality. B…

Comparing American conservative Protestants & Muslims

A few years ago a book came out, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. The title clearly was aimed to push copies, but the gist of the title has moderately wide circulation. The rough sketch is that conser…

Japan has always been secular

In an otherwise fascinating column on Japan’s peculiar demographics, Ross Douthat presents one misleading fact: Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan [...]

How income, class, religion, etc. relate to political party

Update: There was a major coding error. I’ve rerun the analysis. No qualitative change.
As is often the case a 10 minute post using the General Social Survey is getting a lot of attention. Apparently circa 1997 web interfaces are so intimidating…

The upper class is more Republican

A few months ago I listened to Frank Newport of Gallup tell Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace that upper class Americans tend to be Democrats. Ryssdal was skeptical, but Newport reiterated himself, and explained that’s just how the numbers shook out. This is important because Newport shows up every now and then to offer up numbers [...]

Vocab by ethnicity, region, and education

A questioner below was curious if vocabulary test differences by ethnic and region persist across income. There’s a problem with this. First, the INCOME variable isn’t very fine-grained (there is a catchall $30,000 or greater category). Second, it doesn’t seem to control for inflation. But, there is a variable, DEGREE, which asks the highest level of [...]

Iran is relatively liberal on social issues

We’ll be talking about Iran a lot in the near future in the United States. I doubt we’ll invade the country (thank god). But one thing I think needs to be emphasized: on social issues Iran is more “progressive” than many of our close allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia, and one of the [...]

Liberals more politically picky in mates?

In the early 2000s I recall Joel Grus telling me how reality television would become a pretty powerful exploratory tool for social science. I’m not quite sure of that now (there here’s a game-theoretic analysis of Survivor!). For example, c…

“Gross national happiness” in numbers

Bhutan famously espouses “gross national happiness”:
The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened Bhutan to the age of modernization, soon after the…

Brown man + white woman

The title was for search engine optimization! There’s a new blog, Inverted Trope, which is about “the cultural portrayal of relationships between brown men and white women.” People in such relationships naturally do notice these sorts of things. It’s human nature. But there’s one thing I do want to enter into the record: clearing up [...]

The slow decline of trust over time

Yesterday I made an admission of my lack of trust after the 2008 financial crisis. I should have been more precise and clarified that my collapse in trust has been particularly aimed at elites and “experts.” In any case, I realized that the…

The double standard

A few years ago Markos Moulitas wrote a book, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. This is in a long tradition of demonization of American Christian conservatives by the Left. All’s fair in love and war, but I think this tendency to make an analogy between American [...]

Is South Asia Next?

You can’t understand ongoing political changes in the Middle East without looking at this graph: The graph might be a little messy (and why is Wikipedia crediting Aksai Chin to Pakistan? Are they doing the same to Arunachal Pradesh?). But you get the idea. Team Islam is going through an expansive demographic moment, and the [...]

India is Poor

Shocking, right? Just check out this graph from Catherine Rampell at Economix: The poorest five percent of Americans are richer than the richest five percent of Indians. China, too, is significantly better than India for virtually all of the income distribution. These comparisons aren’t perfect, as a dollar will get you a lot further in [...]

Jains and wealth

The 2001 Indian Census found that 95% of Jains were literate, and, that over 80% were involved in non-agricultural work. But I want to see some references backing this datum up, Jains’ contribution to exchequer “astounding”: The Chennai chapter of the Jain International Trade Organisation (JITO) was inaugurated here on Sunday by Pusp Jain, MP. [...]

Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, USA, attitudes

Some responses culled from WVS. Some of these are giving extreme views with a 1 to 10 category, explaining low proportions. They’re all from wave 4, which was around the year 2000. Bangladesh India Pakistan USA Family very important 97 93 93 95 Politics very important 20 19 5 16 Work very important 92 78 [...]

Infanticide in the decadent South

One thing that often annoys me is the attitude by those from more “traditional” cultures that the West is “decadent” and “immoral.” That’s because quite often there’s a lot of “dirty laundry” in these “traditional” societies, where open discussion of “immoral” practices is frowned upon, producing the illusion that moral probity reigns. Killings of newborn [...]

What if they were nations

One of the most frustrating things about looking at national-level data sets is that they’re artificially drawn at national borders. So you have a relatively fine-grained sense of conditions in Nepal, but India is a huge aggregate mess. Or, consider Itay vs. Spain. The former is a somewhat more wealthy nation on a per capita [...]

Which nation is the most pro-natalist?

Poking around Google Data Explorer I reacquainted myself with an interesting fact: though the teen birth rate in Bangladesh is greater than that in Pakistan, the total fertility rate is far lower. The disjunction has emerged over the last generation, a…

South Asia, in perspective

Europe, the big five

The New York Times Magazine has a Europe-themed edition. I thought it would be interesting to look at the five big Western European nations in Google Data Explorer.

The generation gone by

A comparison of five nations. Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Female literacy in India in 2010 by district

More than 60% literate (the dark shade):

Demographic projections

Longtime reader (of mine) Danny says: Yeah, although it was the Muslims who wanted partition, but I believe that in the long term the it was in fact the Hindus who missed the bullet; in a couple of decades the lands of former British India will be majority Muslim. Couple of decades = 20 years. [...]

Where are the Hindus of Bangladesh?

Hindus have gone from being ~25% of the population of the set of regions which today consist of Bangladesh in 1950, to less than 10% today. Much of this can be attributed to the events leading up to, and during the, 1971 war. But a substantial proportion of the migration occurred before and after the [...]

Which brown nation is the most pious of all

The wave 4 (~2000) of the World Values Survey has a question: “Politicians who don’t believe in God are unfit for public office.” This seems a good gauge on the importance of public piety in the life of a nation. There seem to be robust cross-cultural differences on this issue. To my knowledge Jinnah was [...]

Are conservatives fatter than liberals?

The maps above juxtaposes the counties which shifted Republican in the 2008 presidential election vs. 2004 (reddish) and the age-adjusted estimated rates of obesity by county in 2007 (darker blue). One issue which I haven’t seen explored too much are the two faces of Appalachia; the Atlantic facing counties are generally healthier than the lowland [...]

Does majoring in science make a difference?

On occasion I get queries about what distinguishes people with science backgrounds from those who don’t have science backgrounds. I think an anecdote might illustrate the type of difference one is expecting. Back in undergrad I was having lunch with my lab partner, when a friend saw us and decided to chat with us as [...]

Polarization on abortion in the USA

Some comments below made me want to look at attitudes toward abortion in the USA by ideology over the decades. I know that political party polarization on social issues has played out mostly over the past 20 years or, but I assumed that this was less evident in ideology (mostly, liberal Republicans became Democrats and [...]

Internet usage by country

In my post below on the rise of China, I ran into the data on internet usage by country again. I was online regularly by the spring of 1995, and it’s amazing to think that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese on the internet now! The World Bank estimates that both China and [...]

American human geography in numbers

One of the great things about Google Data Explorer is that it allows us to explore the quantitative magnitudes of qualitative differences which we have a general sense of intuitively. I’ve focused on the international data so far, but I thought I…

Religious people have more children because they’re more traditional

Tom Rees has a fascinating post up, Why religious Austrians have more children:
On average, the more religious you are, the more kids you’ll have. It’s a widespread phenomenon, seen across pretty much all of the modern world.
The problem is, no-one really knows why this happens.
It could be something about religious beliefs. Maybe they make you [...]

A relationship in attitudes toward Global Warming & evolution?

In my post earlier in the week I mentioned the possible relationship between attitudes toward evolution and the causes and likelihood of Global Warming. I haven’t seen any survey data myself relating the two, so naturally I wanted to poke into the General Social Survey. Two variables of interest showed up, both from 2006:
1) GWSCI, [...]

Borders we forget: Saudi Arabia & Yemen

There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). [...]

Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties

Glenn Beck said some dumb, but unsurprising, things about evolution:
How many people believe in evolution in this country? I’d like to see. I mean, I don’t know why it’s unreasonable to say this. I’m not God so I don’t know how God creates. I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I [...]

Don’t be shocked by polls

You all know about the issues of weighting samples to achieve representativeness. In polling this is an art. But even if you get to representativeness, depending on the average sample sizes the polls themselves will exhibit a distribution of outcomes about a mean. Therefore with a large enough sample space of polls you can find one [...]

The “Hispanic Paradox”, and others

The New York Times has a piece out on the “Hispanic Paradox”. The paradox is that American Hispanics are longer-lived than non-Hispanic whites, despite the relatively lower socioeconomic status of Hispanics (poorer, less educated). The paradox has been around for a while, and these stories tend to emerge whenever there’s a Census or CDC data [...]

Support for bans on interracial marriage by sex

A quick follow-up to my previous post which points to the data that women tend to be more race-conscious in dating than men. There’s a variable in the GSS which asks if you support a ban on interracial marriage, RACMAR. Here’s the question itself:
Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) [...]

Mormons are average

Clark of Mormon Metaphysics says below:
My impression is that atheists, Mormons and Jews did best simply because all three groups tend to be well educated. (Someone mentioned stats adjusted for education but I couldn’t see where that was noted although maybe I just missed the obvious)
This is not an unfounded assertion, as it is “common [...]

Religious illiteracy is the norm

By now you probably know that:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions [...]

There is no prophecy

Intrade probability of the House of Representatives going to the Republicans:

Policy consequences?

Pakistan ~10 years on

Long time readers of this weblog will recognize Zachary Latif. Zachary and I have been having exchanges on various topics on and off since 2002 on the blogs. His early opinionated musings on cultural and historical topics were a definite prod for me to venture out more vigorously into this domain. As a Pakistani [...]

The socioeconomic status of white ethnics

In the post below on the prolific nature of the Kennedy clan some commenters were curious as to the general socioeconomic slant of Irish Catholics. The GSS has a variable ETHNIC which asks which nation an individual’s ancestors came from. Combine that with RELIG, and you can figure out how Irish Catholics stack up nationally. [...]

Positive change in the world

Just want to cheer you up a bit. Click play and watch how things are getting better….

Republicans, the middle class party

In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in [...]

The girls are all right, they accept human evolution

One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of [...]

Must atheists also be liberals?

That’s the topic of this week’s Point of Inquiry, hosted by Chris Mooney. Obviously the answer is no from my perspective, though some Leftist atheists and Rightists religionists would disagree strongly. That being said, from poking around American social science data sets, one can make the following assertions: – Liberals are more likely to be [...]

Daily Data Dump – Friday

23andMe research article finally published. Dr. Dan MacArthur offers his take on a new PLoS Genetics paper which was published using 23andMe’s user base. Of course there’s already information coming out of 23andMe’s user community not getting into the academic literature, see this comment below.
Group Solidarity and Survival. For what it’s worth, I think group [...]

Fundamentalists have a smaller vocabulary

In the comments below a question was asked in regards to “fundamentalist” vs. agnostic Jews. I put the quotations around fundamentalist because the term means different things in different religions. As for the idea of an agnostic Jew, remember that Jews are a nation (ethnicity) as well as a religion, and that religious belief has [...]

WORDSUM & IQ & the correlation

Every time I use the WORDSUM variable from the GSS people will complain that a score on a 10-question vocabulary test is not a good measure of intelligence. The reality is that “good” is too imprecise a term. The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 [...]

Religious people who don’t believe in god

In American society the connection between religion and belief in god(s) is very close. This of course is not a universal. In Indian and Chinese religion there isn’t a necessary connection, though as a matter of operational reality most religious adherents in India and China do seem to believe in god. In the Abrahamic tradition [...]

What rejecting science will mean

I am reading that a scholar affiliated with an evangelical theological seminary has had to resign his position because of a full-throated (see here) defense of evolutionary theory. In particular, this scholar seems to have asserted that evangelical Christianity is on the way to becoming a marginalized “cult” if it keeps rejecting scientific consensus in [...]

Numbers in lieu of wisdom

I’m a big critic of the reliance on impressionistic data often peddled by the media. In classic high school essay form generally it’s rather clear that there’s a hypothesis, and that the journalist just goes looking for individuals who will validate that hypothesis. This is why survey data is so important, though it also makes [...]

Hostility to anti-religion by demographic

A question:
do you have polling data that examines distrust of atheists in public office according to gender/race/religion (e.g. exploring whether men or women are more likely to trust an atheist president)?
I couldn’t find cross-tabs, but pollster.com does have this trendline (atheists are yellow):

But the GSS has the variable SPKATH which would probably be a [...]

The rise of the irreligious Left, the reemergence of Republican religious neutrality (?)

Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post up where I explore the differences by state between the American Religious Identification Survey in 1990 and 2008. I then compare these data to the national election results in 1988 and 2008.
Here is a chart which shows the relationship between % “No Religion” and proportion of votes for [...]

Open thread on Scott Brown, etc.

In case people want to discuss his victory tonight. I don’t have any unique insights that you can’t find elsewhere, but a quick question. Looking at the pollster.com Coakley vs. Brown polls on the front page right now I get average of 51 for Brown and 44 for Coakley. The final looks like to be [...]

Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present

As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…

One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral

Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector act…

Crime way down. Who exactly knows stuff?

Despite recession, crime keeps falling:In times of recession, property crimes, in particular, are expected to rise.They haven’t.Overall, property crimes fell by 6.1 percent, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected b…

Social science data sets

At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free.

Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…

Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)

Are over-leveraged counties seeing an increase in food stamp usage?

Since The New York Times put up the csv file which they used to generate their maps of food stamp usage, I thought I’d look at the data a little closer. In particular, look at this graphic of change in food stamp usage by county (dark equals more usage…

The white vote for Obama, by county & correlates

A friend of mine who was looking at the distributions on obesity and diabetes wondered about their political correlations. To do that and add anything new it seems that it would be best to estimate the white vote for Barack Obama in 2008 by county. Thi…

Where the fat folks live

Since it’s after Thanksgiving and I’m feeling bloated, I figure a follow up to the post on obesity and diabetes might be apropos. I want to focus on obesity. I have the raw county-by-county data, but obviously it isn’t broken down by race. But, I do ha…

Data and social networks

Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident i…

Variation in belief 1988-2008, the rise of skepticism

Below in the comments David Heddle says:
Of course there is no way, that I can see, of estimating how many of those leaving the church were self-identified Christians but who were actually in-the-closet unbelievers. Perhaps (who knows?) this is a sizable group, one that is beginning to come out of the closet as the stigma [...]

Being wrong is good

I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes [...]

Fake fact: America is not secularizing

The whole post is at Gene Expression, but the chart to the left is the core of it. 1980-2008 can to a great extent be labelled a conservative era, when the New Right set the terms of the national debate on politics and culture. And yet concomitantly there was a massive secularization process, as 1 [...]

Creationism in the Muslim world

A ScienceBlogs I have a post on Muslim Creationism data up. The paper, On being religious : patterns of religious commitment in muslim societies, has lots of information. You can download it at the link. Here are the topline results for evolution:

It isn’t a representative sample:

About 45% of American Muslims exhibit some level of belief [...]

The rise of McChurch, but not Old Time Theology

Mr. Bradlaugh’s post on the death of intellectual Protestantism, the highbrow aspect of what we normally term “Mainline Protestantism,” prompts to revisit some data which I’ve reported before, but want to reiterate.
First, the old Protestant denominations which have dominated our culture and set the terms of the debate in terms of what it means to [...]

Traditions and tribes; the genealogy of civilizations

A few weeks ago the socially conservative sociologist who blogs under the name “Inductivist” had an intriguing post up, Social conservatives and Muslims:
Social conservatives typically align themselves with the West against the Islamic world in the “clash of civilizations,” but it needs to be recognized that in some respects we have more in common with [...]

Ross Douthat is back blogging

At The New York Times, Evaluations.
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Fake fact: Catholics care about abortion more than non-Catholics

Political punditry is rife with “fake facts.” Basically, empirical assertions which are false but assumed to be true. Perhaps the readership of political journalism is stupid. Perhaps the writers of political journalism are stupid. Perhaps both. No idea. So a new “series,” which I will label “fake fact,” facts assumed to be true by the [...]

Creationism vs. Abortion, Left, Right, elites and the masses

As a follow up to the post below on Sarah Palin and Creationism, it strikes me that those on the Right & Republicans seem more divided and emotive on this issue than abortion. More specifically, libertarian and secular Rightists seem more likely to express their displeasure about Creationism than abortion. Why? A lot of it [...]

Yes, Sarah Palin is a Creationist (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign:
Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens [...]

The nation-state as idol

Rod Dreher & Daniel Larison discuss the intersection of religion and patriotism. The issue of course isn’t adherence to a higher law vs. the nation-state; even those without explicitly religious motivations can reject loyalty to a state whose actions they feel to be illegitimate. Rather, the bigger issue are multiple loyalties. Religion is an [...]

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