The once and future India
A lot of the media is writing about how India’s population is now, or will be any moment, bigger than China. The issue I always have with these narratives is India is a big country; UP has a total fertility rate of around 3, while West Bengal is closer to 1.5. I assembled data on … Continue reading The once and future India
White privilege, and how to get it
The figure above shows that Indian American women make $1.21 for every $1.00 that a white man makes. I knew this data, but the infographic was brought to my attention to illustrate that not all South Asians are privileged. Pakistani women make $0.84 and Bangladeshi women $0.69. Here’s the “problem” – 84% of “South Asians” …
Hindu philosophy was mathematical, but Hindu nationalists are innumerate
In the early 2000s, there was a lot of demographic alarmism about Islam and European societies. Pundits such as Mark Steyn were predicting Islam would take over some European nation-states by 2020 as the majority religion. For a while, I credited that sort of thing. After all, Islam is an assimilation problem in most Western …
Continue reading “Hindu philosophy was mathematical, but Hindu nationalists are innumerate”
Patterns in the Y chromosome and Holocene expansion
I’ve been looking at uniparental lineages recently. That is, direct maternal and paternal lineages. The mtDNA and Y chromosomal phylogenies. Between the late 1990s and 2000s phylogenetic reconstructions of these lineages dominated historical population genetic inference. Today with ancient DNA and genomewide SNP analysis, and now even whole-genome analysis, there isn’t nearly as much focus […]
The souls of peoples gone
Stonehenge was first erected around 3100 BC, though the timber was only replaced with stone in 2600 BC. The great monument was a product of the Late Neolithic in Britain. Ancient DNA today tells us that these people were distantly related to the modern Sardinians, and derive from a wave of farmers that radiated out […]
Population projections 50 years into the future are fantasy
There’s another Census Projection out. Yes, I understand that the character of the children born today is going to have obvious impacts on the nature of the population 50 years from now, but we really need to heed the stupidity of past projections. Here’s a piece from 1930, A Nation of Elders in the Making: […]
Religion determines politics for Asian Americans
I was at ASHG this week, so I’ve followed reactions to the election passively. But one thing I’ve seen is repeated commentary on the fact that Asian Americans have swung toward the Democrats over the past generation. The thing that pisses m…
The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…
The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…
Who shall inherit the earth?
There was a question below in regards to the high fertility of some extreme (“ultra”) religious groups, in particular Haredi Jews. The commenter correctly points out that these Jews utilize the Western welfare system to support large famil…
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 …
Identity by descent & the Völkerwanderung
Early this year I received an email from Dr. Peter Ralph, inquiring if I might discuss some interesting statistical genetic results from analyses of the POPRES data set which might have historical relevance. I’ve been excitingly waiting for the p…
People wanted more children in 2000s, but had fewer
The readers of this weblog are relatively non-fecund, at least going by reader surveys. But I was curious nonetheless about the attitudes toward number of children, and realized goals of number of children, in the General Social Survey. I decided to lo…
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…
Verbal intelligence by demographic
A few years ago I put up a post, WORDSUM & IQ & the correlation, as a “reference” post. Basically if anyone objected to using WORDSUM, a variable in the General Social Survey, then I would point to that post and observe that the cor…
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 […]
The revival of the American city?
I’ve never watched Mad Men, but I really can’t help but hear all about the show. One thing that has struck me about the change from then, ~1960, to now, ~2010, is the alignment of quantitative demographic trends with impressionistic cultural ones. The 1970s were a disaster for the old urban order. Below are the […]
How many minorities are there in the USA?
Prompted by Andrea Mitchell’s complaint that Iowa is not representative of America in racial terms the Audacious Epigone probed an American state’s typicality in terms of racial demographics, using the overall American population as a measure. One of the major issues with judging the typicality of a given state is that there is a great […]
Vocabulary score by race, ethnicity, and region
Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Modest Proposal: Alabama Whites Are Genetically Inferior to Massachusetts Whites (FOR REALZ!). The post is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it’s actually an interesting question: what’s the difference between whites in various regions of the United States? I’ve looked at this before, but I thought I’d revisit it […]