{"id":37501,"date":"2011-02-10T00:52:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T08:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=9815"},"modified":"2011-02-19T09:45:37","modified_gmt":"2011-02-19T17:45:37","slug":"moderates-are-dull-liberals-are-smarter-conservatives-are-middling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/10\/moderates-are-dull-liberals-are-smarter-conservatives-are-middling\/","title":{"rendered":"Moderates are dull, liberals are smarter, conservatives are middling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Long time reader <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/02\/the-academy-is-liberal-deal\/#comment-57585\">Ian<\/a> comments:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A comparison with \u201cthe American public\u201d isn\u2019t really appropriate \u2013 to even be in the pool where you\u2019re thinking about an academic career, you need to have a college degree.<b> And that population if memory serves, is far more liberal than the population at large.<\/b> More realistic would be a comparison with the population of people who have graduate degree&#8230;.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Roughly about ~20% of Americans self-identify as &#8220;liberal,&#8221; and ~40% as conservative. The <a href=\"http:\/\/sda.berkeley.edu\/cgi-bin\/hsda?harcsda+gss08nw\">General Social Survey<\/a> has a variable POLVIEWS, which asks individuals to assign themselves to a position on a political spectrum, from &#8220;extremely liberal&#8221; to &#8220;extremely conservative,&#8221; like so:<\/p>\n<p>1 = Extremely liberal<br \/>\n2 = Liberal<br \/>\n3 = Slightly liberal<br \/>\n4 = Moderate<br \/>\n5 = Slightly conservative<br \/>\n6 = Conservative<br \/>\n7 = Extremely conservative<\/p>\n<p>So in other words, <b>the higher the integer, the more conservative the individual.<\/b>  The GSS has a variable, EDUCATION, which records the highest level attained. It falls into three classes, high school, bachelor&#8217;s, and graduate degrees (I assume those who did not complete high school are omitted because they didn&#8217;t attain an education?). Additionally, it has a 10 word vocabulary test, WORDSUM, which has a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2010\/05\/wordsum-iq\/\">0.71 correlation with general &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/jQFywT1I0VY\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Long time reader Ian comments:<br \/>\nA comparison with \u201cthe American public\u201d isn\u2019t really appropriate \u2013 to even be in the pool where you\u2019re thinking about an academic career, you need to have a college degree. And that population if memory serves, &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281,451,56,827,1120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-analysis","category-general-social-survey","category-gss","category-intelligence","category-moderation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37501"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37823,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37501\/revisions\/37823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}