Marriage and happiness among young adults

On a show earlier this week, radio host Michael Savage asserted that young men today who delay marriage look back on their father's and grandfather's generations and think marrying and working like a dog at the bottom to support their families must have constituted a miserable existence.I've only very recently even thought about marriage as a personal possibility in the next five years (made especially acute last weekend by a bachelor party), and...

Shades of Simpson-Mazzoli

A cliched but legitimate argument made by restrictionists in opposition to any type of "comprehensive" immigration plan that purports to happily marry enforcement with amnesty is that the same false promise was made 25 years ago, when, numerically-speaking, the stakes were a lot lower. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us.Sharing that sentiment, I'd like to see HR 2164 smothered. The resolution is being pushed by Lamar Smith (R-TX)....

Inequality in intelligence distributions by political party

In the comments to the post on scientific literacy by political party, Harriet wrote:It would be interesting to see a breakdown by educational level; D's attract more lower income voters. That's enough of an impetus for me to quantify an aspect of something that probably comes as little surprise--the contemporary Democratic party is increasingly becoming the party of the bottom and the top, while the GOP solidifies the middle. Consequently, the educational...

An admonition from Captain Obvious

For the last several years, I've been using Facebook as an effortless, free archival backup for TAE. I edited the privacy settings on my notes so that I was the only one able to view them. A few months ago, I happened to notice that the privacy settings for notes had disappeared, but I asked a couple of trusted people to scour my profile to see if they were able to view them. They were not. No harm, no foul. Then a few days ago I got a message from...

Let me live here or I'll sue you!

At least it's not quite as audacious as the Mexican-led coalition of Latin American countries suing the state of Georgia for trying to enforce US immigration law that the federal government refuses to enforce:Dozens of people who were mistakenly told they had won a spot to apply for a U.S. visa through the annual visa lottery system are suing the U.S. government....Roughly 22,000 individuals were told in May they had been selected thoughthey would...

IQ by religion

In the six years I've been digging around in the GSS, and the countless times I've converted group wordsum averages into IQ estimates, I've never applied the method to get an IQ figure for Jewish respondents. The question of Jewish identity (is it religious, ethnic, ancestral, or something else?) inevitably causes some amount of measurement dissatisfaction when a broad survey like the GSS is used. Also, Jews tend to do especially well on the verbal...

Highwind

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Multicult namingways

Ed Tom Kowalsky previously commented as follows:Perhaps we could track the frequency of first names with the prefixes La, Sha, Ja, and Ty. My guess is these began appearing roughly the same time multi-culti struck. The Baby Name Wizard is a great resource for tracking the popularity of American names extending back into the late 19th Century. Name popularity is amalgamated...

Trusting for fairness

The role of trust in understanding how societies and individuals function is a fascinating topic, and one I don't feel like I coherently understand. High-trust countries function better than low-trust countries do, and they're more desirable places to live.What is a high-trust society? Trust for family members and trust for strangers are two distinct things, and may even be inversely correlated. It is the latter--trust for strangers--that is generally...

Scared of nuclear power, dummy?

Prior to the release of the 2010 GSS data set, finding questions on the perceived danger of nuclear power generation required going back as far as the early nineties. In response to a commenter, I attempted just that. Now, more contemporary responses are available, albeit still prior to the Japanese tsunami.Responses are on a 5-point scale that has been inverted from the GSS for ease of viewing. A 1 indicates the belief that the perils of nuclear...

Like riding a bike

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The region

As a fairly regular listener to NPR, I'm perpetually annoyed by the network's utter lack of testosterone present in anyone behind a microphone, Car Talk excepted. I can't quite pin down why unctuous whispering is the default mode of communication exclusively on NPR and nowhere else in the universe (like the BBC, or at TED conferences, or on other leftist media outlets like...

Logistics of disaster

As Joplin is only a two hour drive south of Kansas City, the local media have been filled with solicitations for donations of food, water, and other basic necessities to be sent to the devastated town. As a Joplin native, they certainly hit home for me.Yet when these calls for things to be gathered inevitably follow a natural disaster of this magnitude, I can't help but think...