Which way to Happy Happy Village?

Oh, so you say all you want is to just be happy? By way of ordinary least squares, here are the multiple regression coefficients for nine variables that are, in the conventional wisdom, arguably putative predictors of happiness, with the obligatory qualifier that some component of sunniness, of yet undefined magnitude, is innate. For contemporary relevance and to avoid racial...

Steady studs, dysgenic dolls

Examining eugenic and dysgenic trends is a bit of a hobby horse here. Levels of educational attainment, religiosity, alpha vs. beta, and monogamy vs. getting around are a few of the angles we've explored. Jayman recently took a thorough look at fertility trends among blacks, simpliciter style, without adding in a bunch of variables, prompting me to want to do the same...

Liberalism rankings by country

Expanding on the idea from a previous post showing that America's Religious Right is more permissive than moderate Muslims throughout the Islamic world are, I'll take a stab at sorting countries by attitudes on social issues. The formula is simple. The WVS asks a series of questions on the justifiability of several different actions and behaviors. Taking the mean responses to the queries on homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, divorce, euthanasia,...

Asians like Ice People

Half Sigma recently rehashed the familiar reasons why Asians are, as the so-called "model minority", also the inconvenient minority:Asians also make SWPL whites uncomfortable because of all of the white male/Asian female couples and the lack of mixed-race couples who run in the other direction. This brings up a lot of HBD issues that good white liberals don’t want to think about. Asians also make liberal whites uncomfortable because the existence...

Not afraid to die, just don't want to be there when it happens

++Addition++Initially, I forgot to include Italians because I was asleep at the wheel. Looking through all the GSS categories for sample sizes sufficient to include, I apparently just missed them, and though people of Italian descent are on the low end (n = 81), it's still worth including them, for suggestive reasons if nothing else. Thanks to St. Louis for pointing it out.---Commenting on an article by Daniel Smith in the NYT about the putative...

Spoke not a word, though it meant my life

On the question of justice, the contemporary Western world [or Anglosphere, anyway] is collectively more repulsed by a type I error than it is by an error of the second kind, and our judicial system is organized in a way reflecting that. The bar is set high when it comes to demonstrating a person's guilt, the consequences being that people are more likely to go unpunished for committing a crime than they are to be punished for...

Where the greenback goes

The Romney/Obama split on individual campaign contributions from current employees of Bain Capital over the last year through the end of the latest FEC reporting period is 77.7%/22.3%. Among those who listed the federal government as their employer, it's 17.0%/83.0%. It's obvious an Obama administration will do everything in its power to keep the beast from feeling any hunger pangs, let alone contemplate starving the leviathan. It's less obvious...

White guys are the worst

A fun article that appeared on the classy site Jezebel (I'm not a regular reader--Tony Horton brought the piece to my attention) does a pretty good job (for an anecdote, anyway) of illustrating the demographic hipness hierarchy that exists in contemporary America. Ben Mandelker, apparently a pretty typical SWPL guy, who is a few months into the P90X workout program, ranks,...

Consanguinity and corruption

In the wake of MG's essay on the nature and nurture of corruption, I wondered if a hard correlation between consanguinity rates and graft at the national level had been discovered. Searching for as much, the top returns I received were from MG and HBD Chick. Apparently, it hasn't been an area of academic interest, though HBD Chick is deserving of an academic spot for her intellectual curiosity about and indefatigable efforts researching and...

Education, religiosity, and fecundity

++Addition++Heartiste speculates that differences in the joy children bring people correlates inversely with intelligence, especially among men. On the one hand, there's not much in the way of a relationship between intelligence and fecundity among men, with the pronounced dysgenic trend happening primarily on the female side. Yet my own personal experience is similar to Heartiste's--around...

Our polarized politics

From the perspective of someone who is extremely pessimistic about the prospects of the US' democratic system to successfully guide it past the demographic and economic challenges on the horizon, hearing about how highly polarized politics has become--as if compromising between the Ryan and Obama budget plans like the country would have in the past is all the US needs to do...