Counting blue gods

Like children often do, I have many questions. To the GSS I say, "Tell me all your thoughts on God". The following graphs show the percentage distributions for four categories of theistic belief across a host of usual-suspect variables. For contemporary relevance, all results are from 2000 onward. By race:By sex: By political orientation:By partisan affiliation:By community...

Racial composition of smokers of top cigarette brands in the US

Journey into my head for a moment to take a gander at the cigarette brand stereotypes I hold. To the extent that SWPLs still smoke cigarettes, they smoke Camels, especially Turkish blends. Blacks love menthol, and Newport is the premier menthol brand (Kool isn't the Pepsi to Newport's Coke, it's the 7 Up). Hispanics, especially the short, brown ones who know less English than...

Opposition to premarital sex over time

A few years ago, I looked at trends in US public opinion on seven major social issues and came to the conclusion that, with the exception of same-sex marriage, traditionalists are doing a decent job of holding the line (see Dan's comments for a more finely grained, contemporary discussion of as much). Levels of support for abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action,...

Radiohead vs Dave Matthews Band

My brother is a junior in college, at the age when passion naturally flows into debates about which band is the greatest ever, speculations on eschatology, and the like. He's a connoisseur of contemporary music, and puts Radiohead at the top of the pile. I have been since adolescence and remain today a dmb votary, so when he baited me by asserting that Radiohead is the better band, I bit. I asked, "Who's going to be remembered a generation...

Baby-making among non-whites by political orientation over time

Marshaling evidence from the GSS, Jayman has thoughtfully and diligently looked at white fertility rates by political orientation over time. The tendency for conservatives to be more fecund than liberals extends at least as far back as the cohort of people born in the 1920s, and it has become more pronounced since then. Jayman argues this presages a future in which whites...

Regular church attendance rates by party over time

Razib's informative post relating Asian-American religious affiliation to electoral behavior spurred me to take a look at the relationship between regular church attendance and partisan affiliation among self-identified Christians in the US over the last several decades. My impression was that the difference in attendance rates by party have become starker over time, Jimmy...

The service economy

I remember hearing in junior high and high school a fair amount about how the US had become a "service economy" and that the provision of services had replaced the provision of goods as the marker of a country's affluence; in college, I recall a handful of passing references being made; contemporaneously, I can't think of a time in the last five years that I've heard...

In government we trust?

Just in time for the bipartisan, full-court amnesty press, Pew provides some insight into why our political class is so eager to elect a new people. The research center surveyed people in the US on the levels of trust they have in the federal government.Guess which group was the most likely to say that they can "trust the government in Washington to do what is right". This...

The windy city is to die for

Reading through the comments at Randall Parker's Parapundit, I see the proprietor himself musing on murder, specifically Illinois' high rate of unsolved homicides:I would have expected the rest of Illinois (55.4%) to dilute the state-level effects of Chicago. But no.In 2009, the most recent year for which I've gathered detailed homicide data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, the entire state of Illinois logged 477 non-negligent murders....

IQ and homicide

The inverse correlation between mean white IQ (as estimated by NAEP scores) and the white homicide offender rate at the state level in the US is a statistically significant .67 (p = 0).A few technical notes: Florida is excluded for lack of adequate FBI uniform crime reporting data. "White" includes Hispanics who racially identify as white. To compute the total white NAEP scores for each state, I took NAEP results for 8th graders from 2005 and then...