Most people know blacks more violent than non-blacks

The GSS is a gift that keeps on giving. I was unaware of a series of questions the survey put to respondents in 1990 and again in 2000 about the perceived proneness to violence among members of different racial groups. Inexcusable on my part, really, as that sort of thing is this blog's bread and butter. Better late than never, though. For contemporary relevance and because of the finer racial distinctions among participants that are possible in the data from 2000-onward than from before the turn of the millennium, the following comes from the later results.

Despite the Cathedral's intentional obfuscation of disparities in violence and criminality--and, when it's adherents think they can get away with it, blatant inversion of reality--people still tend to believe their own lying eyes rather than their mendacious overlords. The following graph shows the perceived proneness to violence by members of the four conventionally major 'racial' groupings in the US. The higher the score, the more violent the group is perceived to be*:

Blacks are perceived as the most violent, followed by Hispanics, then whites, and finally Asians. Irrational racism or racial realism? The data overwhelmingly support the latter, of course.

Although in a few short decades it will cease to be the case, non-Hispanic whites still form a majority in the US. Surely it is the oppressive majority's anti-NAM and pro-yellow biases that are skewing overall perceptions of racial differences in propensities for violence! Well, let's take a look.

Bear with me, the following graph is a bit difficult to comprehend at first blush. The racial categories along the x-axis (the horizontal line along the bottom) depict groups of survey respondents while the colored bars that run parallel to the y-axis (vertical line) illustrate how each category of survey respondents perceive each racial group's tendencies towards violence. So the first cluster shows how whites view each of the four groups, the second cluster shows how blacks view each of the groups, etc:

It's not only whites who correctly perceive the associations between race and violence. Hispanics and Asians do as well. Blacks present the only stark contrast with reality, perceiving whites and blacks to be (essentially) equally violent, with Hispanics and Asians less so. Grievance peddling race hustlers and their allies in the Media are relentless in their attempts to recast reality in such a way that it actually becomes blacks who need to be weary of whites rather than the other way around, and their efforts appear to be most successful among blacks, many of whom are more than happy to blame whitey for their problems.

What about SWPLs? Don't they see blacks with rose-colored tints and whites, uh, a little more darkly? Than conservative whites, yes, but reality even shakes this more pious contingent's faith in the Narrative. The following graph compares and contrasts the perceptions of liberal and conservative whites:

Less racial variance detected by leftists than by conservatives, but the general pattern is accurate perceived by both. While some credit is due, there is (faux^) ethnomasochism evident among white leftists worth remarking upon as well. Compared to their conservative co-racialists, liberal whites see blacks, Hispanics, and Asians as relatively pacific. When it comes to whites, however, liberals shelve some of their belief in the goodness of mankind and judge whites more harshly than conservatives do. Conservative whites, on the other hand, should come in for a bit of criticism for perhaps being too forgiving when it comes to whites vis-a-vis Asians.

Honest whites--even SWPLs--are having conversations with their children that are similar to the one prescribed by the Derb that subsequently led to his termination from the Cathedral's journalistic equivalent of the Washington Generals.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000), POLVIEWS(1-2)(5-6), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), VIOLWHTS, VIOLBLKS, VIOLHSPS, VIOLASNS

** To facilitate viewing, I've inverted the GSS' scale, for which higher numbers illustrate less proneness to violence.

^ The qualifier here serving as a note that SWPLs are probably mostly thinking of the wrong kind of whites rather than of themselves when passing judgment on the violent tendencies of whites in general. They voted for Barack Obama and all that.

Depicting reality or escaping from it?

I'm finally getting around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. The descriptions of how widespread and commonplace violence was in the 'popular culture' of the medieval and middle ages make for fun reading, but I wonder (because I don't know) how representative said popular culture was of the larger societies it existed in at the time.

I bring this up because that doesn't appear to be the case today--if anything, the inverse seems to be true. Agnostic has indefatigably documented a whole host of things, including this, in a long-running analyses of cultural differences between rising (and high) crime eras and declining (and low) crime eras. Check out comic books from the low crime mid-20th century, for example. Video games, a sort of contemporary successor to comic books, have become far more graphically violent and intentionally realistic in their depictions of said violence (having previously opted for stylized depictions of violence and a predilection for surreality) over the last few decades as actual rates of violent crime have steadily dropped.

As real life in the West has become increasingly more peaceful over the last twenty years, football has clearly surpassed baseball as America's pass time and MMA has left boxing behind. In many ways, as we've become less violent, our popular culture has become more so. Moving outside the US, the exceptionally pacifistic Japanese are into some extremely gruesome and disgusting stuff.

More generally, Quentin Tarantino is a successful director and producer, but if aliens were to try and surmise what life on earth is like for its human inhabitants by viewing Kill Bill and Django Unchained, their conceptions would be wildly off base. Western popular culture is way more violent than life in the Occident actually is.

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. That same year, the city of Chicago alone recorded 459. Over 96% of the state's killing takes place in a city that holds around one-quarter (depending on the city proper is counted) of its total population.

Wow. This is presumably an extreme but informative example of how urban/rural differences are probably a lot more important when it comes to determining violent crime rates than state-to-state differences are.

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 weighted the non-Hispanic white and Hispanic scores according to how much of the total white test-taking population each comprised. For the states in which the Hispanic population is too small to be reliably reported, I used the average Hispanic score from the states where the Hispanic populations are large enough for mean scores to be reported.

Intelligence doesn't just improve quality of life measures in a cerebral way, it also does the physical body good.

Rates of unsolved murder by state

News reports based on FBI statistics show that somewhere between 35%-40% of homicides in the US go unsolved in the US today. Uniform Crime Reporting data, available at the state level (excluding Florida), show that right at one-third of homicide offenders remain racially unidentifiable. These unidentified killers are the ones who haven't been caught, which is why law enforcement is uncertain of their racial compositions.

This means we have access to rates of unsolved murders at the state level staring us in the face. Parenthetically, there are presumably a small number of homicides for which a perpetrator's race is reported even though he is never positively identified, which would explain why the UCR data on the racially unidentifiable comes in at 33% while the FBI reports an unsolved rate in the 35%-40% range. Still, the following estimates must be pretty damn close to the real thing.

The following table ranks states (with the exclusion of Florida for which no data are available) by their rates of unsolved murders. It's like golf here--the higher a state's percentage, the worse it's doing:

State	Unknown
1. District of Columbia	56.1%
2. Illinois	55.4%
3. Maryland	46.1%
4. New York	44.0%
5. California	43.9%
6. Massachusetts	43.8%
7. Rhode Island	42.0%
8. New Jersey	41.8%
9. Michigan	38.8%
10. Connecticut	37.1%
11. Missouri	36.7%
12. Indiana	36.3%
13. Arizona	34.7%
14. Nevada	34.6%
15. Ohio	31.4%
16. Louisiana	31.2%
17. Alabama	27.8%
18. Hawaii	26.5%
19. Georgia	26.3%
20. Kentucky	26.1%
21. Texas	26.0%
22. North Carolina	25.5%
23. Pennsylvania	25.1%
24. New Mexico	24.5%
25. Arkansas	21.7%
26. Kansas	21.1%
27. Colorado	20.8%
28. Virginia	19.8%
29. Oklahoma	19.0%
30. Nebraska	19.0%
31. Mississippi	18.7%
32. Washington	17.9%
33. Minnesota	17.8%
34. Wisconsin	17.5%
35. Alaska	17.4%
36. Delaware	16.7%
37. New Hampshire	15.8%
38. Oregon	15.7%
39. Utah	15.6%
40. Tennessee	14.6%
41. West Virginia	12.1%
42. South Carolina	10.6%
43. Maine	10.4%
44. Iowa	9.8%
45. South Dakota	9.2%
46. Montana	8.2%
47. Vermont	5.6%
48. North Dakota	4.5%
49. Wyoming	4.5%
50. Idaho	3.9%

An accompanying visualization is available here.

I wouldn't fault someone for imagining that rural murders must be the easiest ones to get away with. If I leave my house and head west, it's 600 miles of sparsely populated farmland and prairie from here to Denver. How would anyone find a body buried under the great blue sky out there in the middle of nowhere? Yet rural states dominate the bottom of the list, while DC, by far the most urban 'state' listed, has the inglorious distinction of being the worst of the worst when it comes to positively identifying killers. This article on the subject of unsolved homicides from the Scripps Howard News Service gives an indication as to why. It requires a little reading between the lines, of course:

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI.

...

Experts say that homicides are tougher to solve now because crimes of passion, where assailants are easier to identify, have been replaced by drug- and gang-related killings. Many police chiefs -- especially in areas with rising numbers of unsolved crimes -- blame a lack of witness cooperation.

---

++Addition++A sarcastic Steve Sailer comments.

Not serving bologna here

The data, methods, and estimations utilized in the previous posts on white and black homicide rates by state suggest a national black offender homicide rate of 20.6 and a national white (including most Hispanics) offender homicide rate of 3.1. The FBI reports a black rate of 26.5 and a white rate of 3.5, both from 2005. Take that as you will, but I read it as a pretty good vindication of the methodology employed here.

A few plausible reasons my estimates come in a little lower than the FBI's do:

- My estimates excluded negligent homicide but the FBI figures do not. According to the UCR, about 1.2% of homicides are negligent. Consequently, my estimates are marginally understated, but presumably uniformly so across states.

- The data I used only included the "first" (primary?) offender in a homicide. In the case of multiple offenders being charged, my data only included the first of them while the FBI's national figure presumably included multiple offenders.

- Florida--a state with a homicide rate above the national average--isn't included in my data but I assume it is in the FBI's national numbers.

Black homicide rates by state

++Addition++In response to Anthony's comment regarding the variances in the New Hampshire and Vermont black offender rates being the difference between one black murderer over five years in the former and five black murderers over the same period of time in the latter, I've noted by asterisk states in which there were fewer than five black murderers per year over the years considered.

Parenthetically, the correlation between a state's white and black offender rates is a statistically significant .52 (p = 0). Removing the low-end black offending states actually mitigates the relationship slightly to .48 (p = 0).

---

We've taken a look at white homicide rates by state. Now let's give black rates a gander. Using an online database out of the University of Michigan that utilizes the familiar SDA interface to pull figures from the Uniform Crime Reporting Data Series' homicide reports from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2003 is how we'll go about it.

Murder rates among the total population are a lot easier to determine definitively than murder rates by subgroups within a population are. Murder is unlikely to go unreported--a corpse usually provides pretty good evidence of a homicide if it occurred. Take the number of murders by the overall population over a year and, voila, we have the homicide rate. However, the perpetrator(s) is sometimes unknown. Consequently, the sum rates of any number of non-overlapping subgroups is always going to fall short of the rate for the total population, even if the entire population falls into one of the various non-overlapping subgroups being considered.

To address this, for each state I figured the percentage of homicides perpetrated by blacks among those homicides for which the race of the killer was known and then assigned this percentage of the unknown perpetrator number to the black total. This assumes that the racial breakdown of unidentified murderers mirrors that of their identified brethren. Shows like CSI would have us believe that lots of the hard-to-catch killers are white. On the other hand, structural racism suggests that society often turns a blind eye to blacks killing blacks in the ghetto. Who knows? My guess is that this method understates the true black rates but that the effects of said understatements are pretty uniform across states.

Because 2006 is conveniently both the mean and median year employed, the black homicide rate per 100,000 people is calculated by averaging the number of murders in each state over the included five years and comparing it to a state's total black population in 2006. Both numerator and denominator include Hispanics who racially identify as black.

Only non-negligible homicides, which constitute the vast majority of all murders, are included.

Data are available from all states for each of the five years under consideration with the exception of DC (2009 data only) and Florida, which apparently doesn't participate in the UCR. Estimated black murder rates during the aughts per 100,000 blacks, by state:

State	Rate
1. District of Columbia	38.68
2. Pennsylvania	34.16
3. Wisconsin	30.93
4. Michigan	30.89
5. Indiana	30.74
6. Arizona	29.90
7. Louisiana	29.28
8. Nevada	27.71
9. Oklahoma	27.06
10. Missouri	27.01
11. Tennessee	25.20
12. California	25.13
13. Kansas	24.10
14. Maryland	23.73
15. Arkansas	22.79
16. Ohio	22.34
17. Minnesota	21.58
18. Vermont*	21.24
19. West Virginia	19.70
20. Alabama	19.61
21. Illinois	18.62
22. New Jersey	18.19
23. Texas	18.00
24. Colorado	17.89
25. South Carolina	16.64
26. Virginia	16.26
27. Kentucky	16.16
28. New Mexico	16.00
29. North Carolina	15.40
30. Alaska*	15.39
31. Utah*	15.02
32. New York	14.76
33. Washington	14.53
34. Iowa	14.29
35. Delaware	14.00
36. Oregon	13.94
37. Georgia	13.54
38. Massachusetts	13.45
39. Wyoming*	12.57
40. Rhode Island*	11.77
41. Mississippi	11.20
42. Connecticut	10.57
43. Hawaii*	9.14
44. Montana*	8.78
45. South Dakota*	8.69
46. North Dakota*	8.41
47. Idaho*	8.28
48. Maine*	4.42
49. Nebraska*	3.68
50. New Hampshire*	2.23

An accompanying visualization is available here.

States without areas of high black population density generally appear to do the best. Mississippi is an impressive exception to that rule. If asked to take a stab at which American cities have the most dangerous black populations, I bet people answering candidly would heavily include Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit in their short-lists. Well, there you have it. I hear echoes of the unmentionable here, as well.

Iowa has been a safe place to live for a long time

Hail found CDC data on white homicide rates by state from 1960. Comparing those with rates from the 2000s* yields a statistically significant positive correlation of .74. More than half of a state's modern white murder rate is 'explained' by what its white murder rate was a couple of generations ago. Everyday things change but basically they stay the same.

* Excluding DC, for which contemporary data appears to be erroneous, and Florida, for which figures on homicide by race aren't publicly available.

White murder rates by state

++Addition++Hail looks at white homicide rates 45 years prior and compares them to the contemporary figures in a post that should be read in full. To his discussion of "Hispanic inflation", I'll note that 'whites' in the now heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California were more murderous in 1960 than they are today, though Texas has become a bit less violent, as Steve explains in the comments of Hail's post.

---

Steve Sailer is curious about white murder rates by state. One of Steve's commenters pointed to an online database out of the University of Michigan that uses the SDA interface. Because of my familiarity with said interface, I'll give it my best.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Data Series provides detailed homicide data by state with accessible reports from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2003. Steve wants a decade of data to account for year-to-year randomness in small states. For now, we'll have to settle for half of that.

There are a few technical issues to address before diving in. Most importantly, murder rates among the total population are a lot easier to determine definitively than murder rates by subgroups within a population are. Murder is unlikely to go unreported--a corpse usually provides pretty good evidence of a homicide if it occurred. Take the number of murders by the overall population over a year and, voila, we have the homicide rate. However, the perpetrator(s) is sometimes unknown. Consequently, the sum rates of any number of non-overlapping subgroups is always going to fall short of the rate for the total population, even if the entire population falls into one of the various non-overlapping subgroups being considered.

To address this, for each state I figured the percentage of homicides perpetrated by whites among those homicides for which the race of the killer was known and then assigned this percentage of the unknown perpetrator number to the white total. This assumes that the racial breakdown of unidentified murderers mirrors that of their identified brethren. Shows like CSI would have us believe that lots of the hard-to-catch killers are white. On the other hand, structural racism suggests that society often turns a blind eye to blacks killing blacks in the ghetto. Who knows? My guess is that this method overstates the true white rate but that the effect is overstated pretty uniformly across states.

Another issue is ethnicity, specifically with regards to the question of Hispanic origin. The data are broken down into five categories: White, Black, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Unknown. Hispanics may be of any race, meaning most of them are included in the white numbers. This becomes obvious in the visualization subsequently linked to, as the states along the Southwest border are conspicuously more murderous than the rest of the country is (excepting, perhaps, Florida, which apparently does not participate in the UCR).

Because 2006 is conveniently both the mean and median year employed, the white homicide rate per 100,000 people is calculated by averaging the number of murders in each state over the included five years and comparing it to a state's total white population (including most Hispanics) in 2006.

Only non-negligent homicides, which constitute the vast majority of all murders, are included.

Finally, data are available from all states for each of the five years under consideration with the exception of DC (2009 data only) and the aforementioned Florida no-show. Estimated white murder rates during the aughts per 100,000 whites by state:

State	Rate
1. District of Columbia	12.43
2. Nevada	6.64
3. New Mexico	6.63
4. Arizona	6.43
5. California	5.81
6. Oklahoma	4.45
7. Texas	4.38
8. Alaska	4.12
9. Hawaii	3.64
10. Maryland	3.52
11. South Carolina	3.52
12. Tennessee	3.51
13. Louisiana	3.42
14. Missouri	3.42
15. West Virginia	3.05
16. Arkansas	3.00
17. Alabama	2.91
18. North Carolina	2.90
19. Colorado	2.86
20. Georgia	2.68
21. Kentucky	2.66
22. Kansas	2.51
23. Wyoming	2.49
24. Virginia	2.44
25. Washington	2.43
26. Indiana	2.41
27. New York	2.35
28. New Jersey	2.27
29. Mississippi	2.21
30. Michigan	2.19
31. Pennsylvania	2.16
32. Idaho	2.10
33. Connecticut	2.03
34. Oregon	1.98
35. Montana	1.84
36. Rhode Island	1.84
37. Massachusetts	1.74
38. Ohio	1.73
39. Delaware	1.69
40. Utah	1.63
41. Maine	1.60
42. Vermont	1.58
43. Wisconsin	1.34
44. Illinois	1.27
45. South Dakota	1.21
46. Nebraska	1.19
47. North Dakota	1.19
48. Iowa	1.14
49. Minnesota	0.91
50. New Hampshire	0.86

Here's a cartographic visualization (requires Java).

Live free and don't die!

In addition to the white Hispanic/non-white Hispanic factor, proximity to the Canadian border appears to be associated with pacifistic tendencies. The upper Midwest does best (Nazis these Nordics and Teutons are not!), followed by the Northeast.

DC's whites are conventionally thought to be a cut above the rest of the country. They're the elites, after all. Even the white kids with parents who don't get them into private schools are as sharp as tacks. As Steve sardonically asks:

Has anybody checked out what Ezra Klein, Chris Matthews, and Cokie Roberts are up to?

As noted previously, data on DC are only available for 2009, a year in which there were 12 identified white killers and another 87 who went unidentified. That's a small sample size to work with. Fewer than one-in-five DC whites are Hispanic, so that offers little in the way of explanation, either. While it is a completely urban 'state' and the jokes about the district of corruption practically write themselves, I suspect something else is up with the data from the capital.

Parenthetically, when compared to the rest of the developed world, the US does notoriously bad on measures of criminality (among other things). Race, of course, is a major reason why this is the case. Taken as nations of their own, the upper Midwest and the Northeast look just fine when measured against Europe.

Variables used: V2, V16(a), V25,

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 a crime they didn't commit.

But dissent from that societal more is not equally distributed across all groups. On four occasions, the GSS has asked respondents which miscarriage of justice is worse--convicting the innocent or allowing the guilty to go free. Blacks and liberals tilt more heavily in their preference for allowing some guilty people to walk as a cost of ensuring that the innocent aren't convicted (76.3% and 74.9%, respectively, saying that convicting the innocent is worse than letting the guilty off is) than whites and conservatives (71.6% and 70.7%) do.

As Steve Sailer regularly reminds us and the Trayvon Martin case illustrates, though, the "Who? Whom?" question is of paramount importance. In a Florida poll conducted last month, 79% of blacks but only 21% of whites were confident in George Zimmerman's guilt. On the political front, 49% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans asserted that he is guilty of murder. Better lock Zimmerman up to ensure the guilty won't walk!

Getting back to the philosophical, ideological realm, which people hastily evacuate when "Who? Whom?" becomes relevant, it is by intelligence rather than political orientation, sex, or race where divergence in opinion on the question is most pronounced. The percentages of people, by IQ grouping*, who would prefer to see a guilty man let go than an innocent man locked up rather than the other way around:

IQ	Free
Real dumbs	66.0%
Pretty dumbs	68.1%
Normals	67.0%
Pretty smarts	75.3%
Really smarts	88.6%

No, dummy, Barabbas' release wasn't the real tragedy!

GSS variables used: VERDICT, WORDSUM, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), RACE

* Respondents are broken up into five categories in a way that approximates a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%).

Hunting for institutional racism

M.G., author of Those Who Can See, has yet another tremendously data-packed post, this time on institutional racism (including a fun yeti metaphor). Like the terrifying shambling strider, it wreaks havoc and destruction wherever it treads, yet no one is ever able to pinpoint any hard evidence of its actual existence.

That doesn't stop us from writing about it, though. Using Ngram viewer, the percentage of published books in the US containing the phrase, from the sixties--1962 being the year of its inception--through 2008:

During the high crime crack war years, we began to forget about the renegade ronso, as making excuses for dangerous behavior that was suddenly hitting too close to home presumably fell out of favor. But once that straightened itself out, we set our sights back on the sasquatch, and we haven't taken them off him since.

Blacks more likely to commit hate crimes than whites are

++Addition++As B.B. points out in the comments and Inductivist reported several years ago, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) shows that the majority of offenders perceived to be motivated in their criminal activity by racial animus are black. That there are 2.5 times as many black perp haters as there are white haters, and that there are nearly six times as many whites (Hispanics included) in the US as there are blacks means that blacks are over 14 times as likely to engage in a hate crime as whites are from the perspetive of the nation's crime victims. That's not the story we get though, of course, because some victims are more equal than others.

---

Digging through some more 2010 FBI data, let's take a look at hate crimes, specifically rates of offence by race. As before, the following table shows hate crime offence rates by race relative to the white (including Hispanic) rate, so that 100% indicates a rate exactly the same as that of whites, less than 100% a rate lower than that of whites, and greater than 100% a rate higher than the white rate:

Race	Rate
Black	164%
American Indian	132%
White	100%
Asian/P.I.	29%

When most people hear the phrase "hate crime", they probably think of something along the lines of a hooded white guy burning down a black family's house, but even when it comes to a criminal categorization inherently designed to nail whites for acting upon a personal animus against blacks, NAMs are actually more frequent offenders than ice people are.

Parenthetically, I've looked at this before, but those data were half a decade older than these are. The racial gap actually narrowed a little from 2005 to 2010!

Gay bashing by race

We know from exit polling on California's Proposition 8 that blacks see gays as second-class citizens, but does this civic form of disenfranchisement also manifest itself in less genteel ways?!

FBI statistics offer an answer. The following table shows offender rates by race for designated hate crimes committed against homosexuals as a percentage of the white (including Hispanic) offender rate, so anything over 100% indicates a higher propensity for gay bashing than whites display and anything under 100% shows less of one:

Race	Rate
Black	288%
White	100%
American Indian	66%
Asian/P.I.	30%

In the conception of many, the diversity tower starts with white women on the bottom floor and works its way to the top story where blacks reside. When it comes to special benefits conferred, this conception is pretty accurate. Yet when blacks and gays tussle, gays often win (figuratively speaking, of course--as these crime stats show, they don't actually get the better of a physical confrontation).

Oh, she sees just fine

What to make of this:

Blacks are more than twice as likely as nonblacks (72 to 32 percent) to believe that Mr. Zimmerman (who is white and Hispanic) is guilty of a crime in shooting Trayvon, according to an April 2-4 Gallup survey of 3,006 Americans.

... and this?:

In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge on Friday vacated the death penalty of a black man convicted of murder, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged in deliberate and systematic racial discrimination when striking black potential jurors in death penalty cases.

First and foremost, that justice is most certainly not colorblind.

Black shoots unarmed Hispanic. Whatever, stuff happens. Now, justice for Travyon!

Given the utter lack of national media attention devoted to this story out of Phoenix, I'm not surprised to only be reading about it in the Steveosphere a week after it happened:

About 7:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man and his girlfriend ordered food at the Taco Bell drive-thru and were told to pull up while their order was prepared.

At the same time, Adkins stepped around a corner into the path of the vehicle and angry words were exchanged between he and the driver.

They got into an altercation and Adkins was shot once by the driver. He died at the scene.

The driver, a 22-year-old black male, called police but has not been arrested.

At first, the couple claimed that Adkins had a metal pipe that he swung at them -- but it turns out he was holding a dog leash with his yellow lab on the other end.

Family members want that driver arrested, but he's claiming self-defense.

As Blode explains, this case is quite similar to the Trayvon Martin one, except that in the Taco Bell tussle, the victim--a mentally-disabled 'white Hispanic' man, presumably of Mexican descent--appears to be less culpable than Martin was. While Martin allegedly broke Zimmerman's nose, subjugated him, and then pummeled a supine Zimmerman, it sounds like Adkins swung at and possibly pounded the shooter's car with his fist a few times before being shot. Arizona, like Florida, has a stand-your-ground-law on the books, and perhaps unlike the Martin case, it could conceivably turn out to be relevant here.

Despite (or, more cynically, because of) the potential racial angles the Phoenix shooting presents, the national media aren't running with it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party are nowhere to be found. President Obama hasn't said a word. As Steve Sailer soberly notes, in a huge country of over 300 million people, tragedies like this occur with much greater regularity than we'd like them to, and it's of course absurd to expect nationally known figures to descend on every crime scene braying righteously about the need for justice.

More interesting than the predictable indifference of the usual suspects, however, is the lack of grassroots outrage in the Phoenix case as compared to the Martin case. With the latter, we're seeing bounties being announced, cop cars being shot up, random whites being savagely attacked by blacks as a way, I guess, of avenging Martin's death, and public gatherings clamoring for the shooter to be shackled up or killed. In the former, the slain man's sister sounds pretty upset about the whole thing, but that's about it.

The contrasts between what has transpired in the wakes of the Phoenix and Sanford incidents highlight the differences between the cohesiveness, or lack thereof, of the black and Hispanic 'communities' in contemporary America. There are plenty of self-anointed Hispanic activists willing to spit out foam-flecked hysteria to a soliciting media organ, as a recent profile piece on Kris Kobach in my local paper demonstrated last weekend:

"He definitely is very focused on putting forth at the local and state level anti-immigrant proposals that seem to be progressively more punitive and more and more repressive," said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration at the National Council of La Raza.

"From our perspective, it just seems he is more interested in pursuing the scorched-Earth, anti-immigrant tactics that he believes in than in the well-being -- economic or otherwise -- of the jurisdictions that follow his misguided lead on these issues," Martinez added.

But the people they claim to represent aren't much stirred by their war cries, if they even know who they are at all. The Pew Hispanic Center found that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics in the US do not think of themselves as sharing a broad social culture with other Hispanics, but instead as being comprised of lots of different communities tracing back to their particular countries (or regions within those countries) of descent.

In contrast, every urban hip hop station evinces just how plugged in blacks are to the concerns and going-ons of the 'black community'. The black guy on the street knows who Juicy J, MLK, Barack Obama, and Taye Diggs are. Precious few blacks could identify any policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process, but no doubt existed in their minds as to who they had to support.

The Hispanic on the street probably can't do much better than Jennifer Lopez or maybe Cesar Chavez since the Cesar Chavez Boulevard trend has started picking up (though it has a long way to go before it attains Martin Luther King Boulevard infamy). As for voting, si, Democrat is berry good, if they bother voting at all.

I'm making some assumptions here, but the gist is that when black cultural kingpins say "jump", blacks around the country start hopping. When Hispanic activists say whatever it is that they say, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida, and Mexicans in California don't know they're speaking and don't make an effort to hear them. By persistently clamoring about the coming Hispanic electoral tidal wave and censuring Republican pols who say anything about border security, the media establishment is trying to get Hispanics to adopt the same kind of visceral tribalism blacks exhibit in the US, but up to this point it hasn't had much of an impact.

Trust and violence

Agnostic has been marshaling a sundry series of posts that trace how shifts in the rate of violent crime are associated with changes in the behaviors and culture of broader society, from the rise and fall of shorts' length (heh) to disappearance and resurrection of drive-ins.

Initially, I figured, understandably enough, that trust levels would tend to rise as violent crime declined, and fall during times of increasing violence. Agnostic argues that this is not the case, however. Instead, increasing levels of trust propel people out of their cells and into the commons where they come into more social contact with other people than they do during low trust times, when people keep to themselves. It is this increase in social mingling that brings on an increase in violent crime, as the perpetrators of those crimes now have greater and more varied opportunities to strike (and it is not always necessarily a consequence of mendacious intent on their part--more social contact inevitably means more confrontations that may result in violent outcomes, even if neither party involved planned on having it end up that way).

Agnostic's trust-influences-violence-and-violence-influences-everything-else theory (my eloquent naming, not his!) is intriguing if not obviously convincing. How does the increasing racial and ethnic diversification of the US, and the consequent "hunkering down" it brings, play into this relationship? Robert Putnam shows that diversity dampens social participation, but it is also associated with higher rates of violent crime. Of course, despite increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the US, crime levels have fallen steadily for two decades now. As more diversity brings more social retreat and lower levels of trust, will violent crime rates continue to decline? Perhaps a continuing drop in violence should be thought of as a silver-lining in the balkanizing skies above.

Anyway, I wondered if any correlation between trust levels and violent crime could be detected in the US from the early seventies to today. Scaling the national rate of violent crime to responses to the GSS question over whether "most people can be trusted" or "you can't be too careful in life", I graphed the relationship:


The correlation is an insignificant .10. When violent crime is compared to trust levels a couple of years prior, the correlation becomes an inverse (which is to be expected in Agnostic's conception of the trust-violence relationship) .16 (p = .47). That's only slightly less easy to dismiss as meaningless.

By no means does this refute any part of Agnostic's theory, as the GSS survey question just gauges a general feeling among respondents, not how they actually behave, and is subject to some statistical noise (though the average annual sample size is over 1,400). Further, trust has been declining for three decades, violent crime for two. The lag might simply be considerably longer than two years, maybe closer to ten, something that is unfortunately not testable using the GSS. But it would've been neat if it clearly supported the theory, which it does not do.

GSS variables used: YEAR, TRUST(1-2)

Peace is so SWPL

The Institute for Economics and Peace compiled a peace index ranking the 50 states (see the map here) earlier this year. The index uses five indicators in making the peace score calculations--homicide rates, violent crime rates, incarceration rates, per capita police officers, and the availability of small arms.

At first blush, the last indicator seems to reveal an unsatisfying leftist outlook in the report as less densely populated, politically conservative flyover states tend to have less restrictive legal gun ownership requirements than Northeastern and West Coast states do. That's probably a more-or-less accurate read into the authors of the report. However, gun ownership rates are estimated rather bizarrely by the percentage of suicides in each state committed by the use of a firearm, so while this is surely influenced in some degree by the availability of guns, it's difficult to dispute that a relatively high percentage of people ending their lives by blowing their brains out instead of overdosing on sleeping pills proxies for the violent tendencies of the residents in question reasonably well. Anyway, this factor was assigned the least weight of the five, representing only 1/15th of the peace index total.

Using incarceration rates and the number of police officers per capita is a bit problematic as well. Throwing increasing numbers of people who commit crimes in prison and holding them there is arguably one of the primary reasons criminal activity has decreased in the US over the last couple of decades. Similarly, relatively large police forces could be seen as a necessary response to a violent population, but could also be viewed as an expression--not necessarily related to the actual prevalence of violence--of how high a priority that population makes deterring crime and capturing criminals.

A few years ago, I computed a strictness index that ranked states by how many people they incarcerated relative to the amount of crime that occurred. South Dakota comes out as the most 'draconian'. This is notable because the report contains a "case study" on New York and South Dakota, the former being the state where the peace index has increased the most over the last 20 years and the latter being the state where it has decreased the most over the same period of time. Singling out South Dakota as a state that has slid backwards since 1991 highlights why incarceration rates and police presence are suboptimal measures of peacefulness--homicide and other violent crime rates are almost exactly where were 20 years ago, but because the incarceration rate and the per capita police presence have both increased markedly over that period of time, South Dakota looks bad. As a law-abiding citizen, if more thugs are in jail and more patrol cars are out than they were when I was a kid, but the frequency of crime has been held in check, I'm not complaining too much. These changes are certainly preferable to even a modest uptick in the crime rate.

These qualifications notwithstanding, state-level correlations with indices like these are rarely uninteresting. So without further ado, here are some of them. Positive correlations indicate the variable in question is associated with more peace, negative correlations with less of it:

Mean IQ -- +.62
McCain's share of the '08 vote -- (.31)
McCain's share of the '08 white vote -- (.58)
Median age -- +.28*
White population % -- +.48
Black population % -- (.56)
Hispanic population % -- (.34)
NAM population % -- (.67)
Male:female sex ratio -- +.26*

* Not statistically significant at 95% confidence

The only surprise is in the sex ratio, with relatively more men being modestly correlated with more, not less, tranquility. Crime is a young person's game, so it's hardly shocking that states like Maine and Vermont, where the median age is over 40, are among the nation's least violent.

As always, higher IQ is positively associated with a higher quality of life. And also as always, ugly a fact as it is, the more black and Hispanic a place is, the lower that place's quality of life tends to be.

Although the report, at 52 pages in length, delves deep in discussing the results and implications of the index, and the racial composition of a state is apparently the single most determinative factor in how that state fares, there is not a single mention of race in the entire thing. Those of us interested in human biodiversity are often accused of being obsessed with racial differences. Well, race matters. It matter a lot. Reports like this, in which the most influential variable is inexplicably ignored, illustrate that rather than HBDers being excessively focused on race, the majority of people are tragically ignorant of it (or at least profess to be so) whenever paying attention risks casting non-whites in a bad light.

It's plausible to think that in places where crime is an acute problem, whites react by tending towards political candidates, generally Republican, who take a tough-on-crime approach, and that is reflected in the strong inverse correlation between peace and the percentage of whites who voted for McCain. Whites in the South vote heavily Republican--at rates in Alabama and Mississippi that nearly mirror black support everywhere else for whoever the Democratic candidate is--and the South, unsurprisingly, is rated the least peaceful in the country.

Black-white and Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state

In the previous post, an updated visualization of black-white incarceration rate ratios by state was provided. I have no good reason as to why a corresponding table was not included to go along with that, so here it is:

State	B:W
1. Iowa	13.59
2. Vermont	12.49
3. New Jersey	12.38
4. Connecticut	12.00
5. Wisconsin	10.64
6. New Mexico	10.29
7. North Dakota	10.05
8. South Dakota	10.02
9. Rhode Island	9.62
10. New York	9.35
11. Wyoming	9.24
12. New Hampshire	9.22
13. Pennsylvania	9.15
13. Utah	9.15
15. Minnesota	9.14
16. Illinois	9.06
17. Nebraska	8.34
18. Montana	8.24
19. Massachusetts	8.13
20. Maine	7.60
21. Kansas	6.99
22. Colorado	6.65
23. California	6.50
24. Washington	6.42
25. Ohio	6.38
26. Delaware	6.36
27. Virginia	5.89
28. Oregon	5.84
29. Arizona	5.58
29. West Virginia	5.58
31. Michigan	5.49
32. Maryland	5.48
33. Indiana	5.46
34. North Carolina	5.40
35. Missouri	5.25
36. Kentucky	4.98
37. Texas	4.74
38. Louisiana	4.69
39. Nevada	4.65
40. South Carolina	4.47
41. Florida	4.45
42. Oklahoma	4.39
43. Alaska	4.33
44. Idaho	4.25
45. Tennessee	4.12
46. Arkansas	3.86
47. Alabama	3.54
48. Mississippi	3.46
49. Georgia	3.32
50. Hawaii	1.88

The proximity-to-the-Canadian-border phenomenon is detectable. It's plausible to think that to some extent this is a consequence of whites behaving better the further north we go, while blacks are blacks, wherever they are. I'm skeptical, though, because it's not just whites who fare better as we head north--blacks do so as well, and the latitude-performance correlation is virtually identical for both races.

When Steve ran the numbers, he found a vigorous correlation of .62 between the 1997 black-white incarceration rate ratio and Kerry's share of the 2004 vote. As La Griffe du Lion has explained, this is largely attributable to stricter sentencing for criminal activity in red states than in blue states.

That remains the case with the fresher data, although the relationship has weakened. The correlation between the 2005 black-white rate ratio and McCain's share of the 2008 vote is .34 (p=.02). If red states were full of racist whites who wanted to irrationally throw large numbers of blacks in jail and blue states full of SWPLs who did not, we'd expect the correlation to run in the opposite direction. When it comes to closing the jail gap, red states do a better job of it than blue states do.

Fortunately for community organizers and activists everywhere, there is a silver lining in the (disgraceful!) nationwide trend towards tougher sentencing laws that has more people in the US behind bars now than ever before--the jail gap narrowed between 1997 and 2005 in a full 45 states. In only five lily white (and thus racist!) places--Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming--did it widen.

As someone who is keenly aware of the Hispanic tidal wave crashing onto our shores from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern end of our coastal border with the Pacific ocean, I would be remiss not to present a table showing Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state. Unfortunately, data were not available in eleven states--AL, KS, ME, MD, MN, NM, NC, SD, VT, WI, and WY--that apparently do not inquire about (or at least publicly report on) whether or not prisoners are Hispanic:

State	H:W
1. Connecticut	6.64
2. Massachusetts	6.11
3. Pennsylvania	5.62
4. New York	4.47
5. New Hampshire	3.68
6. New Jersey	3.32
7. Rhode Island	3.30
8. North Dakota	3.18
9. Nebraska	2.55
10. Iowa	2.47
11. Idaho	2.45
12. Utah	2.14
13. Colorado	1.98
14. Montana	1.95
15. Illinois	1.86
16. Arizona	1.82
17. Ohio	1.78
18. Delaware	1.72
19. California	1.70
20. Kentucky	1.35
21. Washington	1.34
22. Indiana	1.25
23. Texas	1.24
24. Virginia	1.23
25. Mississippi	1.21
25. Missouri	1.21
27. Tennessee	1.15
27. South Carolina	1.15
29. Oregon	1.14
30. Oklahoma	1.12
31. Nevada	0.99
32. Michigan	0.96
33. Georgia	0.92
34. Alaska	0.76
35. Florida	0.65
36. Arkansas	0.60
37. West Virginia	0.54
38. Louisiana	0.47
39. Hawaii	0.41

As Peter explained in the comments of a previous post, Puerto Ricans (virtually all of whom are Hispanic) in the US are heavily concentrated in the Northeast and fare especially poorly among Hispanic immigrants and their descendants in the US. That is clearly evident above, as the Northeast takes all the top spots.

Florida's Cuban population, while no longer constituting a majority of the state's Hispanics still comprises a sizable chunk of it, presumably makes the state look great on this ranking.

Hawaii's combination of a large military presence and relatively unintelligent whites help to place it at the very bottom of the list. Accounting for the fact that the Aloha state's Asian/PI population is distinctly less prosperous than Asians in the US as a whole, it's probably the most racially egalitarian state in the country.

The biggest surprise to me is Nevada, where Hispanics and whites are incarcerated at almost identical rates. Excepting New Mexico for which data are unavailable, Hispanics in the border states predictably all end up in jail more frequently than whites in those states do. Any ideas as to why Nevada bucks this trend? Michigan is also unexpected.

Excluding Alaska (there are Hispanics in Alaska? Yes, though fewer than 40,000 of them), the rest of the states where Hispanics are better behaved than whites are in the South, where whites are more prone to criminal activity than they are in the Midwest, Northeast, or Old Northwest.

Black-white ratios on TANF usage and incarceration rates

The indispensable Steve Sailer made the following suggestion in the comments of the recent post that looked at black and Hispanic TANF utilization rates by state:

There's a bias in these ratios depending on how large a percentage blacks make up of the whole state. For example, if Mississippi is, say, 40% black, then the maximum possible ratio for Mississippi would be 2.50 (100%/40%), while if Idaho is 1% black, then the mathematically maximum possible ratio would be 100.00. (Indeed, the ratio in Mississippi is only 2.22.)

I think it's better to compare blacks to whites than blacks to the entire population, even though there's still the problem of whites differing between states (e.g., CN v. WV).

That's a great point. The problem is even greater when attempting comparisons of white TANF utilization rates to the extent that it is almost impossible to do meaningfully, which is why it was not attempted in the original post.

There's a way around this, though, by calculating utilization rates for blacks and comparing them to utilization rates for whites in the same state. So if in Mississippi for example, blacks represent 95% of total TANF usage (2.38 in the table), and the remaining 60% of the population that is white (for argument's sake--those aren't exact figures) contributes the remaining 5% of TANF usage for a value of .08 in the original table. Dividing the black by the white figures yields 29.8, a figure for which a higher value indicates relatively higher black TANF utilization while 'adjusting' for the absolute sizes of each state's black and white populations.

Why I didn't think of this before is unimportant. Go brush up a little on your vocabulary, and it'll make more sense.

Anyway, the following table ranks states by the level of black representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is black (black TANF % / black population %) divided by the level of white representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is white (white TANF % / white population %), expressed as an index in which 1.00 would represent exactly equal utilization rates by race, while index scores higher than that indicate what might be thought of loosely as the slavery tax multiple:

State	B:W
1. Wisconsin	27.75
2. North Dakota	23.40
3. Minnesota	23.15
4. New Jersey	17.97
5. South Dakota	16.50
6. Pennsylvania	15.81
7. Nebraska	15.00
8. Illinois	12.55
9. Iowa	11.30
10. Michigan	11.10
11. Maryland	9.71
12. Nevada	9.52
13. Connecticut	9.03
14. Idaho	8.80
15. Indiana	8.78
16. Delaware	8.75
17. Arizona	8.56
18. Louisiana	8.34
19. Arkansas	8.24
20. Mississippi	8.14
21. New York	8.13
22. Utah	7.56
23. Wyoming	7.45
24. Texas	7.35
25. Kansas	7.26
26. Virginia	7.22
27. Montana	7.17
28. Maine	7.02
29. Oklahoma	6.94
30. Oregon	6.72
31. California	6.51
32. Ohio	6.49
33. North Carolina	6.48
34. Alabama	6.44
35. Massachusetts	6.30
36. Florida	6.19
37. Tennessee	6.12
38. South Carolina	5.88
39. Missouri	5.73
40. Georgia	5.71
41. Vermont	5.27
42. Rhode Island	4.93
43. Washington	4.73
44. Alaska	4.52
45. New Hampshire	4.41
46. New Mexico	4.15
47. Kentucky	4.01
48. West Virginia	3.45
49. Colorado	2.75
50. Hawaii	1.39

Black Mississippians looked pretty good in the original table, but as Steve noted, it was more of a statistical artifact of the useful but limiting method I originally employed. This method turns out similar results (the two correlate at .68), but they are more useful, and a few states where the black population is particularly large, like Mississippi and Louisiana, shift upwards quite a bit.

An accompanying visualization is available here (Adobe/Java required).

Several years ago, Steve wrote an article entitled "Mapping the Unmentionable: Race and Crime", where he looked at the ratio of black and white imprisonment rates by state based on data from 1997. Surprisingly, moderately liberal states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, were where the black-white imprisonment gap was the widest, while being narrowest in the South.

If the purported racism of conservative whites manifested itself in incarceration patterns, we'd expect the black-white ratios to be the largest in the South and the smallest in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, almost exactly the opposite of what Steve found to actually be the case.

A more plausible explanation might be that softer sentencing standards in blue states (Steve found a correlation of .62 between Kerry's share of the 2004 vote and the size of the black-white imprisonment ratio) leads to a greater black-white incarceration ratio than stricter sentencing standards in red states do. To comprehend why, imagine a 'draconian' state in which the slightest legal infraction lands a person in the slammer. A full 90% of blacks might spend time behind bars in a state like this, but so would half of that state's whites, producing a ratio of only 1.8. On the other end of the extreme, imagine a do-as-you-please state where the only thing that carries a jail sentence is murder. Blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder than whites are, so in this state, the ratio is 7.0. [Addition: A commenter mentions La Griffe du Lion's 2006 discussion and explanation for why this occurs, more-or-less validating what I was getting at in a much fuller and more convincing way.]

Comparing the table above with the maps in Steve's article, the two seemed to me to trend in a similar direction--states where blacks milk the welfare system a lot more than whites do also appear to be states where blacks get thrown in jail a lot more than whites do, while in states where black and white welfare use is more equitable, the incarceration rates are similarly more equitable.

Fortunately, I was able to track down fresher data from 2005 on state level imprisonment rates by race. The correlation between the black-white TANF utilization ratio and the black-white incarceration rate ratio is .46 (p = .00). That's a reasonably strong relationship for seemingly unrelated social science data sets.

The motto for Wisconsin's blacks: On the dole or in the cell. If you're looking for a more positive example of black behavior, check out the great state of Hawaii. That shouldn't be too surprising. After all, the tropical paradise has become known for producing brothas of presidential timber! Halfrican and from one of the most racially equitable states in the country--no wonder he's forever insecure in his blackness!

For those interested in the material covered in Steve's article, here's an updated visualization of the black-white imprisonment ratio by state.

Also, if you haven't already, check out Steve's reflections on the material at hand.

* There are no data available for Wyoming and New Mexico in the 2005 data, so for those states I substituted 1997 figures, adjusted for the nationwide increase in the incarceration rate over the eight year period.

Militarily fit-to-serve by state (round 2)

Last weekend, I created a "fit-to-serve" index by state. As I was constructing it, it felt like too much emphasis was being put on the percentage of each state's population on parole, on probation, in jail, or in prison. So I went back and reworked the numbers in to create a more straightforward, less arbitrary way of measuring eligibility by state--I simply added the totals of the three inhibiting factors together and then subtracted that sum from 100 to get the percentage of each state's young adult population that is deemed potentially fit-to-serve in the military*:

State	Eligible %
1. Vermont	59.8
2. Minnesota	59.2
3. Wisconsin	57.4
4. Iowa	57.1
5. North Dakota	55.4
6. Connecticut	53.0
7. Montana	52.7
8. Utah	52.4
9. New Hampshire	51.9
10. South Dakota	51.5
11. New Jersey	50.1
12. Pennsylvania	49.4
13. Maine	48.8
14. Missouri	48.2
15. Oregon	48.0
16. Wyoming	47.4
17. Maryland	47.3
18. Massachusetts	46.8
19. Nebraska	46.7
20. Colorado	46.6
21. Idaho	46.4
22. Kansas	46.1
23. Oklahoma	45.6
24. Rhode Island	44.2
25. Hawaii	42.9
26. Michigan	42.3
27. Ohio	42.0
28. Virginia	41.8
29. Washington	41.7
30. Illinois	41.4
31. West Virginia	40.5
32. Indiana	40.2
33. California	37.2
34. Kentucky	36.1
35. Arizona	36.0
36. Texas	35.5
37. Delaware	35.2
38. New York	34.1
39. Tennessee	33.5
40. Arkansas	32.6
41. North Carolina	32.4
42. Alaska	32.2
43. Florida	28.8
44. Alabama	27.9
45. New Mexico	23.1
46. South Carolina	22.4
47. Louisiana	21.2
48. Georgia	19.3
49. Mississippi	17.4
50. Nevada	15.9
51. District of Columbia	15.2

What immediately jumps out is how white (and geographically concentrated in the upper Midwest and Northeast) the states with high eligibility are compared to those with more modestly sized eligible populations. The correlation between the percentage of a state's population that is white and the percentage of the young adult population deemed eligible for military service is .67 (p = 0).

So much for the idea of granting citizenship to immigrants upon some set duration of military service--unless they are among the sliver of newcomers hailing from Europe, they won't be able to get in! Because far less than 1% of the adult population is actually serving in the military at any given time, to assert that the perpetual decrease in the proportion of the country's population that is white will make it difficult for the military to find potentially eligible recruits actually isn't justified (though being able to find willingly eligible recruits is a separate issue).

The report's public authors, a cadre of retired military officers, do not mention the demographic angle (nor should they, as it is of course irrelevant!). They do emphasize the putative benefit of early education in reducing criminality and increasing the likelihood of on-time graduation throughout, though--in fact, the report is subtitled "Early Education across America is Needed to Ensure National Security"!

Then, without any apparent sense of self-defeat, the report's appendix includes a table showing the percentages of each state's 4-year-old populations enrolled in pre-kindergarten schooling. This measure inversely correlates with latent graduation rates at a statistically insignificant .09 (p = .53) and probation or incarceration rates at a similarly statistically insignificant .06 (p = .69). That is, early education is not associated with desirable social outcomes like on-time high school graduation and steering clear of the law at the state level, despite the praise heaped upon early education and its supposed long-term benefits.

In the comment thread of the previous post, Silly Girl, perspicaciously detecting the lack of any relationship just by eye-balling the table, remarked:

Ugh, page after page of that report trumpeting the benefits of pre k education, then on page 7 the charts of pre k ed. and graduation rates showing no relationship to graduating based on going to free public pre k. Do they think people can't read and think? Okay, dumb question. Do they think no one, even the more educated folks who likely would read it, would question it?

Kurt9 didn't see anything intentionally furtive going on:

People in bureaucracies don't think, period. Its not that they thought they could slip this report past readers without them reading it critically. Its that they did not even think about this at all.

Whatever the explanation, it is, in the literal sense of the word, ridiculous.

Parenthetically, reassuring me that this method is superior to the index I previously created, the correlation between estimated average IQ and the percentage of the young adult population deemed eligible for military service is .78 (p=0) (IQ correlated with my "fit-to-serve" index at .54); as always, desirable social outcomes and intelligence go hand-in-hand.

* This method assumes no overlap among the three inhibiting factors, even though there likely is a significant amount of it--I suspect failing to graduate from high school on time, being overweight, and scuffling with the law all correlate positively with one another. But I see little reason to suspect the amount of overlap varies significantly by state--that they are likely correlated (the report from which the data come does not attempt to tease out what the true percentage of each state's population deemed eligible for service actually is) means the table above inflates the percentages of state populations deemed ineligible for military service, but in a systematic way that doesn't materially effect some states more than others.