Not everything in life is muddled and befuddled

Ben Southwood left the following comment worth remarking upon in the thread on a previous post concerning feminism's War on Biology:

Mainly interesting and reasonably plausible, but the bit about female entry into the labour market and wages is almost certainly untrue, something I'd bet practically any economist could agree on. When a woman enters the labour force she adds to demand as well as supply. When this sort of argument comes from someone with other reasons they don't like women working, then it sounds very much like motivated reasoning.

Perhaps, though it seems nearly every economist professes to believe that immigration exerts no meaningful downward pressure on wages, too, and I'm unconvinced on that front as well!

In fact, I think there is a lot of overlap in the two fallacies. Adding wage earners will increase total consumer spending, but that's not what anyone outside of GMU cares about. The important issue is whether or not it raises per capita spending power. Annexing Mexico tomorrow would increase the United States' GDP by 8% in one fell swoop, but we'd be a poorer country as a consequence.

If the new wage earners earn more than the existing wage earners, then it is possible (though not necessarily the case) that income per wage earner will increase overall, but if the new wage earners earn less than the existing wage earners--as is overwhelming the case in the US with both women and immigrants--per capita wages are going to stagnate or even decline despite improvements in productivity. Additionally, a growing labor pool and the subsequent increase in competition among wage earners that larger labor pool brings with it, allows those who own the means of production to reap more benefit from productivity gains than those who work for them as employees do. That's been the story for decades now.

Women continue to earn less than men not because of irrational discrimination in the workplace--if that was the case, you or I could get rich tomorrow by starting a firm in an industry where such irrational discrimination is commonplace, overwhelmingly hire the qualified, underpaid women in the field who are getting snubbed, and watch the profits flow in... Okay, that's hyperbolic and oversimplified, and there is of course some level of irrationality in virtually all human affairs, but this sort of irrational discrimination is isolated and marginal in the contemporary scheme of things.

Instead, it is because they are less interested in and less devoted to their careers than men are for obvious biological and cultural reasons--reasons that the vast majority of people instinctively understand. Additionally, they aren't as adept men in industries that pay exceptionally well--primarily those requiring lots of high level math, like engineering and physics.

Parenthetically, immigrants in the US earn less than natives because they tend to be less educated, less intelligent, and less entrepreneurial than indigenous Americans are, and the gap doesn't close even after multiple generations of their descendants have been in the country.

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.

White flight from the white robe?

Taking note of Alfred Clark's observations about the 'ghettoization' of Christianity, the Derb recently wrote a piece for VDare exploring the phenomenon of white flight from the religion, an abandonment distinct from the general trend towards secularization in that it appears to be occurring more rapidly among whites than among NAMs.

The GSS has data on religious self-identification extending back through the early seventies up to the present. The following graph traces, by year, the percentages of non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Hispanics who indicated they had no religious affiliation. The mean sample sizes by year are 1112, 126, and 108, respectively:

Understanding there is some noise present in the year-to-year sampling, the white irreligious rate has been higher than the NAM irreligious rate has been over at least the last several decades. While the ratio hasn't changed much over the time period in question, the fact that the irreligious proportion of the population has gone from being fringe at the margins to the sizable minority that it is today probably makes the racial disparity more recognizable now than it was then. In the seventies, someone with no religious affiliation was so rare--and the proselytizing shrillness of New Atheism not yet a thing among them--that most people's pattern recognition software didn't pick up on the racial characteristics of non-believers. Today nearly one-in-five whites professes no affiliation, so if a person knows a handful of white guys, there's a good chance he knows at least one atheist or agnostic. And among an average person's facebook social circle there are tens or hundreds of people without any religious affiliation.

GSS variables used: RELIG(4), YEAR, ETHNIC(1)(2-3,6-15,18-19,21,23-27,32-33,36)(17,22,38)

Sharing is caring?

Heartiste from a few years ago:

The verdict is in: Women want men to cheat on them. Oh sure, they don’t *consciously* want their men to cheat, but unbeknownst to all but the most self aware women, their ginas tingle uncontrollably for men who can — and do — score some poon on the side.

In the vast majority (though likely not all, female sexual variation being what it is) of cases, there's no question that the first part of the assertion--that women tend to be attracted to men who other women are attracted to--is indisputable. Women want you to be capable of cheating. Then again, men want the women they are banging--at least the ones who arouse them more than their own pillows do--to be able to cheat, too, but if they've signed up for the relationship thing, virtually none of them actually want the women to go through with it (if you're not a regular reader here, yes, I'm quite aware that men and women are anatomically, biologically, psychologically, politically, sexually, emotionally, cognitively, etc etc different from one another).

What about the latter part, though? Do they actually want you to dip your pen in another woman's ink? It's difficult to make sense of why, from an evolutionary perspective, females would want their mates to sire offspring with (and presumably provide resources to) other women. The hindbrain isn't going to make distinctions between copulation and procreation when it comes to their men getting with other women, so this is not a straw man argument, it's the logical extension of what Heartiste claims.

The following table shows the percentages of men who were (still) married at the time of their participation in the survey by whether or not they had ever cheated on their spouses and the percentages of men who were divorced or separated when given the survey by whether or not they had ever cheated on their spouses while they were married. For contemporary relevance and racial confounding, all responses are from 2000 onward and only non-Hispanic whites are included, respectively. The relevant questions are posed in such a way that those who have never married are necessarily excluded (N = 3,218):

White men	Still Married	Sep/Divorced
Cheaters	16.0	37.2
Faithful	84.0	62.8

Men from failed marriages are more than twice as likely to have cheated before those marriages officially came apart than are men from marriages that are still in tact.

No, this does not obviously constitute a refutation of Heartiste's assertion. The limitations of a broad based survey like the GSS preclude digging as deeply as would be required for us to take a shot at evaluating that.

For one, we don't have data on who initiated the divorces and separations--how frequently do the men who are cheating leave the marriage because they're ready to trade in the old ride for a new model or simply go back to leasing altogether? How frequently do the women who find out about the cheating break off the marriage as a consequence? We also lack data on if the women who have been cheated on--whether the men who did the cheating are still married or since separated or divorced--were aware of the cheating when it took place, subsequently became aware of it, or remained in the dark up to the point when the responses were given. Finally, we don't know if the married men who have cheated on a spouse were, at the time they partook in the survey, still married to the women they cheated on or if they'd divorced and then remarried someone new (though knowledge on that front would probably just accentuate the relationship between cheating and divorce rather than attenuating or inverting it).

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY(1-2), MARITAL(1)(3-4), RACECEN1(1), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1)

Poor people's poor sense

Cross-posted at HuffPo

This post will appear lacking in systematic structure because poor people tend to be fatalistic. Low future time orientation and few social obligations combine to create an existence that seems impulsive and chaotic from vantage points higher up the ladder. We look at the poverty and pretend to wonder why. We know the what and the how, we can see all the decisions and behaviors that precede the seemingly intractable problems, but it’s rare to have someone actually explain the why without resorting to epicycles and all the pretty lies that accompany them.

Social obligations are the millstones the middle and upper classes refuse to take off their necks. Voluntarily so you might say, but many of them don’t even take all the vacation their employers give them, let alone bailing unexpectedly. They force themselves to sleep before they really want to and then set obnoxious alarms that force them out of bed long before the sun is up. They juggle school, work, church, sports games, civic activities, and on and on—I don’t do many of these things, and none of them with any consistency. I’d rather just mill around in public places, maybe playing a knockout game here or a joining a flash mob there. I’m not married, but if I ever do tie the knot, it’s a good bet that I’ll cut that knot long before my avowed obligations expire. I have plenty of time to think about what I’m doing, but it’s not in my constitution to do so. Planning isn’t in the mix.

I’m coming off as far more eloquent and articulate than I actually am because my thoughts are being edited by someone who reads more books in a month than I will in my entire life. I don’t know what words like “pact” and “animosity” mean, though I do use the word “fuck” a lot, and quite creatively to boot—as a verb, an adjective, a noun, and an of course as onomatopoeia.

I don’t remember the first time I got pregnant. I was bouncing back and forth between my abusive baby daddy and my mom’s apartment. He wasn’t faithful but he was good in bed and shared with me the money he made in exchange for the WIC and EBT benefits I got for being a single mother without any reported income. I like to smoke and drink, and the things science says are changing all the time anyway, so I wasn’t going to stop just because my menstrual cycle had.

Yeah, I have the time to cook, I already said that. But that’s hard, boring work and getting fresh meat and produce means going all the way to the grocery store two miles down the road. There’s a convenient store in walking distance just around the corner where I can get Red Bull and Bomb Burritos with a swipe of my freeBT card. They even have a microwave so I can heat the food up after you buy it for me. I have time to clean, too, but I don’t do that either, so a lot of creepy crawly things live with me.

I try to live like I have the purchasing power of someone in the middle class, but I lack the prerequisite combination of intelligence, executive function, and shrewdness to procure the resources required to enjoy said purchasing power on my own. Better not to try. In fact, the less I try, the easier it is to have the state provide that purchasing power for me. Why would I give up time for sensual pleasures like junk food, nicotine, and spontaneous sex to engage in creating value for someone else? Those working class stiffs need a stiff drink, that’s what they need.

I live in a vibrant area and consequently there are a couple of Planned Parenthood centers amidst the conurbation I stomp around in, but even if I lived three hours away from the nearest one, the profiteering not-for-profit do-gooders and their government enablers who run PP would happily cover my travel costs.

Our society spends way too much time and effort medically remediating a whole host of conditions that our ancestors hardly knew. There are drugs for everything. Blue bloods doctor shop for the prescriptions they want, but I have my own contacts on the ground for getting the stuff whenever I want it. I don’t get vacation per se, but I get a lot more time off than my social betters do. If I was able or even wanted to spend all that excess free time working, I wouldn’t be poor, after all.

I think I’d make a great movie star and do even better with a reality show, but I can’t even get a job as a waitress (though I have enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame here—twice!) because I have stained teeth and it looks like I used to chew on rocks, my BMI is over 30 but an ignorant outsider could be forgiven for mistakenly believing my wardrobe belonged to someone half my size, I shower irregularly and often don’t wash my hair when I do, and when I inevitably make an error on the application I fill out, I don’t have the patience to grab a new one but instead scratch out the mistake and write the correct thing in wherever I can find room.

Beauty is a thing you get when you’re a post-pubescent teenager. After that, you have to work to keep it. And, well, you already know how I feel about work.

Meth makes you overly alert to everything. Before Breaking Bad, nobody realized that. I’ve spent a lot of hours telling cashiers about all the things I need to take care of like right now, haha, sorry, *itch* I also want that, I get so forgetful, sorry *scratch* yeah sure that’s fine haha ohwheredidIputthatohhahaIputitoverthere. If only it would lead me to pull up my sleeves and get my shit together like it pulls back the skin on my face. It doesn’t work, but that is tweaking.

“Free” is only enticing if the object in question is something you want. It’s great that there are free condom giveaways in the convenient stores where I buy my bread (not by the loaf, rather one cinnamon-and-sugar topped roll at a time), but sex doesn’t feel as good with those things on.

Clinics? Specialists? Co-pays? Seriously?! Might as well be speaking Greek to me. If something’s wrong, I’ll go to the ER. They’ll see me anytime day or night, and they don’t make me do a bunch of stuff ahead of time or force me to produce an insurance card.

I smoke. It’s expensive. Okay, you’re with me on that one. If I justified it by feeding you a line about how it is the battery to my Energizer Bunny and then in the same paragraph called it a source of relaxation, well—what’s that? Ah yes, lack of structure, chaotic, impulsive—now you’re seeing exactly what I mean.

You might think I make a lot of poor financial decisions, but that’s because you’re so concerned with the past and the future that you’re forgetting about how I’m feeling in the present, too obsessed with gathering ideas of how it’ll all inevitably end for me. But if all it takes is a swipe of this piece of plastic to sate my appetites, what kind of sucker would I be not to take advantage? There’s an indefatigable pull to spend any money I can get my hands on before it burns a hole in my pocket. Look what being responsible gets you—a bunch of extra zeroes in your bank account that you never let yourself enjoy? And don’t get supercilious about your knowledge of financial instruments, blue blood. I know more about money orders and payday loans than you do, and I've played these same numbers for the last four months so I'm due to hit the jackpot any day now.

Understanding that I lack the long-term orientation we mentioned earlier, it should be easy to understand why you see people like me with four different baby daddies instead of one husband and father. We skip on the abortion because the irresistible pull that made us feel worthwhile at the time is something we can have over and over again afterwards just by letting nature take its course. Compromise isn’t our thing so we’re rarely compatible for the long-term, but carnality can keep us together for a couple of months, or at least a few hours anyway. It does not matter what will happen in a month. We don’t plan long-term because we’re fly, you ain’t cause you not. We take what we can as we spot it.

I’m not asking for sympathy (but I am asking for money. Have any to spare? God bless!), I’m just trying to explain, through parody, some of the many ways members of the Cathedral and their Great And Good Votaries deny empirical, ‘ugly’ realities in favor of self-serving pretty lies. Dive into the links provided and then take a gander at the interactive General Social Survey site to get a sense of what life is like in the Dark Enlightenment and a feel for the mechanisms that red-pill poppers employ in an effort to understand the world as it is rather than as we might wish it be. It’s certainly self-defeating, but it’s nobler.

GSS variables used: OWNFATE, REALINC(0-20000)(20001-999999), WORDSUM, NUMMEN, MARITAL, SMOKE, INTRWGHT, RACECEN1, GOVAID, JOBYEARS

Standing as one

A friendly gadfly notes the seemingly out-of-character failure to break down the results on preferred methods of raising a family by race. It wasn't included for a few reasons; as someone with an inclination towards citizenism, there are times when capturing the entire American flavor sounds more appetizing than unnecessarily compartmentalizing the palates (although that's admittedly an approach that doesn't tell the whole story--further drilling down is usually required); racial differences are fairly marginal; and sample sizes for non-whites aren't as large we would ideally like them to be.

But the data are there, so why cover them up? Decide for yourself if there is anything additional that needs saying. The following table shows the percentages of respondents, by race (N in parentheses) in 2012, who identified each of the following six scenarios as the most ideal:

Arrangement	Whites (712)	Blacks (151)	Hispanics (73)	Asians (46)
Mother home, father full-time	40.6%	34.7%	45.4%	34.4%
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.1%	43.2%	36.3%	53.6%
Both full-time	11.3%	17.3%	2.3%	7.5%
Both part-time	6.3%	4.7%	14.9%	4.5%
Mother full-time, father part-time	0.2%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Mother full-time, father home	0.6%	0.0%	1.1%	0.0%

Even among a segment of the population for which over two-thirds of babies are born out of wedlock, the acknowledged ideal is one in which dad brings home the bacon and mom cooks it up.

It is often errantly argued that Hispanics are "natural conservatives", though these results make them appear quite progressive indeed--nearly 15% of those surveyed seem to have acclimated themselves to a Peak Jobs future in which part-time employment becomes more and more the norm not merely among the elderly and those in school, but among those in their prime working years as well.

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), FAMWKBST(1-6)

They aren't meant to pee standing up

++Addition++Staffan points out that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, the concept of feminism as an organizing principle is in decline:

How much of that is due to realization of biological differences and how much is due to female concerns being superseded by the concerns of 'victim' classes like blacks and gays who higher up on the victimology pyramid?

---

Gavin McInnes went into the HuffPo harpy's nest to--colorfully, as is his wont--assert that women tend to be happier following their maternal instincts than they are devoting all their energy to getting ahead in the rat race. He was met with lots of supercilious condescension but, predictably, nothing he asserted was empirically challenged. Unfortunately, his empirical grounding was insinuated rather than explicitly presented. The GSS can aid him in the future.

For starters, let's look at feminism as an idea. In the mid-nineties, the GSS asked respondents whether or not they considered themselves feminists. Self-described feminists, despite being modestly better educated, more intelligent (based on wordsum scores), and wealthier than those who didn't identify as such, reported lower levels of personal happiness than non-feminists. The following table shows the feminist/non-feminist breakdown among women who describe themselves as "very happy", "pretty happy", and "not too happy":

Happiness	Feminists	Normals
Very happy	24.5%	75.5%
Pretty happy	27.8%	72.2%
Not too happy	34.4%	65.6%

Feminists comprise less than one-quarter of women who are "very happy" but over one-third of those who are "not too happy".

Sure, the argument can be made that happiness is subjective and even though the non-feminists are more content, they're not objectively doing as well since they don't have as much money or education as the feminists do. That line of reasoning doesn't contradict McInnes' point, though. Instead, it strengthens it. Making that sort of judgment in favor of feminists because of career success is to assess female success by traditionally male--that is, masculine--standards, and the women whose lives more resemble men in this regard express lower levels of happiness than do women who travel life's more traditionally feminine path.

If that's overly abstract, let's take a look from another angle, one of social cohesion. In 2004, the GSS conducted a special module querying respondents on the most important aspect of their identities. Participants were able to choose from a list of ten, three of which are of special relevance to this discussion--occupation, gender, and family/marital status. The following table shows, among women who indicated one of those three identifiers as most important to defining who they are, the percentages who are "very proud", "somewhat proud", and "not very proud" of being American:

Identifies by	Very proud	Somewhat proud	Not very proud
Occupation	78.3%	18.7%	3.0%
Gender	70.2%	26.0%	3.8%
Family/marital status	84.3%	14.3%	1.3%

Women who are women, first and foremost, are the least content with the society they live in, those who most strongly identify with their work more middling, and those who care most about hearth and heart the most satisfied with it.

The survey also shows that, across a variety of measures, men are more willing than women are to make sacrifices--overtime, odd shifts, etc--in other areas of their lives for the sake of work. The converse of this, of course, is that women are less willing to put work ahead of other areas of life, like, say, raising a family.

What about the perceptions broader society has regarding what is, generally, the more preferable way for families to be raised? Collected in 2012, these figures still have that new car smell. The tables are reposted here from a post put together earlier this year. The following table shows the percentages of respondents who identified each of the following six scenarios as the most ideal:

Arrangement, all responses	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	39.7
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.6
Both full-time	11.3
Both part-time	6.8
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.5

Looks like we need a runoff to decide whether or not the woman should be a full time homemaker or should instead enjoy occasional breaks from the homestead to earn a few bucks while dad takes the kids. Fewer than 1-in-100 think Mr. Mom is the way to go, and the dual careerist path where, in McInnes' words, "shaping a human life" is put on the back burner, isn't very popular either.

Some great victory women in the workforce has been! On the bright side, though, it's self-perpetuating objective--the more women there are working, the lower the wages both working men and working women are able to command, and consequently the greater the need for women to enter the workforce to make ends meet, let alone raise a family!

Perhaps it's skewed heavily by the patriarchal enforcers of patriarchy, the patriarchs themselves. The response results, this time with only women considered:

Arrangement, women only	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	33.6
Mother part-time, father full-time	45.7
Both full-time	11.7
Both part-time	8.5
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.3

The vast majority--we're talking 4 out of 5--of Americans conceive of the ideal family environment being one in which a man works full-time and a woman works either part-time or not at all. It's as though they recognize some sort of special bond between a mother and the child her body spent nine devoted months bringing into the world.

Maybe the patriarchs have brainwashed their own barefoot wives slaving away in the kitchen into falling for the breadwinner-homemaker ideal, but what about women who think for themselves? Liberal women only (n = 130):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	23.1
Mother part-time, father full-time	48.4
Both full-time	12.9
Both part-time	15.0
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.6

The feminists may have three or four waves on their side, but McInnes has the tsunamic force of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary forces on his.

GSS variables used: SEX(2), HAPPY, FEMINIST, FAMWKBST(1-6), SEX(2), POLVIEWS(1-3), AMPROUD1(1-3), SOCID1(1,3,8)

Liberty and equality, stoics and epicureans

Just as there is an enormous amount of tension between the consular ideals of liberty and equality, so too is there in aspiring to provide the best health care available while simultaneously striving to make health care ubiquitous and universally accessible. Anti-Gnostic does a great job succinctly articulating as much, with the following excerpt of demonstrating particular perspicacity:

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let's take those evil capitalists out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. ... 

We are in the realm of social justice. Sounds so nice, until we answer the question: how much of your children's money do you want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others? 

Because you can spend ALL of your money on futile care [or, by extension, the government can spend it for you]. Literally every last penny.

Worth reading in full.

Abstractly, the strong appeal of liberty--potentially even stronger than that of equality in the much of the public's mind--is why, despite actual policy disagreements on crucial issues like immigration, I'm still excited by the rise of guys like Rand Paul.

Anyway, Heartiste first brought the above to my attention. Speaking of the galactic overlord, he gently censured his occasionally inimical dux for insinuating that the Game approach to classifying males has it backwards due to the tendency of betas to outbreed alphas (which should mean even more cleaning up by the remaining alphas!). At the risk of getting lost in semantic weeds, I'm fine granting the Manosphere its preferred terms and consequent definitions and then making empirical observations free of normative judgments from within this framework. Hopefully it's illuminating or at least interesting. All the better if it keeps our hero's skills at their sharpest.

To the extent that I'm grated at all by Heartiste, it's in his seeming celebration of what amounts to an ennui-inducing mix of realized hedonism and nihilism. His meaning is often as nuanced as his tongue is silver, and I suspect that beneath all the veils lies a volition more inclined towards using sexual conquest as a means to an end rather than an end to indulge in for it's own sake, despite protestations to the contrary. Oh yes he doth protest, but I don't buy it, which is why I'm compelled to play the role of affectionate gadfly rather than whiny hater.

This isn't all merely a philosophical rehashing of Stoic vs. Epicurean, either. You might not care about propagation, but propagation cares about you. It's plausible to imagine that in the not-so-distant future pleasure surpassing that coming to a "Super Alpha" on an A-game night will be made available to all on demand without any real life human interaction being required at all. Just as the reproductive edge has shifted away from alphas and towards betas over at least the last half century, so another seismic shifting in fecundity may be just around the bend. I want kindred souls to be ready for it.

Finally, a post like this wouldn't be complete without an added wrinkle or two. The data are a couple of decades old, but the GSS queried respondents in 1994 on whether or not they'd watched any pornography in the preceding year. Cross-referencing this with reported sex frequency, we find that men who had sex less than once a month over the same period of time were considerably less likely to have viewed pornographic material than men who had sex more frequently than that were to have viewed any (18.2% and 38.1%, respectively, N = 183). For more contemporary, if proxied, relevance, using male respondent data from 2000 onward, we find that men who report not having sex at all in the last year are more than twice as likely as men who enjoy it 4+ times per week to support an outright ban on pornographic material (36.9% and 16.5%, respectively, with a sizeable chunk of that 16.5% of 4+ times per week group presumably being comprised of social and religious conservatives). Pornography, at least from this angle, appears to be more of a supplement to real life carnality than a substitute for it.

Undoubtedly there are a lot of frustrated betas out there who would love to possess an alpha prowess with women, but there are also a lot of them who just aren't that interested in recreational sex (and I suspect the latter has been and continues to increase as a proportion of the total male population). This probably goes some way in explaining why the unending comment threads Heartiste generates are mostly populated by alphas echoing the taunts and diminutions of the beta no shows, who, while constituting a majority of the population, are far less likely to be found than sheer numbers would suggest. How much attention is this Silent Majority paying?

GSS variables used: XMOVIE1, SEXFREQ(0-2)(3-6)(0)(6), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1), PORNLAW(1)(2-3)

Pat on the butt too much for Pats' fans

As a complement to Jayman's recent post on state laws regarding corporal punishment, I'll note that blacks express the greatest support for the practice as a means of disciplining children. Additional positive correlates include being male, politically conservative, and of modest intelligence. The GSS item doesn't specify who the spanker is, though it's reasonable to assume that much of the time the respondent has a parent in mind--if the question specifically inquired about opinions on schools using corporal punishment, the approval rates would surely be lower across the board.

One of Jayman's recurring themes is to employ an American Nations paradigm when evaluating social phenomena. The GSS doesn't allow quite that level of granularity, but it does break survey participants up by census region. The percentages of respondents who either "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement "It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking". For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. Here is a map of said regions for those who are unfamiliar with them:

Region	%Spank
1) East South Central	85.9
2) South Atlantic	80.0
3) West South Central	78.5
4) East North Central	72.9
5) Mountain	71.8
6) West North Central	71.4
7) Mid Atlantic	68.2
8) Pacific	64.1
9) New England	46.9

Most acceptable in the South, least so in the Northeast. Embers of the Civil War burn on.

And the same, by reported ethnicity. Minimum sample size of 50, though N is much exceeds that for most groups:

Ethnicity	%Spank
1) African	84.5
2) "American"	81.5
3) Native American	79.0
4) Scottish	78.5
5) Puerto Rican	78.3
6) Dutch	74.9
7) English/Welsh	73.3
8) German	73.1
9) French	71.3
10) Spanish	71.1
11) Mexican	69.0
12) Irish	68.4
13) Filipino	64.5
14) Swedish	63.3
15) Italian	63.0
16) Chinese	61.6
17) Norwegian	61.3
18) Indian (dot)	59.7
19) Russian	59.4
20) Czechoslovakian	58.1

White liberals, black rednecks. Those who refer to themselves as "American" are largely Scottish, and unsurprisingly express attitudes similar to those who consider the highlands to be an ancestral homeland. Most people in the US of Russian national descent are Jewish, not little Putins. No idea about the Slavs!

Parenthetically, regarding the question of ethnicity, people much smarter and far more perspicacious than myself have said that in the contemporary US it is basically meaningless. Perhaps as a biological marker, okay, though it does track geographically and it seems to provide some insight into cultural characteristics. My working assumption is to treat it as good--or at least useful--information, and not an enemy of the perfect even if it falls well short of being as much.

Finally, in the comments section of Jayman's post, there is some incredulity about the use of corporal punishment among readers who are from states where it is legal. I suspect that in these states it occurs almost exclusively in private schools, though few if any of the state laws distinguish between public and private in questions of the legal permissibility of the practice.

GSS variables used: SPANKING(1-2)(3-4), YEAR(2000-2012), REGION, ETHNIC(1)(5)(6)(7)(10)(11)(14)(15)(17)(18)(19)(20)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(30)(31)(97)

Those disapproving of Obama more intelligent than those approving of him!

Although the 2012 GSS did not include any questions on presidential voting plans for the same year, the survey did sneak in a question on presidential approval, querying respondents on whether they approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling the job of president. Because it's fun and often causes people to make fools of themselves, here are IQ estimates derived from wordsum scores for those approving and disapproving of Obama's performance, presuming an average national IQ of 98 and a standard deviation of 15:

Approve -- 97.7
Disapprove -- 98.5

A nation divided. Race, of course, is a confounding factor. When only non-Hispanic whites are considered:

Approve -- 101.5
Disapprove -- 99.3

Per usual, white leftists could appear more credible in the supercilious scorn they have for their bigoted brethren if they acknowledged as much. Since they're afraid to do so, however, let it be known that Obama's supporters aren't quite as intelligent as his detractors are!

More insightfully, the GSS results provide a useful illustration of what the Derb terms "classic class conflict: the top and the bottom against the middle". The following graph shows Obama's approval/disapproval numbers among members of five categories in which respondents are classified based on their wordsum scores*:

If only I could remain stuck in the middle with you. Unfortunately, stasis appears to be a dream of the past, not the way of the future.

GSS variables used: PRESPOP, WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), RACECEN1(1)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble 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%).

White New England Protestants, a liberal lot they are not

As a myopic provincial, the figure I conceptualize in my mind as politically representative of New Englanders is a theistically ambivalent liberal white Protestant. A SWPL, basically. N/A, proprietor of R/H/E Notes, who has set me straight on misconceptions in the past, may have done so again by showing that Romney enjoyed a comfortable edge among white Protestants in New England in last November's presidential election.

The GSS allows us to look back almost as far as LBJ and the Great Society to see how white New England Protestants have voted over the last forty years. To avoid regional skews (self-identified New England Republicans tending to be to the left of Republicans on the whole, etc), only presidential elections are considered. The following graph traces the percentages of white New England Protestants and the national popular electorate as a whole who voted for the Republican candidate over the last four decades of US presidential elections as though there were only two tickets to choose from:

Sample sizes are small, in the 50-100 range for each election, so some sampling error is surely present, but the trend is clear--most Protestant white New Englanders find their seats on the right side of the national assembly hall. Only in 1996 do they appear more Democratically-inclined than does the public, and then only marginally so. If they built the Cathedral, they haven't been its most pious votaries.

GSS variables used: PRES68, PRES72, PRES76, PRES80, PRES84, PRES88, PRES92, PRES96, PRES00, PRES04, PRES08, RELIG(1), RACE(1), REGION(1)

Denominational doubt and devotion

Agnostic's insights into hair color and heaven (lots of blondes in half-hearted denominations like Episcopalianism, relatively fewer among the more committed, like Baptists) got me wondering about certainty of belief among members of major religious institutions in the contemporary US. And it's not like I need even that flimsy a segue to report as much, because the results fit the blog's tagline quite well. The following table shows the percentages of members of each major religious denomination* who assert that "I know God exists and I have no doubts about it":

Tradition	%Exists
1. Mormon	88.1
2. Jehovah's Witness	87.9
3. Baptist	82.6
4. Church of Christ	80.4
5. Non-denominational Christian	70.8
6. Muslim	68.3
7. Methodist	64.1
8. Catholic	63.7
9. Lutheran	62.0
Entire US population	61.3
10. Presbyterian	60.1
11. Episcopalian	52.6
12. Unitarian	44.6
13. Jewish	35.7
14. No religious affiliation	21.3
15. Buddhist	16.0

No big surprises. The only variations between my own predictions and the results are the marginal edge Mormons have over Jehovah's Witnesses (I guessed Witnesses would be the most zealously theistic), Muslims being further down the list than anticipated (I thought they'd be neck-and-neck with Mormons), and Jews coming in under even Unitarians. So obvious even an epigone could call it.

Neither my fiance nor I are religious, but my inclination is to give my kids some exposure to organized religion during their formative years. Her family is Episcopalian, mine Lutheran. If you're going to commit to something, take it seriously! Consequently, I think Lutheran is the way we'll go--it's at least in the respectable middle. Better yet, maybe we'll become Baptists. What we might lose in social connections we'll more than make up for by instilling some earnestness in our offspring.

* Yep, even though only 51 Muslim respondents fell within the relevant parameters, making them the smallest sample represented in the table, they're inclusion is mandatory. After all, Islam has always been part of America and American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country!

GSS variables used: GOD(6), RELIG(2)(3)(4)(6)(9), DENOM(10-18)(20-28)(30-38)(40-48)(50)(70), OTHER(34-35)(58)(61,64)(80-82,95), YEAR(2000-2012)

Expendables are more interesting

Genetically, men are more expendable than women are. Historically for our species around 40% of men and 80% of women reproduced. Alphas ruled the past. But the biological world isn't static and significant evolutionary changes can occur in the geological blink of an eye. Today in the US the gap has narrowed substantially. The GSS shows that 81% of men and 86% of women who've made it through their reproductive careers have procreated. Genetic continuance is a lot more egalitarian than it used to be, especially for men. Fecundity is now a beta trait. Still, while we're not the same people who lived during ancient Roman times, let alone the same people as the first neolithic agriculturalists, we're not an alien species to them, either. Grok is relevant to us, even if he isn't exactly us.

If men are more expendable than women are, a presumable corollary is that, from a woman's perspective, characteristics of sexual attraction in men are more varied, more numerous, and less ubiquitous than the characteristics of sexual attraction in women are from the perspective of men. It takes a lot of time and effort for women to reproduce, and we need just about all of them to do it if the species is going to survive and prosper. Consequently, men overwhelmingly focus on signs of maximum fertility: Waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, healthy and supple skin, perky breasts that appear to defy gravity, lack of current impregnation, etc. The rest is mostly marginal stuff.

We can afford to be less conservative when it comes to men's contributions, which works out well since male contributions are the stronger drivers of evolutionary changes. Women aren't primed to detect signs of fertility in men. They aren't any better at identifying said signs than (disinterested) men are, and it's presence is usually uncertain (though presumed to be there) unless the last stages of intimacy reveal otherwise. Yes, older and fatter guys are more likely to have issues, but even among these 'at risk' categories, most are capable. Pubescence is just about the only prerequisite--once that box is checked off, female attraction moves on to assess a whole host of other characteristics: Status (ie command of resources and of other people, not evincing a need of approval from other people whether they be male or female, etc), humor, height and general physical fitness, intelligence, kindness, self-confidence, etc, with different women putting varying amounts of emphases on different dimensions of a more variegated (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) suite of desirability markers. Men are more interesting, if not necessarily more infatuating.

Tell me if I'm missing something, merely stating the obvious, or being overly presumptive with an amateur's understanding of evolutionary psychology.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, SEX, AGE(40-65), YEAR(2000-2012)

Certainty of God's existence is now a minority position among young whites

In an intriguing post (when are his anything but?) criticizing the New Atheists' evangelism, Jayman remarks:

This indicates that religious belief – or lack there of – is largely intractable. It is a futile effort to get people to give up religion en masse (or, for that matter, to get non-believers to believe). You may have some individual “successes”, largely because of changing the environmental context of people who already had the genetic potential for whatever belief you want to instill, but you’re not going to achieve broad change in the population.

While we're not looking at a phenomenon operating at anything close to the velocity in the rate of change we've seen in the western world with regards to homosexuality, atheism is on the rise. Heredity isn't the whole story. Theists have more children than non-believers do, and they start having them sooner. That broad pattern has characterized the US for at least the last century, yet rates of belief have gently but steadily declined over that period of time. Correspondingly, professed atheism continues ticking upwards, having more than doubled over the last couple of decades. More than a few atheist spawn are springing from the loins of the faithful.

In this battle between nature (which favors theists) and nurture (which favors atheists), the atheists can scarcely afford to forgo missionary work if they want to maintain and extend upon the gains they've made in the 'culture war'.

The GSS has queried respondents on their belief in God since 1988. The following graph shows the changes that have occurred over the last 25 years. To avoid racial and generational confounding, only whites under the age of 40 are considered:

While atheists and agnostics remain squarely in the minority, their combined representation has doubled over the period under consideration. Meanwhile, the 20-point advantage firm believers ("I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it") had over uncertain theists ("I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind", "I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others", and "While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God") has completely vanished.

Whether this is because of, in spite of, or uninfluenced by the rise of militant atheism is another question, as is the judgment of whether this is a boon or a bust for society in general, but, while belief in the supernatural might not be especially elastic, it isn't static, either.

GSS variables used: RACE(1), AGE(18-39), GOD(1)(2)(3-5)(6)

Destiny is child

++Addition++Do read Matt's comment.

---

Heartiste points to the writeup of a study by the tenaciously dissident Satoshi Kanazawa claiming to show an inverse correlation between IQ and maternal urge in women. In so doing, the former references a finding from the GSS showing that while fertility trends among women in the US are dysgenic when IQ is used as a measure, men appear to be treading water:

Smart and over-educated lawyercunts are a dying breed. Literally. I believe it was the Audacity of Huge [link mine, though presumably intended by that wily devil] who once tabulated and correlated GSS data to find that smart men have more children than dumb men, while smart women have fewer children than dumb women. I call this the “Alpha Male-Cute Secretary Assortative Mating” theory. You may know it better by its street handle: Female hypergamy. And… wait for it… it will be the salvation of the white race in multicultural miasmas.

Here's the post he had in mind, and the relevant graph (apologies for the atrocious aesthetics, but blogger was having a hell of a time uploading graphics at the time):

We've seen, from several different angles, that educational attainment specifically--rather than the intelligence it tends to correlate with--is where the robust inverse correlation with fecundity makes its bed.

The takeaway message for sharp guys with pessimistic views of the future of our collective demography, and consequently the outlook for modern Western Civilization as we know it, is to not make the perfect the enemy of the good and refuse to join the melee because to follow the aquila would entail condescending to fight alongside allies they perceive to be beneath them.

That thinking is suicidal. Demography is destiny. Find an effeminate, trustworthy, fun, sweet, mildly submissive girl desiring children to start a family with. If she's as sharp as a tac, great. As long as she's not an utter dunce, though, you'll still be striking a direct blow against the Idiocracy.

Incidentally, that's the only way such a blow can be struck--those like Heartiste who are sparring in the Circus Maximus and those of more modest abilities who are doing so in a wooden arena in Illyria alike are merely intellectual auxiliaries in the war against the Idiocracy. They may spur others to action, but they cannot win the actual battles on their own. We need you!

Pedant on that

In summarizing a post on college bank rollers, Steve writes:

In general, it appears that the biggest donors to colleges are conservatives.

To investigate this assertion rigorously would require something akin to Fortune's survey of the XXX wealthiest whatevers. The groups in question are too numerically small to be represented with any meaningful reliability in most wide-ranging, general surveys. Sometimes these surveys employ precision modules targeting niche respondent groups, but the results are often fruitless (and risible to boot). Case in point, the 2012 GSS includes a set of items pertaining to elements of Jewish identity. It garners relevant responses from a whopping 12 people. Hardly enough for a HBR case study, let alone statistical significance on a national scale. This isn't an isolated example, either.

While general surveys aren't capable of providing the electrolytes number crunchers crave, however, they often do at least provide some suggestive hydration in an otherwise arid environment. In 1996, the GSS queried respondents on how much they had donated to educational organizations in the past year. The following table presents a breakdown of the political orientation of donors who gave in the three figures and up (n = 131) and contrasts that distribution with the political persuasions of the broader population during the same period of time:

Politics	Donors	General
Conservative	43.8%	37.2%
Moderate	31.3%	37.9%
Liberal	24.9%	24.9%

Despite academia being an intellectual pillar of the leftist Cathedral, the bit of hard data we have suggests that perspicacity is Steve's middle name--conservatives give to schools more than their representation in the general population would predict they would. Note that this is despite the fact that, in general, liberals attain higher levels of educational attainment than conservatives do.

Parenthetically, we see yet another iteration of the tendency for moderates to be less engaged, involved, or aware than more committed ideologues are.

GSS variables used: POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), YEAR(1996), TOTEDUC(100-999999), JEWAJ

Geography, race, religion, and class

... is a ridiculously audacious title for the post it introduces.

Anyway, previously, Dan commented:

Poor inner city people go to church more than everyone else, and they theoretically believe in marriage. But they don't believe in losing the government checks.

Having read Charles Murray's Coming Apart, that assertion struck me as inaccurate, with the caveat in mind that, as Murray did through most of The Bell Curve, so as to avoid racial confounding, the relevant research includes only whites. I did a quick check of the GSS, confirming what Murray found--affluent people from rural and suburban areas go to church more than poor urban folks do.

However, Dan correctly pointed out that blacks attend worship services at significantly higher rates than whites do.

I ran the same GSS test, this time for whites exclusively and for blacks exclusively and found the same patterns for both racial groups--wealthy suburban and rural blacks go to church more than poor inner-city blacks do, and wealthy suburban and rural whites attend more than poor inner-city whites do. The rub is that poor urban blacks still attend more than wealthy suburban and rural whites do. Here are the averages. The higher the figure, the more frequently the group attends worship services (n = 2,468, one SD = 2.76):

Group	Attend
Wealthy country blacks	5.64
Poor urban blacks	4.12
Wealthy country whites	3.59
Poor urban whites	3.24

The "wealthy country blacks" row is only comprised of 23 respondents, so take it with caution, but the overall results pass the smell test.

If Dan's in error, it is in the assumption that urban poor = black. While the urban poor are far more likely to be black than the rest of the country is, in absolute terms I don't think blacks comprise an absolute majority of the country's poor city dwellers. As an empirical question, it's tough to get a straight answer because the definitions of "urban" and "poor" aren't standardized, with the idea of "urban" being a lot more expansive at the US Census office than the idea of "ghetto" is in the vernacular.

GSS variables used: RES16(1-4)(6), REALINC(0-30000)(100000-999999), YEAR(2000-2010), ATTEND, RACECEN1(1)(2)

Turned red, blue, purple, so colorful indeed

Think about the worst illness you've ever experienced, the kind of infection that sees you prostrated helplessly in front of the porcelain throne after making seven consecutive offerings to it while you desperately--and unsuccessfully--try to sneak a breath in edgewise, followed by a miserable, aching eternity of darkness in which your thoughts are, almost by necessity, about nothing other than being rid of the curse. If such an existence was your life's sentence, would you have the stomach to go on? What if it were to last, without interruption, for a full month?

These sorts of questions come to my mind whenever I'm mulling over the issue of assisted suicide (and in those mercifully rare times that I contract something so fierce). In answer to the first question, I'm a weak-willed buddhist--all of life is suffering, but I don't want to grit my teeth and bear it--get me out of here! To the second question, though, I like to think I would, and no worse for the wear.

How about if it were to continue for a full year, though? It's not difficult for me to sympathize with those who'd like to dismount from the mortal coil rather than be racked continuously by it as the earth makes it all the way around the sun. Yet if the person in question was someone I cared deeply about, I'd be tempted to compel him to suffer through it even, if he had access to a legally sanctioned, painless, clinically administered suicide escape hatch.

As is the case with so many social issues, I'm a libertarian at a safe distance but more of a sanctity-of-lifer up close. Politically pro-choice, but forever disappointed in a close family member who had an abortion, that's my line of thinking--it's why I prefer sticking to the data over pontificating from a personal perspective.

Andrew Stuttaford isn't so demure. He celebrated a legislative victory for doctor-assisted suicide out of the northeast, curiously remarking:

Vermont may be a lefty sort of place, but occasionally it gets some things right.

I say "curiously" because in the US--Stuttaford's home for the last couple of decades--euthanasia is primarily championed by the left, not the right. The GSS has queried respondents for even longer than Andrew has been on this side of the Atlantic on whether or not they feel a person who has an "incurable disease" has the right to commit suicide. The question is dichotomous, and for contemporary relevance, responses are from 2000 onward. By political orientation, the percentages of people who feel such a person should be able to end his life:

Orientation	Cato%
Liberal	73.7
Moderate	62.3
Conservative	44.6

Since we're on the topic, feelings towards pulling the plug, by age range:

Age	Cato%
18-29	60.6
30-44	61.5
45-64	63.0
65+	48.2

One might think that as the prospect of irreversible, painful decline went from theoretically occurring sometime in a young stripling's distant future to suffocating a senescent creature in his bed at the retirement home, the willingness to allow someone to die with dignity would increase. Sounds plausible, but it's not quite the case. Life was cheap in the old republic and it became even cheaper during the imperium. Parallels might be drawn. Shifting from contemporary to historical relevance, the percentages of respondents who expressed comfort with suicide, by year (in defiance of Hegel, images in blogger have become more, not less, buggy over time--click on the image if its bleeding over into the sidebar is driving you to distraction):

When I came into this place, it was still a minority position. No longer, for better or worse.

GSS variables used: AGE, POLVIEWS(1-2)(3-5)(6-7), YEAR, SUICIDE1

GSS on Haidt's Moral Foundations theory

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt describes a list of initially five, which he subsequently expands to six, moral foundations. In this theory of morality, there are six major dimensions of morality on which humans operate. Wikipedia provides a brief description of them here. Haidt's research shows that liberals in the US put more emphasis on the care/harm and liberty/oppression dimensions than conservatives do, while American conservatives give a bit more weight to the fairness/cheating foundation and considerably more focus to the loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation dimensions than liberals do.

As it so often does, the GSS allows us to put this theory to a general test by tapping data that was not specifically designed to measure what Haidt and company are after but that, conveniently, still manages to provide another measurement.

I've selected six items, each one approximating one of the six foundations, and compared average liberal and average conservative responses to them in standard deviations. Positive (negative) values indicate that conservatives care more (less) about assuring the positive expression of the foundation is condoned and/or the negative expression of the foundation is censured than liberals do.

The care/harm question asks respondents if they believe the government should help pay for medical expenses for those who cannot afford them; the fairness/cheating question asks if it is wrong for a person to hide income to avoid paying taxes; the liberty/oppression question asks if personal freedom is more important than marriage; the authority/subversion question asks if a cop is ever justified in hitting a citizen; the sanctity/degradation question asks if gay sex is immoral; and the loyalty/betrayal question asks if a person should support his country even if when it is acting in the wrong:

Foundation	Cons
Care/harm	(.78)
Fairness/cheating	+.46
Liberty/oppression	(.39)
Authority/subversion	+.32
Sanctity/degradation	+.90
Loyalty/betrayal	+.34

The GSS results largely support Haidt's divisions, with liberals putting greater emphasis on liberty/oppression and especially care/harm, just as he found to be the case. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more concerned with fairness/cheating, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and loyalty/subversion than liberals are. With the exception of the authority/subversion item, for which moderates and liberals are virtually indistinguishable, moderates fall in between liberals and conservatives on every foundation.

The gap between liberals and conservatives on fairness/cheating is larger than expected in the GSS relative to Haidt's findings on authority/subversion and loyalty/betrayal, and the sanctity/degradation gap is probably even wider than Haidt would expect it to be, but these questions are by no means perfectly calibrated to replicate his approach--the fact that they follow the overall pattern described by the moral foundations theory suggests it has descriptive value. Whether it is especially useful or overly cute and stylized is perhaps a separate issue, but that's not the point of this post.

Haidt has a simple, free site for those interested to gauge their own moral foundations within the framework of his theory, though it combines the fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression aspects into a single foundation on which liberals place greater importance.

My results (in green):

Mostly in line with conservatives on four of the five, my only deviation being on the sanctity/degradation foundation (which is, confusingly, referred to as "purity" in the online survey). Engaging in a little self-reflection, my results capture what sometimes borders on indifference towards the plight of others and also what they choose to do to themselves, and the high expectations of loyalty from friends, family, and colleagues. The purple would've suited me nicely, I think!

GSS variables used: HELPSICK, TAXCHEAT, MARFREE, POLHITOY, HOMOSEX, IFWRONG, POLVIEWS(1-2)(3-5)(6-7)

The rhetorical approach to selling eugenics

... is not to emphasize positive over negative iterations of the idea, or even, as I've done in the past, to focus on the consequent egalitarianism that these approaches, if put into practice, will presumably foster. No matter how delicately broached and amenably angled, it's inevitably received as being too harshly comparative, too judgmental, and we simply can't have that! Arguing that this guy should have five kids while this guy shouldn't have any is socially and politically intolerable in the contemporary Western world, irrespective of the merits of such an argument.

It needs to be about individual choice and self-improvement. Forget pushing (to a broad audience, anyway) for one group to do more procreating and another to do less of it. In vitro fertilization has come a long way in the last five decades, and embryo selection has progressed from being all about viability to include avoidance of undesirable traits, the most conspicuous of which is Down syndrome. And the inclusion of putatively desirable traits is somewhere just around the corner. Eugenics need not be about telling the best to breed more and the worst to breed less, but instead marketing it as a game anyone can play. If everyone begins systematically making the most of what they have, we get a rising tide raising all boats outcome.

Since we're on the subject of selling the idea of eugenics for public consumption, Razib Khan recently pointed out the seemingly obvious point (which I nonetheless have never explicitly acknowledged until he spelled it out for me) that eugenics, rather than being a way for the patricians to further distance themselves from the plebes, is actually a means of moving towards that good old American ideal of everyone having an equal--or at least less significantly unequal--shot:

Steve [Hsu] has much to lose in a selfish zero sum sense because he’s already rather assured of intelligent offspring. He’s smart. His wife is smart. Standard quantitative genetics implies that even if they regress to the mean his offspring will be quite bright. There may not be much more juice to squeeze out of that genetic background. It may be very different for a couple with more average endowments. So sorry to turn this upside down, but personal eugenics may in fact be a boon for the ugly, stupid, and psychologically unstable, because it gives them a opportunity to close much of the gap with those who were lucky in the genetic lottery. Some of you may object to terms such as “ugly,” “stupid,” or “psychological unstable.” But people with these issues have to deal with them in their day to day. One can make all the platitudes one wants to make about “inner beauty,” but very few people live by this ideal.

Anyhow, these rhetorical considerations are probably going to become moot in the future. Prospective parents are going to take advantage of technologies that give their children an edge in life regardless of braying from opinion makers. Elites can crow all they want about the need for racial and socioeconomic integration in schools; couples are still going to do their damnedest to get their own kids into the iciest, most affluent schools they are able to.

There is already good deal of conceptual acceptance of eugenic practices on the individual level, especially on the political left. From 2004, the most recent year in which the dichotomous question was posed, the percentages of GSS respondents who say they'd have an abortion or want their partners to have one if a test revealed "the baby has a serious genetic defect", by political orientation (n = 2,451):

Politics	Yes abort
Liberal	49.8%
Moderate	36.0%
Conservative	21.5%

Though the major media regularly treats eugenics as being under the aegis of the right, I suspect the subset of the right to which it actually applies is about as large as the population for which "secular right" is an accurate descriptor.

GSS variables used: GENEABRT, YEAR(2004), POLVIEWS(1-2)(3-5)(6-7)