Give me the republic or give me death

Watching the two-season HBO series Rome was an enjoyable experience for this amateur interested in the history of the republic and later empire. The juxtaposition of stoicism and epicureanism in the two historically insignificant protagonists, the skillful crafting of a narrative in a world that is in some ways strikingly similar to our own but in others utterly alien to it, the immensely satisfying casting--combine for one hell of a historically fictional ride.

On that last point regarding the casting, though, a couple of the portrayals bugged me. Octavia, not for aesthetic reasons, but because in the series she's an irresponsible hedonist when the historical consensus seems to be that she pulled off quite the balancing act, managing to remain loyal, faithful, and contemporarily dignified both to her brother Augustus and her husband Mark Antony even after the two most powerful men in the moribund republic were on a seemingly inevitable path to war.

The other is Cato (the Younger), the unflinching Republican who uncompromisingly opposed Julius Caesar, and, in so doing, helped prod Pompey into forcing Caesar to march on Rome. I find affinity for the historical Cato to come easily, but the series tests that by portraying him as a bit of a stammering, quixotic buffoon.

Randall Parker's recent post entitled "Cato of the Republic was a fool", however, makes the HBO perspective more easily comprehensible:

Cato was one of the leaders in the Roman Republic who maneuvered Julius Caesar into a position where his only choices were to either get convicted of a crime by the Senate (thereby losing all power, possibly his life, and with his best outcome a life in exile) or to overthrow the Republic. Caesar's decision was not surprising. His ability to execute on his decision was also not surprising. Caesar was an incredible dynamo, a great leader of men who inspired intense loyalty and devotion in those he led. Cato, by contrast, was a fool. He helped accelerate the death of the Republic. 

... 

Cato serves as an inspiration for the modern day Libertarians at the Cato Institute. They look up to a guy who overplayed his hand in a Rome where few deeply shared his principles and views. Cato's views found even less support among the native peoples in most of the conquered lands which the Romans ruled. Does this sound familiar? 

Why are open borders Libertarians wrong on immigration? For reasons similar to why Cato was wrong about Caesar: a refusal to acknowledge that pursuit of unachievable ideals can result in worse outcomes.

With all the caveats about enormous differences in time and place, one might make the argument that Ron Paul is a sort of Cato of our times. However, it is such incorrigibility that allows inspiration to survive two millenia and a transcontinental journey across the Atlantic.

Like Cicero, posterity might remember David Brooks as more effectual among his contemporaries than Cato then or Paul now, but history's great moderates lack the appeal that history's more committed giants do. What modern think tank takes its namesake from Cicero? What Christian denomination from Erasmus?

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)

Seneca Sailer

Okay, he doesn't differentiate between genotype and phenotype, and he's unaware of epigenetics, but this isn't bad for a contemporary of the emperor Nero (and a Stoic to boot!):

No amount of wisdom, as I said before, ever banishes these things; otherwise--if she eradicated every weakness--wisdom would have dominion over the world of nature. One's physical make-up and the attributes that were one's lot at birth remain settled no matter how much or how long the personality may strive after pefect adjustment. One cannot ban these things any more than one can call them up.

Boudica

Professional podcaster Jamie Jeffers, in a review of the History Channel's Vikings (which I've never seen), comments approvingly on the show's depiction of Lagertha*:

I really like the fact that they have a tough-as-nails warrior woman and they don't treat it like it's strange... they did an excellent job demonstrating that there were warrior women and warrior women were very effective. It does a good job dispelling a lot of the innate sexism that you run into.

Unsurprisingly, I don't like it.

Jeffers regularly juxtaposes the rigid gender distinctions certain ancient civilizations, like the Romans, made with the relatively more overlapping gender roles that existed among others such as the Norse or Celts, even employing the term "progressive" to describe the latter. In so doing, Jeffers projects a contemporary (and liberal, and western!) worldview to a past that was in many ways quite alien to anything existing within the prevailing mores and ethos of said contemporary worldview.

"Regressive" may be a synonym of "progressive"; "repressive", however, not necessarily so. I'd argue, in fact, that--and I'm generalizing as someone with a spotty amateur's knowledge of history--from the onset of the agricultural age through the Enlightenment, or maybe even the Industrial Revolution, the contextually more progressive (in the Hegelian sense of the word) societies tended to be the ones in which gender distinctions were relatively more, not less, pronounced. It was a natural outgrowth of specialization. Rather than being Jacks and Jills of all trades by necessity, people in more 'progressive' societies were able to become especially good at certain things and leverage these more specialized skills to obtain the products and services produced by others similarly become extraordinarily skilled in other things. It's not all John Locke and Adam Smith, though--similar forces were at work at other layers of society, not just the occupational ones.

Specifically, the relatively more sexually egalitarian tribes in Gaul and Brittania for which the employment of female warriors was not exceptionally remarkable were not 'ahead' of the Romans but instead were 'behind' them (history backs me up here). They used their women to join battle with their opponents and block the retreats of their own men because they had to. For a society to use women in hand-in-hand combat isn't very efficient--women are weaker, smaller, slower, and less physically aggressive than men are. Sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures, but just like arming the old, sickly, infirm, and untrained, what you gain in numbers you tend to lose in per capita fighting ability. Perhaps he used "disproportionate force", but Severus' actions become a little easier to comprehend, don't they?

Additionally, women are a more precious reproductive resource than men are. If, today, tribe Azure is comprised of 100 males and 50 females of reproductive age while tribe Fuchsia is comprised of 50 males and 100 females of the same condition, assuming no annihilation from hostile neighbors, which tribe is going to have more people--both male and female--of reproductive age a generation down the road? The male reproductive role takes fifteen minutes, the female role nine months (and a couple of decades of residual effort on top of that). At the high end, rates of reproduction are far more restricted by the number of fertile women in a society than they are by the number of fertile men.

Today, the rules of the game have changed, and it is indeed the case that in more progressive societies gender distinctions are less pronounced than they are in more regressive ones. Having shaken free of the Malthusian Trap centuries ago, the question of women assuming military roles in the contemporary West is no longer one of necessity but rather one of luxury--progressive societies are able to more easily afford putting women in harm's way. In the US, for example, the fighting capabilities of soldiers operating small arms and artillery just isn't a crucial or even important determinant of the nation's well being. We're not threatened militarily in any serious way and most of the casualties we do suffer are primarily the consequence of the ideologically-driven strategic decisions we make and tactics we forsake (ie sending marines into firefights in the mountains of Tora Bora and the streets of Baghdad rather than raining hell on these places from 30,000 feet above).

Indulging in the same sort of contemporary bias critically examined above, one might say that, in a historical context, Jeffers' take is an example of the bottom (those forced to equip everyone to fight) and the top (by those able to afford inefficiencies) uniting against the middle (those who are neither compelled by penury nor able to insouciantly engage in profligacy)!

* Anachronistic, yes, but it's historical fiction, not a documentary.

Better than one in a million, anyway

Why do those who write about Game tend to overestimate the prevalence of cuckoldry over the course of human history? Fairly recently, Roissy did just this without seemingly even realizing it. Commenting on a study showing a misattribution rate for putative biological fathers of around 1% in Germany, he deftly claimed that he wasn't surprised they were so low (!), and in fact would've estimated contemporary rates to be even lower:

I’m not here to argue that the 1% figure is wrong. In fact, the 1% figure is higher than I assumed. Look at it this way: That recorded 1% cuckoldry rate is more than 30 TIMES the US recorded rape rate of 0.03%. ... 

A flaw in assuming present-day cuckoldry rates align with historical cuckoldry rates is the fairly recent widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion. How many women who sleep with interloper males are using birth control? Probably most, and more so if those women are higher SES.

Mentioned in the comments of the post he linked to is research from geneticist Bryan Sykes showing an estimated non-paternity rate of 1.3% per generation in England extending all the way back to 1300 AD, and one of our national treasures, Gregory Cochran, mentions that similar historical results have been found in the Irish and among the Boers. While Roissy reasonably presumes that women of higher socio-economic status do a better job of keeping extramarital dalliances from producing living evidence of their cheating than prole women do, Steve Sailer asserts that it's likely those with surnames that survived over several generations (including Sykes, the surname the eponymous Bryan Sykes used on the way to concluding an estimated 1.3% cuckoldry rate) were more put together and orderly--that is, of higher SES--than those that did not survive the test of time.

So if today's upper class women are better at avoiding procreation from affairs than lower class women are when, prior to modern contraception, non-paternity occurred in fewer than 1-in-50 births, well, it has been--for at least a millenia, anyway--a marginal phenomenon, and it continues to be so today, perhaps even more fringe now than it was in the past.

Another prospective reason PUAs overestimate cuckolding rates may be due to selection bias, with susceptibility to Game tactics and class being inversely correlated to some extent. That old bugaboo the GSS shows that among married or formerly married women, those on the lower half of the class structure are more likely to cheat on their husbands than those on the upper half are (14.7% of those in the lower/working classes to 11.1% of those in the middle/upper classes, n = 10,778). And of course marriage rates are lower in the lower/working classes than they are in the middle/upper classes. Infidelity rates are presumably higher among those in unmarried relationships than they are among those in married relationships, so the overall class gap in cheating rates is likely wider still.

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY, CLASS(1-2)(3-4), SEX(2)

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.

Deficit spending is about who's doing it

After mulling it over, I think we need a third party presidency for budget deficit reduction to become a sustained, acted upon priority.

Pew has tracked public prioritization of reducing the nation's federal budget deficit for nearly twenty years, and from someone whose default position is one of starving the beast, looking at how partisan positions flip flop depending on which party controls the presidency makes for depressing viewing. The following graph shows the percentage of survey respondents indicating that budget deficit reduction (from '02 onward; prior to that the query was on paying off the national debt, which, while not the same thing, captures similar sentiments) should be a top governmental priority. Results come from surveys conducted in January of each year:

During Clinton's presidency, Republicans cared more about cutting the deficit than Democrats did. Under Bush that flipped, and during Obama it flipped back again. It makes sense if you're all for redistributive spending so long as your guy is the one doing it. It doesn't make so much sense if your party is putatively the one opposed to leviathan's accretion, however.

It's often said that reducing the deficit and restoring fiscal sanity is important in determining the world that older generations will leave to their kids and grandkids, but those kids care less about it than their elders do. Of the 21 issues examined, the only one with a wider old-young (50+ and 18-49 years, respectively) gap is "securing social security", for obvious self-interested reasons.

There might be some reason for cautious optimism, though. Over the last decade, the trend has been upward across the political spectrum, and the GOP now has a high profile champion or two on the issue.

Pivoting to provide Republican pols with political advice, how about emphasizing opposition to gun control? While it's politically savvy, it's not pusillanimously appeasing--a state's gun ownership rate is one of the strongest predictors of how it votes. The higher the rate, the redder the state. And of the 21 issues Pew asked about prioritizing, gun control garnered the highest "should not be done [at all]" response rate of all.

Opposition to restrictions on firearm capacities and ownership is highest among the young, the wealthy, and the well educated, while support for increasing restrictions is highest among the old, the poor, and the uneducated. Excepting the political angle, contemporary demographic trends on the questions of gun control and same-sex marriage are pretty similar. Unlike a lot of other 'social issues' that see the conservative standing athwart history yelling "stop" (which, while I'm personally sympathetic to, is usually portrayed and conceived of in the popular consciousness the antithesis of being hip and forward-thinking), the right to bear arms is important to people who are going and who have gone places in their lives.

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

Marshaling evidence from the GSS, Jayman has thoughtfully and diligently looked at white fertility rates by political orientation over time. The tendency for conservatives to be more fecund than liberals extends at least as far back as the cohort of people born in the 1920s, and it has become more pronounced since then. Jayman argues this presages a future in which whites become, on average, increasingly conservative in their political outlooks. Given the partial heritability of political orientation, this is a plausible assertion (at least in a relative sense--the political ratchet seems almost inexorably to always turn to the left, with the consequence that oftentimes what was leftist a generation ago is considered mainstream today and what was conservative a generation ago is viewed as being totally beyond the pale today).

I've wondered, though, if the same argument applies to non-whites*. The following graph shows the mean number of children among liberal, moderate, and conservative non-whites by range of year of birth. For consistency, I used the same birth cohorts and years of survey participation as Jayman did:

Like whites, conservative non-whites have been outbreeding liberal non-whites for nearly a century now, yet it hardly seems obvious that non-whites have moved to the right (absolutely or relatively) over the last several decades, nor does it seem a prudent to bet that they will in the future. And the social-versus-economic angle doesn't hopelessly confound here--non-whites are moving to the left on social issues, not just on economic ones.

This epigone isn't an augur so I won't prognosticate about the trajectory of non-white political orientation in the future. I merely hope (though I'm not optimistic) that the political beliefs of tomorrow are recognizable by their ideological flavors rather than by the race and ethnicity of the person espousing them.

GSS variables used: COHORT(1883-1909)(1910-1919)(1920-1929)(1930-1939)(1940-1949)(1950-1959)(1960-1969)(1970-1979), YEAR(1972-2010)(1985-2010)(1993-2010)(2002-2010)(2006-2010), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), CHILDS, RACE(2-3)

* Referring here to those who selected either "black" or "other" from the three choices "white", "black", and "other".

Regular church attendance rates by party over time

Razib's informative post relating Asian-American religious affiliation to electoral behavior spurred me to take a look at the relationship between regular church attendance and partisan affiliation among self-identified Christians in the US over the last several decades. My impression was that the difference in attendance rates by party have become starker over time, Jimmy Carter being more overt about his religion than Barack Obama is and Gerald Ford being considerably less so than the second George Bush was while in office.

It's important to keep in mind that we're looking at those with either a Protestant or Catholic religious affiliation. Non-Christians and those without any religious identification at all are not considered. In a subsequent post I'll take a look at religious affiliation by party over time, but for now let's just consider expressed piety (evaluated by whether or not a respondent attends services on at least a weekly basis) among those who identify as Christians. To avoid racial confounding, the analysis is limited only to whites. Note also the range display from 15%-45% of the self-identified Christian population. Even among white Christian Republicans, it has persistently been the case that only a minority attends services on a regular basis:

Independents and moderates are, on the whole, less knowledgeable and less actionable than committed ideologues and partisans are, and that shows up here as well. The tendency among Christians for Republicans to be more religiously active than Democrats and moderates existed at least as far back as the early seventies, continued over the course of that decade, and had become pretty firmly established by the time Reagan left office. The partisan gap has only widened since then.

That said, the differences aren't stark. Today we'd report them by saying that while 4-in-10 Christian Republicans attend services at least once a week, only 3-in-10 Christian Democrats do. Quite similar, really. I suspect the bigger story is in the drop off in Christian identification among Democrats (but not among Republicans) over the same time span.

GSS variables used: RELIG(1-2), RACE(1), PARTYID(0-1)(3)(5-6), ATTEND(0-6)(7-8)

The service economy

I remember hearing in junior high and high school a fair amount about how the US had become a "service economy" and that the provision of services had replaced the provision of goods as the marker of a country's affluence; in college, I recall a handful of passing references being made; contemporaneously, I can't think of a time in the last five years that I've heard a reference to the service economy being made. From Google's Ngram viewer, the percentage of books published in the US that have contained the phrase, from 1960 through 2008:

I fear that professing to your neighbor's kids about Mexican feminism so that he'll do your taxes so you can use your refund to have your other neighbor adjust your lower spine so that you're comfortable when you sit down with your financial adviser to discuss your targeted retirement account isn't as surefire a way to national riches as we once assumed it was.

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.

Holocaust? Beaver never heard of it

Writes Steve in a recent Taki's column:

A more general discovery was the wide usefulness of Israel’s strategy in 1967: Go on the offensive. This military triumph infused American Jews with new confidence. Before the Six-Day War, the Holocaust was only occasionally mentioned. It was depressing and alarming to admit that your people had recently been the victims of the worst massacre ever. But after Israel’s show of force, the Holocaust became a staple in American media.

What to do when one of your intellectual heroes utters something oh so controversial, and about Jews of all groups? Prove he's correct, that's what:

Intelligence and fertility by class, over time

Channeling Charles Murray, Randall Parker comments on the increasing social stratification that has come to define the contemporary Western world:

This isn't the 1950s when people could expect to pair up with a husband or wife and get a factory job that put them at similar status level to a large portion of the total population. We've got a much wider spread of classes and far more cognitive sorting. The poor are dumber on average and the upper classes are smarter on average. The classes have less in common: less shared understanding, fewer shared values, fewer shared experiences with cultural products such as TV and radio shows.

On the one hand, inequality has been public enemy number one for multiple generations now. On the other hand, one major consequence of a shrinking world is that cognitive sorting keeps getting easier to do and is continually approaching ubiquity in practice.

I wondered what insights the GSS might offer. The survey has a question for which respondents are asked which of four social classes they feel they belong to--lower, working, middle, or upper. The following graph shows mean wordsum scores by self-identified class membership over time. The three variables have not been cross-referenced for every year the survey has been conducted (not sure why, as each has independently been included since its inception, but it is what it is), which is why the years displayed jump around as they do. To avoid issues of English language fluency, the foreign-born are excluded:

Steady as she goes. Of course, this doesn't necessarily speak to potential changes in material or cultural class differences over the last several decades per se, but the cognitive sorting by class isn't blatantly obvious, at least not by this measure.

And because detecting dysgenic trends is a hobby horse here, the mean number of children by class over time:

Sample sizes are smaller for the lower and upper classes (self-assessment rates split about 5%-45%-45%-5%) so their respective lines bounce around more, but the pattern over time is pretty consistent--higher class means somewhat lower (and later) fertility, and people across the social spectrum are having fewer children today than their parents had.

GSS variables used: BORN(1), YEAR, CLASS, WORDSUM, CHILDS

Idiocracy is an old friend

Jayman has an interesting post showing that the positive correlation between fertility and political conservatism has existed in the US for nearly a century. Rifting off of this (okay, okay, copying it!), presented below are similar graphs tracing the relationship between fertility* and a couple of other angles I'm interested in--intelligence and educational attainment. To allow for family formation to have occurred, racial confounding to be avoided, and linguistic problems to be evaded, all included respondents were at least aged 35 at the time of their participation, non-whites are excluded, and the foreign-born are disregarded, respectively.

Firstly, fertility and intelligence by decade(s) of birth:

The dysgenic trend isn't anything new. We've putatively been moving towards Idiocracy for a century now. I use the qualifier because it is by no means clear that the average IQ of white Americans has declined in the last 100 years--to the contrary, it has probably increased.

Parenthetically, I find it neat to see the phrase "baby boomer" really come alive with the data.

And fertility and educational attainment by decade(s) of birth:

The correlation between education and fertility is much stronger than the correlation between intelligence and fertility is. The sixties cohorts illustrate this particularly well in the two graphs presented above. Of the 25 bars displayed in the latter graph, only two buck the otherwise perfect pattern of more education resulting in fewer children, and they are minor ("some college" among those born 1900-1919 and "bachelor's" among those born in the fifties). In the former graph showing the interaction between intelligence and fertility, there are several exceptions.

Here's to the education bubble bursting and a much more efficient, industrious method of imparting skills and knowledge to those rationally seeking them rising out of the dampness. The current structure isn't just financially wasteful and morally destructive--instilling in young adults a sense of entitlement to go along with a heavy debt burden and little in the way of marketable capabilities or competencies--it also plays a starring role in the death of the west.

* The averages are systematically overstated here as the GSS instructs survey participants to count not only their biological children but also step-children and those they've adopted.

GSS variables used: COHORT(1900-1919)(1920-1939)(1940-1949)(1950-1959)(1960-1969), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), BORN(1), RACE(1), CHILDS, YEAR(1985-2010)(1995-2010)(2005-2010)

It gets better, er, more propitious, over time?

After reproducing a list of obscure vocabulary words, Steve Sailer wonders:

Do vocabularies continue to grow over a lifetime of reading? The 10 word vocab test on the GSS could of course be used for this, but most of my growth has evidently been at the high end of the range, which probably wouldn't show up on the GSS.

No one attempted to formulate a response in the post's comments, so here it goes. While Steve's reservations about the GSS' Wordsum are duly noted, what constitutes "high end" is relative. For the left half of the bell curve, "allusion" and "emanate" are indeed high end.

The following graph shows the mean Wordsum score for white respondents born in three separate decades by year of survey participation (because at present the survey 'only' spans 35 years, there's no simple way to track the entire adult lifespan of respondents born at the same point in time). My presumption was that a steady increase in scores would be evident from early adulthood through the years preceding retirement age, at which point they would peak and then begin declining as senility started wreaking havoc:

The black lines show when the middle of each age cohort hit 55 years old. While it's not as clearly the case as I'd imagined it would be, especially with regards to how marginally time causes scores to increase, the prediction does appear to describe the general pattern.

With the exception of the aberrational year 2006, the twenties cohort bounces around in a gradual descent as they become increasingly elderly. The forties cohort gradually climbs but appears to have started what may well be a continual decline in the present, while the fifties cohort, just now contemplating retirement, demonstrates continuous accretion in scores over time, most pronounced in their early adult years. Like personality, vocabulary probably grows steadily through adolescence and into early adulthood before becoming mostly static with a little shifting here and there over a forty or so year stretch through late adulthood before inevitably changing in unpredictable but generally negative ways in life's gloam.

GSS variables used: YEAR, COHORT(1920-1929)(1940-1949)(1950-1959), WORDSUM, RACE(1)

White privilege overtakes institutional racism

In the standard MG mold, a comprehensive (and bar none for reference purposes) post mocking the spurious explanations for disparities in outcomes among members of different racial and ethnic groups references the phrase "institutional racism", noting that it seems to have been replaced by the (even more) amorphous "white privilege". Perspicacious writer, that MG. The percentage of English language books published in the US containing the phrases in question from 1950 through 2008 (the latest year for which data are available):

Electoral malleability, by race

Jokah wrote:

Related to the share of voters who are white: have you or any of the other bloggers ever done an analysis of "malleability" of voters by race/ethnic group? Not only are hispanics (and blacks) very small voting blocs, they are so consistent in their voting patterns from election to election that it makes it especially not worth it to try to make inroads. If you are a politician, you have to go where the pickings are easiest and I suspect that is the whites.

If this is true, you could almost say that white voters are the most diverse in their views but we all know whites are never diverse. Ever.

This is the mental framework I operate under, specifically due to how reliably one can count on the overwhelming majority of black votes to consistently go to Democrats. On the other hand, the GOP is the de facto white party in part because it regularly garners more white votes than the Democratic party does.

To test this assumption, let's look at exit polling results by race for Presidential elections from 1992 (as far back as they are easily accessible) through 2008. For a rough measure of malleability, I take the Democrat-Republican voter gap by race (expressed in percentages) for each presidential election and the presidential election preceding it (with the exception of 1992), determine the absolute difference in the gaps between each of the two consecutive elections, and average these over the time period under consideration. The higher the figure, the more variation there is in voting behavior in presidential elections according to exit polling data* (which aren't always reliable):

Race	Chg
Whites	5
Blacks	7
Hispanics	17
Asians	17

It looks like that assumption needs some qualification and refinement. The 'old stock' whites and blacks haven't bounced around as much as the more colorful yellows and browns have over the last several presidential elections. Asians actually supported the GOP when the first Bush and Dole were its standard bearers.

What I described as a measure of malleability might more accurately be conceived of as a measure of fickleness. That whites appear to be less malleable than non-whites is probably attributable in varying degrees to the following list of non-exhaustive factors: Major party platforms are, despite the constant braying about need to appeal to Hispanics at all costs, are most attuned to the sensibilities of whites since that's where most of the votes are; exit polling data on non-whites, especially Asians and Hispanics, are less reliable than the data on whites are due to small sample sizes and, more generally, the smaller the group, the larger the margin of error is going to be; Ross Perot was a significant force in the 1992 and 1996 elections, and most of the votes he received likely would've gone to Bush and Dole if he hadn't run; white concerns tend to be more abstract and philosophical than NAM concerns are; and the ethnic compositions of the Hispanic and Asian categories have changed more over the last couple of decades than the compositions have changed among blacks and whites.

It should also be noted that a 5 point swing in the white vote still represents a larger absolute change in the total count (which is, after all, what really matters) than a 17 point swing in the Hispanic vote does. Indeed, even today, with fewer than half of births in the US to non-Hispanic whites, a 5 point swing among whites is worth more than a 7 point swing among blacks, a 17 point swing among Hispanics, and a 17 point swing among Asians combined.

* For data sources of each election cycle, click on the corresponding year: 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008.

Our polarized politics

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

But I realize that perspective is an outlier's. Divergence in political orientation really has steadily occurred in the US over the past several decades. Democrats have become more liberal and Republicans more conservative, as the proceeding graph indicates. The y-axis shows the mean political orientation score for each political grouping. The question on political orientation is on a 7-point scale. The higher the score, the more conservative the group is, with 4 as the mid-point indicating perfect moderation:

As someone with a cursory understanding of US history in the second half of the 20th century, my first reaction is that Southern Democrats becoming Reagan Democrats and eventually Republicans might explain the apparent polarization. As conservative Democrats have become disenchanted by the Democratic party's increasing focus on 'civil rights' and a corresponding diminution of bread and butter issues the working class cares most about, they've gone from calling themselves Democrats to calling themselves Republicans without really changing their outlooks and sentiments much.

That may be part of the story, and it's a phenomenon not entirely contained in the South even if more pronounced there than elsewhere, but it's not the whole thing, nor does it even look to be particularly significant. The same graph as above, this time with Southerners* excluded:

There aren't any detectable differences between what we get when Southerners are included or when they're excluded. Political polarization has been occurring nationwide.

GSS variables used: POLVIEWS, PARTYID(0-1)(3)(5-6), REGION(1-4, 8-9), YEAR

* Those living in the West South Central, East South Central, and South Atlantic Census divisions.

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.

Fewer marriages, fewer children

++Addition++I'd cued this up but not yet published it ahead of a similar post by Inductivist. So this is complementary to and somewhat overlaps that.

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Inductivist's posts on fecundity and marital status among women in the US got me wondering if and how this has changed over time. Citing Roger Scruton's argument that the societal movement away from marriage leads to declining fertility rates that eventually drop society below replacement level, Inductivist turns to the GSS to see whether or not Scruton's assertion that marriage and children travel together is accurate. Not surprisingly, it is.

The question this raises in my mind is to what extent is the drop in US fertility is attributable to a decline in marriage rates? If fertility holds pretty steadily over time among those who are married and the overall decrease comes not from married couples having fewer children but from fewer people getting married, it certainly becomes plausible that protecting the institution of marriage is critical if the US is going to perpetuate itself.

The following graph shows the mean number of children for women aged 30-45 by marital status over the last four decades. To avoid racial confounding a la Charles Murray, only whites are considered:

The percentage of married women dropped continuously over the four decades, while the percentage of divorced and never married women increased, so the decline in marriage is, as Scruton claims, associated with a decline in fertility rates. It's not the entire story, though. Married women have become less fecund over the last couple of generations while never married women have become more so. The gap is still far from closed, but it's narrowing.

With illegitimacy rates around 70% among blacks and 50% among Hispanics, there is ample evidence that in 21st century America, procreation doesn't need marriage. Whether or not the US is able to retain a semblance of its former self if the two become decoupled, however, is another question entirely.