Fighting the good fight

Photo diary of a loyal soldier in Agnostic's legion:

This is only the avuncular role. Just wait until it's the paternal one!

Shocker--married mothers smarter than single moms

Spurred by Parapundit's Randall Parker and the sight of low-hanging stereotype-validation fruit, the estimated IQ scores (converted from GSS wordsum results with the simplifying assumptions of a mean population IQ of 100 and that one standard deviation in wordsum results is the equivalent of 15 IQ points) of men and women who have procreated at least once, by marital status, follows. For utility, all data are from 2000 onward and the foreign-born and those aged 46 and older are excluded.

Reproductive men

Married -- 101.0
Divorced/separated -- 97.8
Unmarried -- 93.6

Reproductive women

Married -- 101.3
Divorced/separated -- 98.7
Unmarried women -- 93.6

Parenthetically, the mean IQ for those of the same age and time cohort who haven't had any kids is 101.2. To see dysgenic forces in action, look no further than single mothers and their unfortunate spawn, who have both the nature and nurture decks stacked against them.

GSS variables used: CHILDS(0)(1-8), BORN(1), WORDSUM, YEAR(2000-2012), SEX, MARITAL(1)(3-4)(5), AGE(18-45)

More on the demographics of mental health

In the previous post, we looked at the likelihood to have received treatment for a mental health problem by political orientation based on GSS data. It turns out that self-described political liberals are twice as likely to have been treated for mental health issues as conservatives are, with moderates falling in between*. This spurred several intriguing comments that I'll turn to the GSS again to address.

Firstly, the inevitable racial issue. An anonymous commenter writes:

This generalization is too broad, since I'm sure Caucasian Liberals will have superb mental health compared to Caucasian Conservatives. Since there's studies that shows that those in higher Academia has the least stress and hence the best health.

It turns out he was being tongue-in-cheek, and whites are more prone to experience mental health issues than non-whites are. The percentages who have been treated for mental health problems, by race (n = 1,412):

Race	Treated
White	15.1%
Black	9.3%
Hispanic	6.8%
Asian	9.4%

As blacks are only slightly more likely to identify as liberal than they are as conservative, despite consistently voting Democratic by overwhelming margins, it's conceivable that race obfuscates the association between liberalism and mental health issues. In actuality, however, the relatively good mental health of non-whites attenuates political differences that are even more stark when only whites are considered (n = 1,033):

Whites only	Treated
Liberal	23.7%
Moderate	13.3%
Conservative	10.6%

While only 1 in 10 white conservatives have been treated for mental health problems, nearly one-quarter of white liberals have. I am not qualified to explain why this is the case, but perhaps God has something to say about it. In clearing up the confusion about his first comment, the anonymous commenter later writes:

Conservatives should be mentally healthier, because they tend to be more religious, hence making it easier for regulation of mental health.

Liberals worry so much that they actually care about people they don't even know.

Whether or not liberals have more mental issues to deal with because they want to put the weight of the world on their own shoulders, God's most ardent followers tend to come from the conservative ranks, and one of the rewards they receive in return is better mental health. To avoid racial confounding, only whites are included (n = 1,064):

Worship frequency	Treated
Weekly or more	11.0%
More than once a month	13.6%
At least once a year	16.4%
Less than once a year	17.5%

Each classification is exclusive, so the second should actually read "More than once a month but less than weekly or more", etc.

What about Jews? TAE is, loosely defined, part of the alternative right blogosphere, so the question has to be asked! Jews, after all, are as a group more leftist than white Democrats are. Again, God's hand is shown! Not just any god, but our God, an awesome God who reigns from heaven above (n = 1,405):

Religion	Treated
Protestant	11.7%
Catholic	10.7%
Jewish	17.4%
Other	21.0%
None	19.8%

Unfortunately, the GSS is understandably unable to track ethnic Jewishness among survey participants. Instead, we're looking at Judaism by way of self-described religious affiliation. As Jews are considerably more likely than other Americans to be irreligious, there is presumably a sizable contingent of ethnic Jews in the "none" category.

Another trait that requires attention is intelligence. Writes Ed Tom Kowalsky:

[There is a] need to control for IQ inasmuch as I suspect mental illness tracks with intelligence.

Disappointingly, the best GSS proxy for IQ, Wordsum score, is not cross-referenced with the mental health question so controlling for it is a difficult thing to do. Educational attainment is of course correlated with intelligence, but the relationship is far from perfect. Instead of moving out several degrees by using education to estimate wordsum performance to estimate IQ scores, let's just consider differences in rates of mental health issues by educational attainment, again among whites alone to avoid problems with racial confounding (n = 1,067):

Educational attainment	Treated
Less than high school	12.8%
High school graduate	11.9%
Some college	14.7%
Bachelor's degree	20.9%
Post-secondary education	19.7%

As was the case with worship attendance, each classification is exclusive, so the second should actually read "High school graduate but no college", etc.

While conservatives are, on average, slightly more intelligent than liberals are, white liberals have an edge over white conservatives, so the association between greater intelligence and more mental health problems might go a little way in explaining why liberals have poorer mental health than conservatives do (though for what my uninformed opinion is worth, I suspect differences in personality traits other than intelligence are far more determinative).

Silly girl contemplates the relationship between criminality, political orientation, and mental health:

I wonder whether folks who have ever been arrested or incarcerated are more likely to be liberal.

I would say that being anti social enough to end up in prison is a pretty good indicator of mental issues.

As Jokah points out, small sample size is a huge (heh) issue here, as the mental health question was only posed in one year of the survey, and the number of people who spend time in prison is in the middle single-digits range. This GSS well is dry.

For what it's worth, in Freedonomics (p182-184), John Lott--who it should be noted is clearly unsympathetic to the Democratic party--reviews multiple studies showing that to the extent that they express political preferences, felons tend to vote even more heavily Democratic than their demographic statistics (which are very Democratic) would predict.

Since we're running the conventional demographic gamut, let's look at marriage and children. To give respondents a chance to have tied the knot if their plans include as much, those under the age of 30 are excluded, while again only whites are considered (n = 926):

Marital status	Treated
Married	12.8%
Unmarried	18.5%

And finally, kids. We're looking at the number white adults aged 30 and older have had (n = 927):

Offspring	Treated
0	15.2%
1	20.2%
2+	13.2%

So, mental health issues are most commonly experienced among well-educated, unmarried, irreligious white liberals who don't procreate (or do the SWPL thing and have one kid after both parents are firmly established in their professional careers). Mental health problems are progressive, baby!

GSS variables used: MHTRTSLF, RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), MARITAL(1)(2-5), EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), CHILDS(0)(1)(2-8), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), ATTEND(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)(7-8), RELIGION

* As previously noted, the GSS item being utilized here asked respondents if they had ever received treatment for a mental health problem. That's not exactly the same as asking whether or not they had ever suffered from mental health issues, but it's pretty close.

Spare and spoil? Not in the US

Recently, a woman in Texas lost custody of her two children and was sentenced to five months of probation for spanking one of them, aged two, hard enough to leave the kid with red marks. In his ruling, the judge in the case apparently set court precedent that the spanking of a child is a criminal act:

"You don't spank children today," Judge Jose Longoria told Rosina Gonzales.

...

"In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel," Judge Longoria of 214th District Court told Gonzales. "You don't spank children. You understand?"

The Derb is understandably incensed by this blatant instance of judicial activism:

It seems to me that the judge is out of line. It may indeed be that our standards have shifted so much that the generality of citizens would like spanking banned. If that's the case, let them press their representatives to pass appropriate legislation. The current situation in the U.S.A. is that spanking in the home is legal in every state; 19 states, Texas among them, also permit spanking in schools. This judge, name of José Longoria, is therefore legislating from the bench — a far more serious offense against public standards, in my opinion, than smacking a 2-year-old on the rear end.

While the idea of corporal punishment horrifies many SWPLs no matter how deserving of it a child may be (and despite being named Jose, the judge looks enough like a SWPL), the general public does not share the court's thoughts. The GSS has asked respondents if they think it is sometimes necessary to give a child a "good, hard spanking". In 2010, 69% of those surveyed agree that it is, compared to only 31% who do not. In 1986, the first year the question was posed, spanking was favored 84% to 16%, so there has been a little shifting towards wussification in the last couple of decades, but a substantial majority of Americans still believe a swat on the ass is justified at times. The Derb does not need to entertain the thought that the judge may have been channeling public sentiment in his authoritarian ruling.

If this precedence becomes relevant by way of other court rulings referencing it I suspect there will be public push back, and the advocates of outlawing spanking will run across the same minefield that those calling for Michael Vicks' head following revelations of the brutality he inflicted upon pit bulls ran through. Spanking, too, has a racial component. Namely, blacks are its strongest advocate. The following table shows the percentages who agree that spanking is justifiable, by race. For both contemporary relevance and ample sample size for Native Americans and Asians, responses are from 2000 onward (n = 7,393--all proceeding tables have the same parameters):

Blacks	83.2%
Native Americans	79.6%
Whites	70.7%
Asians	64.7%
Hispanics	64.9%

There is a political component as well, and as is rather often the case on social matters, reliably Democratic blacks and reliably Democratic SWPLs are not on the same page (n = 8,026):

Conservatives	77.4%
Moderates	73.0%
Liberals	63.0%

Even among white liberals, though, spanking has majority support (56.4% to 43.6%). Banning corporal punishment may be a progressive issue, but intruding on parental rights is not a popular one.

Parenthetically, spanking also finds relatively greater support among men than it does among women, and among those of more modest intelligence than it does among the more intelligent (and, surprisingly, the least intelligent):

Men	76.5%
Women	68.2%

Really dumbs*	69.5%
Pretty dumbs	77.4%
Normals	72.9%
Pretty smarts	69.2%
Really smarts	56.7%

GSS variables used: SPANKING(1-2)(3-4), YEAR, SEX, RACECEN1(1)(2)(3)(4-10)(15-16), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), WORDSUM

* Respondents are broken up into five categories; 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 Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%).

Diversity helps US claim first prize in single parent department

The OECD report that made it into news cycles earlier this week for having discovered that children in the US are more likely to live in single parent households than children in other developed countries grabbed my attention for illustrating why ignoring racial realities and instead relying only on culture (or 'propositionalism') has significantly obfuscatory policy implications. The AP story reads:

Experts point to a variety of factors to explain the high U.S. figure, including a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of single-parent child rearing. The U.S. also lacks policies to help support families, including childcare at work and national paid maternity leave, which are commonplace in other countries.

The logic of the second sentence seems backwards to me--shouldn't a lack of childcare and paid maternity leave discourage single people from having children more than it should discourage married people from doing so? In the latter's case, there is potentially already a stay at home option, with the on site childcare being a nice fringe benefit but not a necessity. In the case of the single person, it probably means private childcare, which makes low-end employment barely economically viable.

That aside, the point is to highlight the fallacy of identifying the US' single parent rate as higher than in other wealthy countries and then, in a robotic fashion, proceed on to suggestions that the US adopt the policies x, y, and z that distinguish these countries from the US. This almost always works to the detriment of those in the US who are opposed to the expansion of the welfare state, because our uniquely multiracial society means Americans as a whole consistently underperform residents of other Western countries on a slew of social indicators. Why? Because race matters. It matters more than the availability of paid paternity or maternity leave does.

Of the 27 European and European-descended countries (plus Japan and South Korea) listed, the percentage of children under the age of 18 living in single parent households has the dubious distinction of being the very worst. But if NAMs are removed from the equation*, the US jumps ahead of Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Estonia, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland. Still near the back of the pack, but no longer sticking out like a sore thumb as the conspicuous worst.

Parenthetically, the data the OECD report draws from are copious but require a sea gate oracle to filter through. In getting to what I was after, a came across some other interesting figures, including the 2009 rates on female labor force participation and total fertility. Might there be an inverse relationship there, with more women running the rat race corresponding to fewer of them making babies?

Not really. The correlation is inverse, but it's weak (.18) and statistically insignificant (p = .26). Eyeballing the numbers, the high female participation rates and high TFRs of the island nations--Great Britain, Iceland, and New Zealand--stand out as especially bucking the weak trend. Removing them from the regression ups the inverse correlation to .28 (p = .10).

Another should make Walter Williams smile. The following table shows the percentage of impoverished married couples with children in which both spouses are working, by country:

Country	%
1. Norway	0.16
2. Denmark	0.57
3. Germany	0.61
4. Czech Republic	0.74
5. Australia	0.85
6. New Zealand	1.00
7. Great Britain	1.03
8. Finland	1.14
9. Sweden	1.41
10. Slovak Republic	1.83
11. The Netherlands	1.84
12. Ireland	1.85
13. Slovenia	2.06
14. Belgium	2.52
15. Italy	2.70
16. Austria	2.94
17. France	3.00
18. Hungary	3.09
19. Estonia	3.12
20. Israel	3.58
21. Greece	4.04
22. Canada	4.11
23. Iceland	4.13
24. Portugal	4.80
25. Spain	5.10
26. South Korea	5.30
26. Luxembourg	5.30
28. Poland	5.72
29. Chile	5.78
30. United States	6.55
31. Japan	9.54
32. Mexico	11.22
33. Russia	15.00
34. Turkey	20.21

The keys to staying out of poverty in the first world are to marry and hold down a job. If these two things are present, for more than 19 out of 20 parents in the developed world, poverty is not. This gets to the heart of Half Sigma's assertion that one of the best things public schools can do for children from working and underclass backgrounds is to try and instill middle class values in them. Easier said than done, of course, but more worthy than the pie in the sky aspirations of legislation like No Child Left Behind.

* The report does not break down national statistics by race, so I used data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that does and applied it to the OECD figures. The foundation's numbers are a bit higher across the board as it includes the children of unmarried women who are cohabiting as being in single parent households, while the OECD does not (more usefully, in my view).

Birth order and the Flynn effect

Studies on birth order show that first-born children tend to have IQs that are, on average, 3 points higher than those of their second-born siblings, and second-borns in turn have a point or two advantage on their younger brothers and sisters. The most popular (and most PC) explanation for this is that couples are able to invest all of their parental energy into the first-born before the next child comes along. After that, though, parental attention is split among multiple offspring. But if the explanation is at least partially one of nature (or a product of a woman's reproductive quality declining as the number of times she's given birth accumulates), might there be a causal relationship between declining birth rates and the Flynn effect (realizing that at most this would account for a 1-2 point increase in average IQ and thus constituting only a fraction of the observed effect)?