Nigeria had fewer people than Chicago when I was a wee lad

The Pew Research Center is an honest organization that provides often interesting and useful data on social issues, public opinion and demographic trends. That assertion, though, needs to be qualified by pointing out that Pew is honest by way of commission, while it is often less so by way of omission. The center regularly conducts a survey entitled "News IQ" in which American adults are surveyed on their knowledge of current events.

If I recall correctly, Pew originally included racial breakdowns in the quiz results, though it stopped doing so several years ago and it looks as though Pew only maintains the most recent results on its site. Now it appears as though a stop to breaking down results by sex is imminent. Report results from the latest survey only separate out male and female responses for three questions that specifically have to do with women (tragically, men performed better on all three!). However, after completing the quiz online, results are broken down by sex, age, and educational attainment.

While men performed better on the three ostensibly girl power questions (identifying Marissa Mayer, the percentage of congress critters who are female, and female college graduation rates), women actually outscored men on two of the thirteen items, the two concerning subjects of elevated interest to many women--same-sex marriage and educational curricula. While sexless feminists might be interested in female figures engaged in traditionally masculine pursuits, most women are far more interested in traditionally (and biologically) feminine concerns like social inclusion and nurturing.

If Pew stops reporting results by sex, we're left with age (fairly predictable question by question and a dead giveaway overall), education (more obvious than the outcome of a Globetrotters-Generals game), and party affiliation (almost indistinguishable this time around).

One age-related result does catch the eye:

Percentages who correctly answered "Nigeria" by age range:

18-29 -- 47%
30-49 -- 45%
50-64 -- 43%
65+ -- 29%

The question is multiple choice with four possible answers, so old fogies are essentially oblivious to the specific differences in rates of fertility between various different countries in the world. You don't have to care about demographics for demographics to care about you, of course.

Spanish beats out others including Urdu, Cantonese, Gaellic for the #2 spot

Pew reports "Spanish is the most spoken non-English language in U.S. homes". In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning and is projected to set in the west later this evening.

In seriousness, predictable social data like these are valuable, even when they're not 'controversial'. But while Pew is deserving of admiration for its acts of data-reporting commission, it often disappoints by way of omission.

Case in point in this very report, conveniently enough. After spending a seemingly inordinate amount of time on the tangential non-Hispanic Spanish speaking population in the US (numbering 2.8 million, compared to the country's 34.8 million Hispanic Spanish speakers), the report closes by informing us about English language proficiency rates of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish in their homes (2.8 million) and of non-Hispanics who do not speak Spanish in their homes (roughly 290 million):

When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English “very well”, 11% say they speak English “well”, and 9% say they speak English “not well” or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it “very well”, 2% who speak English “well”, and 2% who speak English “not well” or do not speak English.

Leaves something to be desired, doesn't it? We get nationwide English language proficiency rates but with the glaring exclusion of the 34.8 million Spanish-speaking Hispanics residing in the US, the figure most readers--especially Dark Enlightenment types like us--are presumably the most curious about.

I've asked the authors to provide a similar breakdown of English proficiency rates among Hispanic Spanish speakers in the US. The comment thread is quite manageable and it looks fairly interactive between readers and the reports' authors, so feel free to ask for the same data I've asked for. Strength in numbers!

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

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.

We can spare the state department, but that's it

Rand Paul is spitting into the wind. Unfortunately so from my perspective, but it's what he's doing all the same.

Pew recently released the results of a survey in which respondents were asked whether they would increase, decrease, or maintain current spending levels across 19 different expenditure categories if they were writing up the federal government's budget. The following table shows the public appetite for spending increases (decreases) by category, computed by simply taking the percentage of respondents who indicated they would increase spending in an indicated area and subtracting from it the percentage who said they'd decrease it (and letting be the percentage who wanted to keep it the same). The first numerical column shows the broader public's predilections. The three subsequent columns show results by partisan affiliation:

Spending up (down) on...	Total	Rep	Dem	Ind
Education	50	31	70	47
Veterans' benefits	47	48	45	47
Social security	31	18	46	25
Combating crime	27	24	42	19
Natural disaster relief	22	3	33	21
Roads and infrastructure	21	7	25	27
Medicare	21	3	45	15
FDA inspections	19	(5)	38	17
Scientific research	17	(10)	37	17
Health care	16	(28)	51	11
Energy	15	(5)	34	13
Agriculture	14	2	23	11
Anti-terrorism defenses	13	26	18	1
Environmental protection	11	(28)	44	10
Military defense	8	37	(4)	1
Aid to needy in the US	3	(40)	30	3
Unemployment assistance	(8)	(47)	28	(12)
State department	(20)	(26)	(13)	(20)
Foreign aid	(27)	(63)	8	(33)

Statism is alive and well in the US. Combined spending for unemployment benefits, the state department, and foreign aid--the three areas for which there is more desire for attrition than accretion--constituted less than 5% of all federal government spending in 2012. While there is some aversion to sending our pooled money overseas, the masses want it gathered up and spread around by a federal apparatus at home.

Even self-identified Republicans want spending increases in more areas than they want decreases, and more importantly, in the three gargantuan spending categories--social security, defense, and medicare--they want the federal government to spend more, not less, than it's currently spending. In 1980, Reagan's platform included abolishing the department of education. Today, only one in ten Americans (and barely one in seven Republicans!) say they'd like to see federal spending on education cut, let alone abolished entirely.

Leviathan loves the tacit agreement between Demopublicans and Republicrats to allow for increases in international defense offense defense spending in return for acquiescence to increases in domestic spending back home. Consequently, the only outlay category that voters in both parties express a desire for cuts in is the state department (with a $0.030 trillion budget from the $3.746 trillion the federal government spent last year). What percentage of Americans even know what the state department does? Besides being derelict in attacks on diplomatic missions in places like Benghazi, that is. Heh, maybe that's why they aren't overly eager to give it more money.

I'm not qualified to proffer financial advice, but every day that passes sees me becoming more and more satisfied with the investment strategy I've been employing for the last few years--buying gold and silver, exclusively. In retrospect, I wish I would've started when I hit legal adulthood in 2002. Better late than never, though, I guess.

In government we trust?

Just in time for the bipartisan, full-court amnesty press, Pew provides some insight into why our political class is so eager to elect a new people. The research center surveyed people in the US on the levels of trust they have in the federal government.

Guess which group was the most likely to say that they can "trust the government in Washington to do what is right". This group reports higher levels of trust in the federal government than blacks or even self-described liberal Democrats do. Hint: The GOP's response to Obama's state of the union address will be given by an invade-the-world, invite-the-world neocon who will be delivering said response in both English and Spanish.

Pew induces puking

A little with this report, anyway. Pew Research is an admirable organization that has given me buckets of food for thought and more than my share of blogging material to make use of, all without asking anything of me in return. Countless hours of entertainment for free. What could the organization possibly owe me? If anything, I owe it. Still, while this report might not be the Worst. Report. Ever., omission and obfuscation abound.

Entitled "A Bipartisan Nation of Beneficiaries", it opens by showing that a full 59% of Obama voters and 53% of Romney voters received benefits from at least one of the six major entitlement programs considered. Wow, looks like "the 47%" thing was an understatement! Voters tend to be a notch above non-voters and yet majorities of both parties' electorates are welfare queens! This graphic, presented later in the report, sheds some light on why the recipient percentages are so high, however:

Virtually all seniors have been on the public dole because medicaid and especially social security--which is there for the taking for everyone, the only restriction being geriatric--are included in the analysis. With the 65+ age bracket breaking 56%-44% for Romney, the inclusion of these universal old age government-provided benefits stacks the deck to make it appear as though Obama voters were hardly any more likely to be feeding at the public trough than Romney voters were. That, of course, is technically accurate, and it sheds some light on how politically perilous the Ryan budget plan was. Excepting defense, cuts in the rate of growth in these programs are among the least offensive to the Democratic party. But in the public mind, social security is something everyone pays into and subsequently is entitled to take from, while things like TANF and food stamps are there for those who are incapable of providing for themselves.

If Pew spun the findings as noted above but disaggregated the data in the index of the report, I wouldn't be whining, but the organization doesn't. It would be nice to know, for instance, the electoral breakdown among medicaid, TANF, food stamps, and unemployment insurance recipients without the inclusion of social security (which has the greatest number of recipients among the six programs considered) and medicare recipients in the mix. As written, the report clearly indicates that Pew has the data broken out in such a manner but intentionally doesn't report it as such, as doing so would show that the takers are squarely in Obama's camp.

There is still something to be gleaned from the report as is that will be of interest to regular readers, however. It's well known in these parts that women are leading the way towards our progressive leftist future. If only men had voted in November, Romney would've won as convincingly as Obama actually did. Why do women--especially the unmarried ones--like the welfare state so much? Because men foot the bill for it while they enjoy the lion's share of the benefits it provides. The percentages, by sex, who use none, one, two, and three or more of the six entitlement programs:

Sex	0	1	2	3+
Men	51%	23%	15%	12%
Women	39%	22%	19%	19%

Plurality of Americans see the Arab Spring as bad for the US

As well aware of public sentiment as I like to think I am, I'm not impervious to the occasional surprise, this one of the pleasant variety. The following graphic comes from Pew Research's recent report on how Americans feel about our involvement in the Middle East and North Africa generally and the 'Arab Spring' in particular:

Quite encouraging. Americans were instinctively skeptical of the uprisings as the numbers from the beginning as the March/April 2011 show--pluralities thought they would "not lead to lasting improvements" and would "be bad for the United States" and an outright majority, in defiance of neocons and the interventionist left, expressed a preference for stable governments over democratically formed ones in the Arab world. Since then, these "America First" positions have only become firmer.

Further, the Republican electorate appears to have lost some of the enthusiasm for preaching messianic democracy with the aim of remaking the rest of the world in our own image over the last decade:

 That shouldn't be oversold, though:

The GOP has long way to go before it's the party of Rand Paul, but the country is inching in his direction. I'll gladly take evidence that the ratchet doesn't have to inexorably move in just one direction all the time where I can get it.

Welcome news as this may be, however, it's disheartening that most Americans don't have a presidential candidate from either of the major parties who shares their sentiments on our nation's relations with Muslim countries.

Charles Murray on (the) Pew (quiz)

Criticizing a joint effort by PBS and Pew Research to construct a 12-item party identification quiz, Charles Murray makes a few questionable assertions. Firstly, his commentary on the "I never doubt the existence of God" item:

So let’s say you’re the Pew researcher making up the test, you know that conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals, and you want an item that will capture that tendency. So far so good. But then do you say to yourself, “The very most religious people are the ones who never doubt the existence of God”? “Lack of doubt in the existence of God has a statistical correlation with conservatism”? This item is clueless. Clueless about the nature of deep religious faith, clueless about the relationship of conservatism to religiosity, and clueless about the different tendencies of libertarians and conservatives regarding religious faith.

Murray's elitism (and I say that not with derision but with admiration, as the best minds are almost by necessity elitist) causes him to be overly pedantic and demanding of too much semantic precision. Blaise Pascal and Mother Theresa may have perpetually struggled with doubt, but generally speaking, the most pious tend to leave the least room for an existence in which God isn't extant, as the GSS clearly illustrates. The percentages of people who express certainty in God's existence by political orientation and then by frequency of church attendance (with no double counting, so "monthly +" includes only those who attend less than weekly but at least once a month, etc), from 2000 onward and among whites exclusively for contemporary relevance and to avoid racial confounding:

Orientation	Certain
Liberal	37.3%
Moderate	58.4%
Conservative	69.3%

Frequency	Certain
Weekly+	86.3%
Monthly+	68.8%
Annually+	49.3%
Less than annually	33.6%

If we really want to pile on, we can criticize the availability of four responses (completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, completely disagree) to a clearly dichotomous question. How is it possible for one to "mostly agree" that he never doubts the existence of God? If he has ever doubted God's existence, he must choose "completely disagree" as his answer; otherwise, he must choose "completely agree".

This is the nature of most of Murray's criticism, and he could've gone a lot deeper on several of the items if he'd wanted to. For example, the item "Gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry legally" could easily be answered in the affirmative by someone entirely opposed to same-sex marriages. Yes, gays should be able to marry but no, we should not change the definition of marriage to include incestuous, multiple, or same-sex partners. A gay man is allowed to marry a woman he is not related to just as a heterosexual man is! However, the sliver of the population that might logically interpret the question and proffered response in this way is going to realize what the survey is intending to measure and thus answer that they completely disagree with the item even though, strictly speaking, they may completely agree with it.

But that's not the point of surveys like these. Look, social survey data aimed at the general public are inevitably going to be found lacking in nuance and precision, but that's more of a feature than a bug. Better to have informed (and those who read Murray are in the top decile of the population) respondents scoff at the simplicity or semantic sloppiness of a question yet answer in the same way as they would have had it been worded more cogently than risk having a substantial slice of the relatively uninformed masses become confused by the question and offer random or bemused responses that confound the entire data pool.

Murray also utters this doozy on the question about immigration, a subject for which I recall John Derbyshire having noted causes otherwise perspicacious pundits to momentarily lose several IQ points upon discussing:

Hasn’t anyone at Pew or PBS noticed that unions, mainstays of Democratic party funding, are among the most vocal critics of immigration?

The AFL-CIO's official position on immigration:

The U.S. immigration system is broken—and U.S.-born workers as well as aspiring citizens are paying a heavy price. America needs to create an immigration process that works for working people—not a system that benefits corporate employers at the expense of everyone else.

 Current U.S. immigration policy is a blueprint for employer manipulation and abuse, and both new American immigrants and American-born workers are suffering the consequences.

 We say, “¡Basta Ya!” or “Enough Already!” That’s why the AFL-CIO supports a comprehensive, worker-centered approach as part of a common-sense immigration process.

Click here to read the union movement's framework for creating a roadmap to citizenship.

To the right of the page linked to are a couple of 'statements and resolutions' explaining the union's support for "in-state tuition of undocumented youth" and "the devastating effects of state anti-immigrant laws". The language used by the nation's largest unions are indistinguishable from the words employed by La Raza. The rank-and-file might not be big fans of open borders, but, like their non-union brethren, their appointed leaders are.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), GOD(1-5)(6), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), ATTEND(0-1)(2-3)(4-6)(7-8)

Partisan perceptions of media bias

Of the 13 major media outlets queried about by Pew, the only one Republicans trust more than Democrats do is Fox News. "Question everything" is a tired phrase leftists often employ as a means of obtaining morally posturing cheap grace, but the late George Carlin's proscription of it characterizes those on the right better than it does those on the left, at least when it comes to the real time filters through which they view the larger world around themselves:

Children should be taught to question everything--to question everything they read, everything they hear.

Even the WSJ enjoys more credulity among Democrats than it does among Republicans. As a reader of the journal, I don't find this particularly surprising. While the op/ed section is run by neocons, the hard news pages betray the same typical leftism-primarily-by-omission that the NYT and the Washington Post do. Small wonder those on the left so viscerally loath Fox News (which, having recently acquired XM radio, I've begun listening to along with other cable stations in the car, and they strike me as even more sensationalist, unrigorous, and partisan than I remember them being when I watched with regularity in the early 2000s).

I'm not overly eager to wade into the polluted waterways of media bias, but one potentially interesting way to gauge which direction it is 'objectively' perceived to tilt presents itself in the Pew report we're considering here. Respondents were asked to rate the "believability" of 13 news organizations on a 4-point scale, with 3s and 4s indicating believability and 1s and 2s a lack thereof. Correlating the percentages of independents giving each news organization a 3 or 4 with the percentages of Republicans and of Democrats who did the same yields r-values of .26 and .62, respectively.

Wow, so independents' assessments of believability are much more in line with those of Democrats than they are with those of Republicans. Remove Fox News from the comparison, however, and the correlations shift dramatically, to .63 (up from .29) between Republicans and independents and to .49 (down from .62) between Democrats and independents. The independent perception is a little closer to that of Republicans when it comes to most of the media, but is almost as jaded towards Fox News as Democrats are. I interpret this as showing that the soft middle sees a relatively gentle leftward lean across the media landscape with the glaring exception of Fox News, which is perceived as an organ of the GOP.

Parenthetically, local news stations get high marks for believability across the political spectrum and are most trusted overall among those surveyed. Geographic proximity creates familiarity and fosters trust. People don't care much for Congress but they love their own congress critters. Localism is inherently a lot more natural to and comforting for people than all the various strains of globalism are.

Asians like Ice People

Half Sigma recently rehashed the familiar reasons why Asians are, as the so-called "model minority", also the inconvenient minority:

Asians also make SWPL whites uncomfortable because of all of the white male/Asian female couples and the lack of mixed-race couples who run in the other direction. This brings up a lot of HBD issues that good white liberals don’t want to think about. Asians also make liberal whites uncomfortable because the existence of a successful minority lends support to the taboo idea that maybe blacks don’t succeed because of their genes and not because they are a minority. The best way to avoid thinking about these things is to avoid Asians.

A Pew survey on Asians in the US adds another reason for why Asians are the left's stickiest minority group, even though they tend to be socially liberal on issues like abortion and mostly vote Democratic (and also act like Belmont SWPLs in their personal lives). The following table shows what we'll deem a harmony index, computed by taking the percentage of Asians who say they get along "very well" with each racial group and subtracting from it the percentage of Asians who say they get along either "not too well" or "not well at all" with that group. The higher the score, the greater the perceived harmony between Asians and the group in question is:

Getting along with...	Harmony
Whites	+17
Other Asians	+13
Hispanics	-3
Blacks	-13

Asians report getting along with whites even better than they get along with other Asians, far better than they get along with Hispanics and far, far better than they get along with blacks.

Jews and abortion

As has been reported here (and iterated elsewhere), Jews in the US--including Orthodox--are, on the whole, further to the left politically than white Democrats are. There are lots of varying explanations for this--Jews being yoked to the American left wing because "it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe", a consequence of several centuries of urban concentration, as a vehicle for successfully pursuing a "group evolutionary strategy", and a long history of working with and for the state, just to run through a few.

Despite at least being aware of all of this, I was surprised to find how hostile Jews are towards restrictions on abortion. A recent Pew report headlined for cataloging increasing support for gun rights and same-sex marriage contains a seemingly orthogonal table at the end that tracks percentages of people who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases and those who think it should be illegal in all or most cases. Splitting 86%-11% in favor of legality, Jews are the most pro-choice of the 33 groups Pew breaks out; more so than those who have no religious affiliation, than liberal Democrats, and than those who seldom or never attend religious services.

Why? Perhaps it's as difficult for a gentile to understand this particular aspect of Jewish liberalism as it is for him to truly comprehend why the Jewish affinity for leftism generally is so strong, but the possibilities that crop up in my mind--that setting parameters on reproductive rights smacks of 'Nazism' (notwithstanding how odd a way this would be to express that), that Jewish fertility is in the toilet even though Jewish abortions are rare means that more abortions leads to a larger Jewish population share, or that the pro-life movement is preponderantly a white southern evangelical one and therefore something Jews instinctively oppose--feel kind of kooky.

Political news IQ

++Addition++See Steve's insights on the Pew results.

---

Expanding beyond the News IQ quizzes it periodically conducts, Pew Research recently released the results of what the organization calls the Political News IQ Quiz, which you can take here. I answered them all correctly, as I suspect the majority of readers of this blog and others like it will also do. Yet only 8% of the population fared as well, a reminder that the overwhelming majority of the American public is unaware of the basic layout of the political landscape, let alone plugged into the minutiae of committee memberships, legislative action, or how relevant Lochner v. New York is in the Supreme Court's consideration of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Some points of interest from the results:

- Men fared better than women on every single question asked. Ho-hum, that's always the case when it comes to current events more distant than the dinner table or, at most, the local city council meeting. As has become its custom, Pew did not publish these results in the body of the actual report, but they can be accessed by users who finish the abbreviated online version of the quiz. Pew's acts of commission are honest and laudable. Acts of omission, on the other hand--well, Pew's still better than most, so I guess we have to take what we can get.

- On most items, age and political knowledge increase together. There are a few exceptions, though. Those aged 18-29 were more aware than older cohorts that the Democratic party is more favorably inclined towards spending cuts on defense, allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens, and expanding the privileges of homosexuals. These (especially the latter two--the first is more of a reflexive and rhetorically effective reaction to conservative calls for spending cuts) presage the direction the Democratic party will take in the future, away from concerns like punitive taxation of high income earners and creating laws favorable to labor organizations that the contemporary left doesn't care that much about, and will care even less about going forward.

- As Republicans have higher average IQs than Democrats do, and Democrats have higher average IQs than independents do, it isn't surprising that Republicans fared best, answering an average of 12.6 of the 17 full length quiz questions correctly. Democrats followed, with 11.4 correct. Independents took up the rear at 10.7 correctly answered questions. To SWPLs' eternal frustration, failing to break out results by race means that assessments by party affiliation are always going to make Republicans, members of the nation's de facto white party, look better than they do.

Hispanics favor big, activist government

As the Hispanic tidal wave perpetually approaches election cycle after election cycle, always just about to crash upon the shoreline of US politics, establishment types repeatedly talk about the urgency with which Republicans need to Hispander or face electoral oblivion. This latest WSJ article is just the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon:

Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney's presidential campaign are working to fashion proposals that could make up ground with Hispanic voters, concerned rhetoric on immigration from many in the party is turning away the increasingly powerful constituency.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) [what a great vice presidential candidate he would make!] is developing a scaled-back version of the Dream Act, which would allow people brought to the U.S. as children to gain legal status, but not citizenship, if they enroll in college or the military. Several Senate Republicans have signed on to bipartisan legislation aimed at broadening access to the legal immigrant visa system.

The Romney campaign is looking for new proposals that would show he backs legal immigration, trying to pivot from a primary campaign in which he has taken a tough line on assistance to those here illegally.

That there were ten non-Hispanic white voters for every one Hispanic voter in the 2008 Presidential election, and that swing states are less Hispanic than the country as a whole is are never mentioned in articles like these, of course. While this undue emphasis is annoying, though, it's the self-immolating idiocy of Republican pols that really goads me:

Many Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), argue that if the party could get past the immigration issue, it would be the natural home for many more Latino voters, who are often socially conservative and value entrepreneurship.

The mantra about Hispanic social conservatism (to the extent that it rests on any actual evidence at all) rests almost entirely on modestly stronger opposition to abortion among Hispanics than among non-Hispanics. Well, black opposition to abortion is similarly stronger than non-black opposition is. Maybe Graham has read Jeffrey Kuhner and plans to have the GOP steal black votes from Obama next!

The Pew Hispanic Center provides a dose of reality in a report on Hispanics in the US released earlier this week. The following table breaks down Hispanic and non-Hispanic responses to a dichotomous question on whether one would "rather have a small government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services":

	Small gov't	Big gov't	DK/Refused
Hispanics	19%	75%	6%
Non-Hispanics	48%	41%	11%

The non-Hispanic figure includes blacks, so the non-Hispanic white/Hispanic gap is even larger than the table makes it appear to be. Hispanics, who tend to be poorer than whites, are more likely to receive government benefits and less likely to pay for them than white Americans are, so it's hardly a surprise that they are more favorably inclined towards big government and the associated wealth transfers that come with it than whites are.

Some other interesting findings from the Pew report:

- Despite the push from above to rebrand Hispanics as "Latinos", actual Hispanics, er, Latinos, actually prefer the "Hispanic" descriptor by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

- Similarly, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics (I'll defer to them and continue to employ this term rather than adopt SWPL's favored pet name) do not think of themselves as an umbrella ethnic group sharing a common culture. This is lost on media types and obtuse pols like Newt Gingrich, who were surprised to find that Cubans in Florida don't care much about illegal immigration from Mexico into the US' Southwest.

- Hispanics primarily think of themselves with regard to their country of origin. While 51% of Hispanics think of themselves in this way (as Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans, etc), 24% think of themselves as Hispanic/Latino. Only 21% think of themselves as Americans.

- A staggering 95% of Hispanics say it is either "very important" or "somewhat important" that future generations of Hispanics living in the US are able to speak Spanish. See, they're assimilating just like my German grandmother did when she schooled my mother, who of course schooled me, in the German language I speak so fluently today! Fortunately, 87% of Hispanics also assert that Hispanics in the US need to learn English to succeed here. Bilingualism for all!

Right to privacy, Facebook variety

A Pew survey on the online social networking habits of adults reveals unsurprising gender differences in personal privacy settings. By a ratio of nearly 5 to 1 (67% to 14%), women make their profiles private and thus only accessible to their friends rather than making them publicly available for viewing by whoever looks them up. While men also tend towards restricting profile access, the ratio, at less than 2 to 1 (48% to 26%), is far less lopsided.

Biology is informative here. Women are the more restrictive gender not only in regards to sex, but when it comes to personal relationships of lesser intensity as well. The survey didn't probe it, but I'd wager girls are also more apt to reject friendship requests from people they barely know or don't know at all than guys are. Being Facebook stalked is understandably a worrisome issue for women, while for men it's flattering and invitational (there are a few easy tricks to get a good sense of who is regularly checking your Facebook profile out).

Parenthetically, 93% of those who use online social networking sites have a Facebook account (as of Spring 2011). MySpace is still used by 23% of them. By contrast, only 11% use Twitter. It's my impression that the latter receives undue media attention given its relatively niche presence. I don't use Twitter so excuse my ignorance about the site, but doesn't Facebook, via status updates, do everything Twitter does plus a whole lot more?

Capitalist whites, socialist blacks, libertarian youths

Martin Luther King, Jr. is reported to have said the following in a speech to staff members in 1966:

We are saying that something is wrong ... with capitalism ... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

Nearly half a century later, that dream still appears to live on in the hearts and minds of a majority of America's black population.

The source of this assertion comes from Pew's recently released report on word associations. The invaluable organization often (though not always!) goes where other polling and survey organizations--even those putatively on the right--refuse to go. Pew breaks down responses by race and ethnicity, among other things. The following table shows the percentages of participants, by race, who have positive and negative reactions to the term "socialism". The fourth column shows net favorability, computed by simply taking the positive reaction percentages and subtracting from them the negative reaction percentages:

Socialism	Pos	Neg	Net
Whites	24%	68%	(44)
Blacks	55%	36%	+19
Hispanics	44%	49%	(5)

While a slight plurality of Hispanics are averse to socialism, likely stemming from having had some experience with it if not first-hand then vicariously through relatives in Central and South America, they are not positively disposed towards capitalism, either. The same table, this time for the term "capitalism":

Capitalism	Pos	Neg	Net
Whites	55%	35%	+20
Blacks	41%	51%	(10)
Hispanics	32%	55%	(23)

How widely known is it that black feelings towards socialism mirror white feelings towards capitalism, and that a majority of blacks both react positively to the idea of socialism and react negatively to the idea of capitalism? Can Steve Innskeep handle the truth?

I'd love to hear a free market open borders leftist like Thomas Friedman challenged on how he squares the Hispanic preference for socialism over capitalism with the claim that the US should open its borders "as wide as possible".

Even the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, despite claiming to represent the 99%, is comprised almost entirely of whites (who only constitute 63% of the US' population and a mere 15% or so of the world's), is less inclined towards socialism than either blacks or Hispanics are, with 39% of those who support the movement expressing positive feelings towards socialism while 52% of OWS supporters react negatively towards it.

The Pew report should also help direct the attacks of mainstream radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity towards a new target. "Liberal" has been beaten to death to such an extent that it only carries positive connotations with it in the minds of half (50%) of the population, compared to "conservative" (62%) and the new target, "progressive" (67%). Even among Republicans a majority (55%) is favorably inclined towards the term "progressive". Time for the ditto heads to get to work!

Parenthetically, Hispanics express warmer feelings (67%) towards "liberal" than whites (45%) or even blacks (54%) do, another blatantly obvious reason for the Republican Establishment to keep clamoring for amnesty and open borders!

To the extent that the GOP will be able to bring younger Americans into that 'big tent' Republican pols are always blathering on about, it will be by way of their libertarian (read Ron Paul), not neocon, ideas. The following table shows the percentages who elicit positive and negative feelings towards the term "libertarian" by age group, with the fourth column showing net favorability, computed by simply taking the positive reaction percentages and subtracting from them the negative reaction percentages:

Libertarian	Pos	Neg	Net
18-29	50%	28%	+22
30-49	41%	35%	+6
50-64	35%	43%	(8)
65+	25%	43%	(18)

Hispanics vote Democrat because of economic concerns and health care, not immigration

Though it is persistently asserted by self-proclaimed 'Latino activists'*, media types, and Establishment Republicans alike that taking a restrictionist stance on immigration is to commit political hara kiri, Hispanics are not particularly concerned with immigration (and to the extent that they do care, their opinions are far more ambiguous than the casual observer has been led to believe).

Pew just released the results of a survey on Hispanics in the US headlining with their reactions to an uptick in deportations carried out under the Obama administration as compared to the Bush administration. The report also contains other points of interest, including the emphasis placed on the question of immigration. Of the six issues participants were asked about, immigration came in dead last in the percentage of Hispanic voters who say they are "extremely concerned" about it. From most to least important: Jobs (50%), Education (49%), Health care (45%), Taxes (34%), Federal budget deficit (!) (34%), Immigration (33%).

Hispanics primarily favor Democrats because of the party's policies on health care and economics--policies that seek to transfer wealth from middle class whites to the (disproportionately Hispanic) poor. The GOP would have to move to the left of the Democratic party on both of these fronts to beat it at its own game and have a chance at winning over Hispanics, a move that would necessarily entail the Republican party ceasing to be conservative in any meaningful way.

Calling for open borders alone doesn't aid the Hispandering cause. The survey was conducted when the three big names in the GOP field were Romney, Perry, and Cain. Romney, whose relatively tough stance on illegal immigration is only outdone by Bachmann, was found to be running neck-and-neck with Perry and slightly ahead of Cain among Hispanic voters, even though Cain was running at the front of the pack among Republican primary voters at the time.

Perusing the rest of the report, I was reminded of a one of my favorite Simpsons moments, when, as the family shovels down low-fat pudding, Marge remarks that she can just feel the pounds melting off. The report shows that while Hispanics who are fluent English speakers, make $75,000+ per year, and/or have a college degree feel the Republican party is more inclined towards Hispanics as a group than the Democratic party is (14%, 19%, and 14%, respectively) than are Hispanics who primarily or exclusively speak Spanish, make under $30,000 per year, and/or have less than a high school education (6%, 10%, and 7%, respectively), an increase in even the more assimilated and successful portion of the Hispanic immigrant contingent is obviously bad news for Republicans.

* Despite an apparent upsurge in preference for the term "Latino" over the term "Hispanic" by 'activists' and SWPLs in the media over the course of the last decade or so, more people descended from south of the border prefer the latter descriptor, Hispanic, over the former, Latino. This remains the case whether those Latinos/Hispanics in question were born in the US or outside of it, by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

More on the myth of Hispanic social conservatism

From the Pew Research Center comes more evidence that the open borders Republicans' nonsense about Hispanics being natural Republicans because of their putative "family values" social conservatism is just that, nonsense.



Pew conducted a survey earlier this year in which respondents were queried about their positions on seven areas of contemporary change in family structure that has occurred in the US over the last several decades. The seven are "more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them", "more unmarried couples raising children", "more gay and lesbian couples raising children", "more people living together without getting married", "more mothers of young children working outside the home", "more people of different races marrying each other", and "more women not ever having children". Respondents rated each of the items as being "good for society", "bad for society", or "makes no difference".



From the responses, Pew categorized participants into three groups of roughly equal size ("accepters", "skeptics", and "rejecters"). Accepters were the most likely to render the changes as being good for society and rejecters the most likely to render them bad for society, while skeptics fell in between.



The following table displays a progressive index for various demographic groupings, computed by simply taking the percentage of each group classified as accepters and subtracting from that the percentage of the group classified as rejecters. Thus, the higher the value, the more progressive that group is:

Sex
Men	-8
Women	+7
Race
White	-5
Black	-1
Hispanic	+25
Age
18-29	+23
30-49	+2
50-64	-5
65+	-28
Marital status
Married	-15
Unmarried	+16
Political affiliation
Republican	-38
Democrat	+22
Independent	+1
Electoral status
Registered voter	-7
Unregistered	+19
Church attendance
Weekly+	-33
Monthly or less	+3
Seldom/never	+34

Hispanics hold far more 'progressive' views on the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family than blacks and whites do. Who would've thought blacks are even more natural Republicans than Hispanics are?! Hispanics are even slightly more progressive than self-described Democrats and those under the age of 30 are. Only the irreligious are more libertine in their views on the state of the family in contemporary America than Hispanics are.



The other results come as little surprise, meshing well with conventional wisdom, with a couple possible exceptions in the sex and registered voters gaps. After all, it's women who are said to suffer more from single parenthood, hence the recourse available to women through the legal system to force absent fathers to transfer resources to them. Regarding registered voters being more traditional than the population at large, it's yet another reason I'm an opponent of universal suffrage.

On the wealth gap

Pew recently published a report accompanied by a press release that highlights the recent growth in the ratio of the median wealth of white households relative to that of black and Hispanic households. As of 2009, the median white household's net worth was 20 times that of blacks. Just four years prior, the multiple had 'only' been 11.

The median net worth of white households fell over $22k from $135k in '05 to $113k '09, while black net worth decreased $6, from $12k to $6k. White wealth decreased more than NAM wealth in absolute terms.

As nearly one-quarter of NAM households have no assets beyond a vehicle (about 1 in 17 white households are in the same situation), it's a bit misleading to focus on relative multiples, since the floor is not zero, but some undefined negative number far below that. If a double dip recession propels us into "peak everything", imagine the consequences are another $20k off of median white household net worth and another $5k off black net worth. Now we're looking at a multiple of nearly 100 between white and black wealth. Is it plausible that the relative increased suffering of blacks will be an order of magnitude worse than the pain this causes whites? If black net worth falls to $100 and white net worth to $50k, is the black situation 500 times worse? Doubtful (though it is admittedly difficult to quantify economic suffering). And what if median black wealth falls $7k, into negative territory, where a large number of blacks already are? The multiplier becomes a negative number, which just gets really confusing in the popular press.

Anyway, the underlying data that comparative reports like these are built upon is often useful for calibrating one's hazy conception of the American scene (in this case, by affluence and race) into something sharper. Unfortunately, even though the report understandably focuses on median rather than mean wealth, breaking out actual average dollar figures by asset class for all households is more tenable for mean wealth than it is for median wealth based on the figures provided. Consequently, that's what the following table displays, derived primarily from the data on page 6 of the full report (all figures are in US dollars, rounded to the nearest $100):

Asset class	Whites	Hispanics	Blacks	Asians
Total assets	271,000	73,000	73,800	313,000
Own home	103,000	40,200	41,300	109,600
Rental property	16,300	6,600	4,400	15,700
Other real estate	10,800	1,500	2,200	3,100
Stocks and mutual funds	43,400	2,200	3,700	100,200
IRA and Keogh accounts	27,100	4,400	4,400	18,800
401(k) and thrift accounts	32,500	8,000	10,300	31,300
Financial institution accounts	16,300	4,400	4,400	18,800
Other interest-earning assets	5,400	700	700	3,100
Business equity	19,000	10,200	6,600	15,700
Vehicles	8,100	3,700	3,000	6,300
Other assets	8,100	1,500	700	3,100
Unsecured liabilities	(13,500)	(9,500)	(8,900)	(12,500)

The gap between whites and NAMs is by far the widest in categories involving financial assets. While the average white family's sedan is only twice as nice as the average Hispanic's family van, the white family's Scottrade account is 20 times as valuable. Seeing people on the street gives the general impression that whites tend to be a little better off than NAMs, but it's certainly nothing like a British tourist traveling to a village in the Congo. Seeing each of these people's personal ledgers reveals that behind relatively equal public appearances, whites have a lot more tucked away than NAMs do (and Asians--whose cars are less flashy than those of whites--have even more than that tucked away). If whites and Asians tried to be as opulent relative to their real wealth as blacks (and to a lesser extent, Hispanics) do, racial tensions and the clamor for robin hood economics would be even worse than they already are.

A couple of other interesting asides: 1) The report mentions that the Asian figure for stocks and bonds is noticeably higher than it was four years ago, even though the DJIA lost around 40% of its value over that period of time, and suggests caution in putting too much stake in an Asian sample that may have had an unexpectedly high number of very affluent participants. The total mean wealth of Asian households holds over the four year period. As the recession hit states with large immigrant populations the hardest, it would be expected for mean Asian wealth to drop quite a bit, like Hispanic mean wealth did. So the caution is valid.

2) While the median Hispanic household's net worth is higher than the median black net worth, mean black net worth is higher than mean Hispanic net worth. Among the lower classes, blacks struggle a little more than Hispanics do. But there are a lot more blacks than there are Hispanics who make it big in things like sports and the world of entertainment.