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%

Black-white ratios on TANF usage and incarceration rates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black TANF utilization by state

In a column for Taki's Mag, John Derbyshire highlighted an interesting table from the Department of Health and Human Services showing the state-level distributions of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) by race. The piece considers the so-called "slavery tax" and whether it is something we can--or should--continue to pay (or collect--though "pay" is the far more accurate verb to describe Derb readers), and the table's relevance comes from his making the point that as soon as one starts delving into the subject of welfare, race inevitably becomes an issue:

As soon as you start to look at the numbers, though, you come up against the race issue. Here are the 2007-08 TANF tables—that’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal program—broken up by state and race. So for example, in the state of Maryland, which is 30 percent black, 80 percent of TANF-receiving families are black.

Aside from the table naturally catching my attention, I wondered if the Derb fished for and then used an especially startling example of black overrepresentation to make his point. Less than one-third of the population but four-fifths of the active TANF cases? That certainly makes blacks look bad!

The following table ranks states by the level of black representation among TANF beneficiaries relative to the percentage of the total population that is black (black TANF % / black population %), expressed as an index in which 1.00 represents exactly proportional usage, anything less than 1 indicates lower utilization and anything greater than 1 indicates disproportionately high utilization:

State	TANF
1) Wisconsin	9.04
2) Minnesota	8.90
3) Nebraska	7.92
4) Idaho	7.33
5) Iowa	7.23
6) North Dakota	6.83
7) Maine	6.67
8) Utah	6.00
8) Wyoming	6.00
10) Oregon	5.65
11) Pennsylvania	5.48
12) Vermont	5.20
13) Indiana	5.02
14) Kansas	5.00
15) Nevada	4.96
16) Michigan	4.47
17) Illinois	4.46
18) Oklahoma	4.45
19) New Jersey	4.27
20) New Hampshire	4.25
21) Ohio	3.91
22) Arkansas	3.85
23) Arizona	3.77
24) Missouri	3.71
25) Connecticut	3.47
26) Alaska	3.38
26) Kentucky	3.38
28) Montana	3.33
28) Tennessee	3.33
30) Washington	3.30
31) Delaware	3.29
32) Massachusetts	3.25
32) South Dakota	3.25
34) Florida	3.23
34) West Virginia	3.23
36) Virginia	3.19
37) California	3.06
38) North Carolina	2.87
39) Maryland	2.81
40) Alabama	2.65
41) New York	2.56
42) Georgia	2.45
43) Louisiana	2.43
43) South Carolina	2.43
45) Texas	2.39
46) Colorado	2.38
47) Mississippi	2.22
48) Rhode Island	2.11
49) New Mexico	1.70
50) Hawaii	1.06

A visualization of the black data is available here.

Rather than cherry pick a state that made blacks look especially bad, the Derb chose from near the bottom of the list, a state that is closer to racial parity in TANF usage than the country as a whole is. He wasn't trying to pull any punches--in fact, he probably just randomly selected a state that where the figures happened to be round and easily comprehended.

With the exception of Hawaii (where many blacks are in the military and are consequently relatively intelligent and prosperous), blacks receive a disproportionately large share of TANF benefits in every state in the country.

The upper Midwest is the nation's most racially unbalanced region, with blacks using welfare at rates far higher than non-blacks. The South, in contrast, is its most balanced. It is often argued that as a place becomes less white, white support for welfare programs that come to increasingly transfer white wealth not from affluent whites to poor whites but from affluent and middle class whites to non-whites will decrease. This by no means debunks that argument, but it is worth noting that the rankings don't shake out the way such an argument might predict, with whites in states where blacks receive especially disproportionate amounts of welfare benefits voting more strongly Republican than they do in states where welfare benefits are more equally distributed. There is no correlation between the two.

And TANF utilization relative to population share for Hispanics:

State	TANF
1) Massachusetts	3.61
2) Connecticut	2.78
3) Pennsylvania	2.40
4) Minnesota	2.19
5) New York	2.13
6) Nebraska	2.01
7) New Hampshire	1.89
8) Rhode Island	1.78
9) Arizona	1.78
10) Utah	1.69
11) Idaho	1.69
12) Wyoming	1.62
13) Washington	1.62
14) New Jersey	1.55
15) New Mexico	1.54
16) Texas	1.50
17) North Dakota	1.50
18) Wisconsin	1.42
19) California	1.35
20) Iowa	1.34
21) Indiana	1.33
22) Montana	1.31
23) Colorado	1.24
24) Oregon	1.22
25) Vermont	1.20
26) Kansas	1.13
27) Missouri	1.11
28) Ohio	1.10
29) Michigan	1.09
30) Nevada	1.09
31) Oklahoma	1.03
32) Delaware	0.96
33) Alaska	0.93
34) Maine	0.85
35) Hawaii	0.74
36) Florida	0.74
37) North Carolina	0.70
38) Virginia	0.67
39) Illinois	0.60
40) Arkansas	0.59
41) Tennessee	0.59
42) West Virginia	0.50
43) Louisiana	0.43
44) Kentucky	0.42
45) South Dakota	0.41
46) Alabama	0.36
47) Georgia	0.35
48) Mississippi	0.30
49) South Carolina	0.29
50) Maryland	0.21

A visualization of the Hispanic data is available here.

Not surprisingly, Hispanics in states with small black populations appear to be especially heavily welfare users. That's because in these states, their TANF utilization is being compared mostly to white TANF utilization rates, whereas in the South, Hispanics are being compared to a black-white mix, and consequently look less disproportionate (and actually quite admirable in many places). Looking at the preceding table, it's not surprising why Arizona has a restrictionist reputation--that Alabama does so as well is less predictable.

Like father (country), like son

The CIS recently released a detailed study on welfare usage by immigrant households in the US using Census data. That immigrants are more likely to use welfare programs than natives are hardly constitutes a novel discovery, though it's rarely acknowledged in Congressional and popular media debates on the subject. This could easily be remedied by the institution of a selective immigration system with the well-being of current US citizens rather than of aspiring migrants in mind, but that's not the purpose of the post.

What grabbed my attention is just how predictable welfare usage by country of origin is. Table 4 of the CIS report shows welfare usage rates of immigrant households with children by householder's country of origin. Near the bottom of the list are affluent, functional nations like Great Britain and South Korea. Topping the list are places you don't want to be (for more than a week or two, anyway) like Mexico and the Dominican Republic.


Picking up on an old habit, I looked at mean national IQ of the 20 sending countries listed and welfare usage rates of immigrants from those countries who were residing in the US in 2009. The correlation is an inverse .57 (p = .01). That relationship is tempered by Indian immigrants, who constitute a conspicuous exception to the general rule (only those from Great Britain use fewer welfare programs than they do). Removing India from the regression ups the correlation to .64 (p = .00). The Indian demographic landscape is an incredibly complicated one, but it's clear that Indians living in the US are not representative of the country they were born in.

Charter cities: Institute Occidental rules, realize Occidental results?

In a recent EconTalk podcast, host Russ Roberts had Stanford's Paul Romer on to talk about the latter's ideas about what he calls "charter cities". Romer explains that Haitians are miserable because they live under terrible rules. He suggests letting them seek out 'charter cities'--something akin to Singapore with a suzerainty and guarantor of laws that doesn't interfere with internal affairs--and in the process allowing the rest of the world to learn from experimentation in the field. It's the "laboratory of the states idea" on steroids.

The glaring problem in the eyes of HBD realists, of course, is that it is more than just 'rules' that make Haiti Haiti--Haitians themselves play a big role. Relative performance of immigrant groups in the US is similar to the performance of the home countries those immigrants come from. Moving pockets of the underclass into middle class suburbia does not turn the hood rats into burghers--turns out you can take the underclass out of the hood, but you can't take the hood out of the underclass. Likewise, it's easy to get Mexicans out of Mexico, but taking Mexico out of Mexicans is not so simple.

Because it operates under the presumption that human populations are completely interchangeable, the hour long discussion is almost worthless intellectually. But the content isn't all forgettable flotsam. Worse that that, much of it is civilizationally masochistic (28:33):

I think it would be great if we let poor people come to the United States. As [Romer] say[s], their incomes usually jump manyfold. They're very productive. They make our lives better.

Yes, clearly importing poverty on a massive scale is the best way to increase the quality of life in the US! The only reason places like Zimbabwe and Somalia are such hellholes is because they have governments that are too heavy-handed and too feeble, respectively, for a Western standard of living to be realized. Since we have a poor track record when it comes to changing the governmental structures of other countries, a better way of fighting poverty is to take the world's impoverished and put them within the borders of the developed world. What could possibly go wrong?

Roberts goes on to agree with Romer that just allowing a few hundred thousand poor migrants into the US each year is merely a drop in the bucket, that there are one billion people who would benefit from coming here. Those we are unable to take in should be transported to these charter cities (presumably on the developed world's dime, although that's not fleshed out in the podcast). Because they become much wealthier upon taking up residency in the US, largescale immigration of impoverished third-worlders not only carries with it a putative economic benefit (because everyone knows that it is countries where labor costs are lowest are the same countries where standard of livings are the highest!), it also brings a humanitarian one.

The same logic can be applied to wealth redistribution at the individual level. If a bunch of indigents are free to take up residence on Bill Gates' Lake Washington property and use the facilities for their own well-being, it will markedly increase their quality of life. It won't even break Bill's bank. But it will bring down the value of his property, cause him to devote more of his energy to addressing the issues that arise as a result of having indigents living under his roof, decrease the trust existing within the household (Bill's not doing the same thing with his spare time as the indigents are), and disincentivize the behaviors that allowed him to acquire the property in the first place.

I suspect that in response Romer would point out that such indigents being allowed to take up residency on Bill's property is a violation of his personal property rights. But are property rights at the individual level principally different from the rights of a national sovereign to the territory that comprises it? If the majority of the Gates' household was in favor of allowing the indigents to move in, the political argument would be different. When it comes to illegal immigration in the US, however, it is clear that the majority of the Gates' are opposed to hosting the indigents. Forced against their will to accept their new housemates, the Gates' will be prone to move to sections of the house where the indigents don't frequent, such as the northeast quadrant of the property.

The American Southwest is approaching the Deep South in terms of poor scholastic performance, public indebtedness, unemployment, and criminal activity. White flight has been an element of California's existence for over a decade now, due in part to unskilled immigration from Mexico and Central America, most of it unregulated or based on family reunification rather than any measure of merit. The negative externalities listed previously (in addition to accentuated economic and social inequality) associated with largescale unskilled immigration is why laws like the one recently signed in Arizona are created--residents of the states on the front lines realize the transformation from first-world United States into third-world Mexico is not a desirable one.

That Northeastern professors existing in the most unrealistic setting imaginable--the university setting--see no meaningful difference between Ellis Island Jewish immigrants from Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries--before the modern welfare state came into being, when a couple percent of aspiring immigrants were actually turned away in fear they'd become public charges, and when the need for physical labor was rapidly rising--and the immigration patterns today is unsurprising.

While I generally enjoy EconTalk podcasts, Roberts regularly makes empirical assertions that are simply incorrect (although to be fair, he usually prefaces them with something along the lines of "I think, although I'm not familiar with the latest data..."). The one theoretical problem he sees with unfettered immigration--although his comments show he really only thinks it's a political, not a legitimate, problem--into the US is the potential for abuse of the welfare system. After asserting that immigrants in the US improve the lives of natives, he insinuates that welfare use among immigrants is not an actual problem (28:42):

As long as they didn't live off our welfare system, which is a big handicap--I don't think they want to live off our welfare system, but the fact that they could, means people aren't going to let them in. We don't have that luxury [the realization that current immigration patterns are beneficial for natives] right now, politically, I don't think.

A graph comparing usage rates of various welfare programs in the US from the Center for Immigration's impressive 2007 report profiling the US' foreign-born population demonstrates, however, that while it may not be the case in Fairfax, on the whole immigrants make considerably better use of welfare programs in the US than natives do: