The establishment's theory of race differences in socially valued metrics is that this is due to "systemic racism", a kind of Marxist conspiracy theory where the dominant group (Whites) keeps other peoples down.
There are clear testable predictions from this theory. In places where racist, White people have more power, outcomes for non-Whites, especially Blacks and Hispanics should be worse. Recall that the US demographics by county look like this.
Of course, Republicans are racist in this theory.
Thus, the theory predicts that in these areas of the USA, Blacks and Hispanics should be particularly worse off compared to Whites. But the exact opposite is actually true. The race gaps are smaller, not larger, in Whiter and more Republican areas.
The above figures are for test score gaps, but the same holds true if we look at social status gaps. Here's some maps of race gaps in social status.
So we need another way to explain the variation in social status gaps. Well, it's easy. Test scores -- academic achievement that mainly reflecting intelligence -- explain why race gaps are smaller and larger in various locations. Meritocracy works.
It gets even worse for the theory. It turns out the effect of White population share and Republican vote share are interactive. The areas with the smallest race gaps are the ones with the largest White populations and the largest Republican vote shares combined!
There we have it. The Marxist conspiracy theory that is the go-to explanation of race relations fails when we look at county-level variation across the United States. The predictions it makes are exactly opposite of reality. If anything, it seems Republican Whites are good for minorities.
If you want more details, read my new blog post:
New study out: Systemic Racism Does Not Explain Variation in Race Gaps on Cognitive Tests
Everybody knows some topics or questions are taboo, but which ones? Do people agree? Decided to find out. We asked 500 Americans online to rate the tabooness of 29 questions, and this was the result.
Race and IQ was the winner, even beating incest, pedophilia, gay germs etc.
The results were almost entirely consistent across all subgroups: age, sex, politics, race, science knowledge. The correlations for taboo ratings across groups were >.90, close to 1.00 without sampling error.
Though note that some grounds find everything more taboo than others.
Why did we look into this? Well, back in 2021, I made fun of this paper. And now we have the published demonstration the taboo hierarchy.
Socialism attracts losers. This is also true for immigration socialism.
Attaining a reasonable outcome -- no more costs from foreigners in the country -- requires drastic measures. Even reducing 'refugees' by 90% is not enough.
To understand the fiscal effects of immigration you have to start with a plot like this one. From the perspective of the government, people below 25 are net negatives, between 25 and 75, they are net positive, and then negative again.
The reasons for this are straightforward. Below 25's cost the state money in terms of childcare and education and don't yet make much money, and thus don't pay much in income tax. Old people cost money in retirement, old peoples homes, and healthcare.
The current net fiscal effect of an immigration group thus depends on its age distribution to a large extent. Maybe a group is currently positive because it is of working age, but that is short-term thinking. You must apply a lifetime perspective -- longtermism.
Education attainment is often given as the best example of heritability not being noticeably stronger than shared environment. But this conclusion is somewhat incorrect because of the assortative mating bias. In this study of Finnish and Dutch families, heritabilities were estimated at 55% and 66%, compared with shared environment of 16% and 13%.
As usual, beware that variances are deceptive. If heritability is 60% and shared environment is 15%, this doesn't mean that genetics is 4x as important. You need to take the square root to get the path coefficients. These are 0.77 and 0.39. Thus, genetics is about 2x as powerful.
Who likes big butts? Who prefers breasts instead? @MrGeorgeFrancis and I decided to look into this in more detail using national and subnational data.
The main source of data here are Pornhub and Google searches for body-related terms. There is strong agreement across sources.
The main metric from the data is the relative interest in butts versus breasts. Behold, science.
Since such preferences plausibly relate to life history speed, and various metrics of development of a given locality, we of course checked the relationship to intelligence at the same level: national.