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Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

Oct 5

In a new post, I contest the common claim that precolonial India was a rich society.

With qualitative and quantitative evidence, we see that the living standards of Indian commoners were poor. I also trace the origins of the divergence between the West and India.

The typical claim is that India once accounted for 25% of the global GDP, which reduced to just 4% after colonialism.

But this tells us nothing about their living conditions before we have accounted for the respective population counts. (These old estimates are also dubious)

Many European traveler accounts give us a picture of precolonial Indian living conditions.

The Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert, for instance, writes about the “miserable poverty” experienced by Indian common people.

Read 6 tweets

Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

Jul 7

African homicide rates are completely dubious

That's what I argue in a recent piece. Consider, for example, Nigeria's homicide rate.

An organization that monitors homicides from news reports find >3x homicides than official counts, and household surveys suggest >10x.

There are two major sources that compile national homicide rates across the world, including African countries: WHO and UNODC.

WHO, recognizing the unreliability of African homicide statistics, do not even use the official homicide counts and try to estimate it by other means.

How do they estimate it? They use a socio-demographic regression model. They basically say “the country is this poor, this unequal, has this many young males, etc, therefore the homicide is probably about such-and-such.”

But we have no idea how accurate such predictions are.

Read 16 tweets

Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

Jun 22

Africa's Poor Numbers – new long post published!

In this piece, I critically examine the quality and availability of data in Africa. I argue that much African data is highly unreliable.

In particular, I look at economic data, criminal justice data, and population data.

I'm by no means the first to sound alarm about African data quality. It has previously been called "Africa's statistical tragedy". Similarly, a well-known book "Poor Numbers" critically examines Africa's developmental statistics.

There's a lack of proper birth registration, death registration, lack of recent censuses, and much more.

This chart illustrates a composite measure of statistical capacity across the world. As is evident, Africa is the region with the lowest average score.

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Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

Jun 2

It is not unusual to see claims that intelligent or otherwise able people have fewer children. But is this universal? In the Nordic countries, the opposite seems to the case.

Consider first this data of IQ-fertility for Swedish men born between 1951–1967.

The data clearly shows that there is a positive relationship between IQ and fertility. To be fair, this is mostly explained by reduced fertility below average IQ. (Note also that "not tested" have very low fertility, but people who weren't tested tend to have very low IQ).

Basically the same is shown for Norway here (Stanine score is just the IQ scores being distributed into bins).

Read 10 tweets

Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

May 13

In my most recent piece, I evaluate whether immigrants tend to assimilate with respect to various social outcomes.

One important outcome is crime. Consider for example the following chart. In Denmark, second-generation immigrants are no less criminal than first-generation.

I then went one step further and considered whether differences between different immigrant groups converge. Again, Denmark offers excellent data by nation-of-origin.

There is a remarkable persistence in crime rates between first- and second generation (correlation = 0.9).

It's not just in Denmark. Though Sweden does not report them at the national level, we see the same strong persistence for region-of-origin.

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Inquisitive Bird

@Scientific_Bird

May 9

The Assimilation Myth — new post published!

Using data from a variety of countries, I show that ethnic disparities in human capital, economic performance, crime and cultural values tend to show substantial persistence across generations.

First, I consider whether immigrants assimilate in terms of human capital.

Systematic PISA comparisons show that even second-generation immigrants tend to score much more similar to their parents' country-of-origin than the country they were born and raised in.

In fact, even if you control for school and socioeconomic status, students whose parents come from high-scoring countries still tend to score higher on tests. This indicates a strong degree of persistence.

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