I wasn't a National Merit Scholar either

Some people point to Obama's lack of National Merit distinction as evidence for his lack of high IQ.

Vox Popoli said a looong time ago, "UPDATE II - Obama graduated from my mother's alma mater, where everyone takes the various college prep tests. He was not a National Merit Scholar, a National Merit Semifinalist or an Outstanding Participant. This indicates a ceiling on his SAT percentile at 96.9, which indicates a maximum possible SAT score of 1230 and maximum IQ of 129."


In order to qualify for the National Merit Scholarship, one had to be a junior taking the PSAT. I did not qualify because I did not take it because I was not at school the day the test was given. So no, not everyone takes the "various college prep tests" at any school.

Why is Lady Gaga special?

I don't understand. My friends describe her as "crazy", as though she is a total departure from everyone else in the pop industry. I see Lady Gaga and I can barely tell the difference between what she does and what Madonna and Britney Spears did. She sings pop/dance songs, wears outlandish costumes and does some pop/dance moves. To me, her songs sound like anything other major pop stars could perform. What's so special? Presumably, her marketing team put effort into branding her as more edgy and sophisticated than other pop stars, and this effort appears to be working.

To me, Lady Gaga has the body and charisma of a regular pop star. Her voice is adequate but her dancing is not the best and more importantly, her face is not that pretty. Thus, she is in an unusual place of being unable to market herself that well as a heterosexual sex symbol, which is the core image of most other pop starts. Instead, Miss Gaga acts avante garde and androgynous so that her lack of looks can be excused. Other than this, she is not really different from standard big name pop stars.

The Racist Religion

Supposedly people believe in hereditary determinism of group behavior and psychological characteristics because they think they take a rational perspective and that they have familiarity with the empirical basis behind these ideas. Therefore, it is hypocritical when the same people refuse to use the same analytical methods and evidence based approach to reject their religion. Belief in God is already arbitrary, belief in a personal God is additionally foolish, but belief in a whole religion is sheer hypocrisy when one is willing to accept HBD, which happens to be far less supported by evidence in comparison to the falsity of every major religion.

How can a person who claims to believe in the value of sound data and properly designed experiments then act as though there is some celestial creature with mighty superpowers that created the universe in all its vastness with the specific purpose of creating humans in his image? After one believes in evolution, notes that we are 98% similar to chimpanzees, sees how we live by fulfilling animals needs, how can this purportedly intelligent person think that a universal creator picked some tribe in the Middle East and authored a series of tangled texts which describe the most important tenets of life? What kind of ideas do tribes in the Middle East tend to produce again? This is a book which contains no useful information such as plans for making vaccines and instead contains any number of discredited ideas. Women did not come from a rib. Languages did not come from an attempt to build a tall building. Some man and his family did not build a boat by hand and fit every known species on it for the duration of a flood which covered the entire earth. No one can live inside a whale. Green fairies did not invent the moon. Well, that's not in the Bible. But it you didn't know it, you couldn't point that out since it's no less absurd than other ideas put forth by that text.

Surely, I am preaching to the choir when I denounce any literal interpretation of the Bible, but to be clear, I should add that there is very little value in even a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible. In several cases, the Bible condones the most immoral behaviors. Gang rape, slavery, slaughter, and of course, the veneration of ignorance and actions based on lack of all evidence. Not every story in the Bible promotes backwardness, but enough of them do for a sane person to understand that the book isn't a reliable source of guidance.

Anyone. Any single person who believes in an evolutionary basis for cognitive differences and also believes in a religion is a racist. A racist and a hypocrite who is driven by bigotry and is searching for excuses to cling to that bigotry. A person who is driven by a fair minded acceptance of data would not then believe in tales so elaborate yet so extraordinarily unsupported and falsified as religion.

FemX vs Half Sigma

Personally, I don't even see the similarities. He's pithy. I'm long winded. He's practical. I'm abstract. He's topical. I'm a generalist. I'm a solipsist. He doesn't reveal his personal vulnerabilities. Basically, we aren't even similar, so why would we be the same?

Do other people really think that I resemble Half Sigma more than anyone else in this blogosphere?

Is it easy being a girl?

Who has it easier? When and why? Men or women?

Abortion is for Dummies

Some people in the HBD sphere want to support a pro life position because that is the position which politically correct liberals do not choose even though virtually all the evidence shows that abortions are done for a disproportionate amount of NAMs and poor women.

Inductivist presents data (link) that shows how the most educated group of women are more likely to have abortions than the least educated group of women.

This data might be internally confounded (depending on when the information was taken) because many women obtain abortions because they want to continue their educations. In this sense, while the education level between women who had an abortion and unwed women who had a child might be the same, their IQ levels are likely to be more similar than the IQs of educated vs uneducated women usually are. Group A gets pregnant at age 18 and has abortions. Group B gets pregnant at age 18 and does not have abortions and instead has the time and resources to complete school. Group B is not necessarily of greater intelligence.

The second issue is that his conclusion only reflected the data in that the most educated group of women was more likely to get abortions than the least educated group, and the least educated group doesn't even have 8 years of school. Comparing what happens at the thin ends of the bell curve doesn't help properly describe behavior. Less than 7%of Americans have less than 8 years of education. That is a very odd subset of the populace. It doesn't mean much to say that those with less than 8 years of education are less likely to abort an unwanted pregnancy than those with at least a college education.

Anyways, that is a rather strange data table and without seeing the study, the data is presented in an unclear manner. The data is also from 1991, so I don't know if it should still be taken as accurate.

Here is the standard non-convoluted description of the women who obtain abortions:

But through the late 1990s the TFR among blacks once again dropped to near or below the replacement level. In 2002, the last year for which comparative data are available, something entirely new happened. For the first time ever, the total fertility rate among blacks fell below 2.00 below that of whites (2.028)*. Not only were black Americans not replacing themselves, but their natural rate of population decline is steeper than that of white Americans. If the pattern evident in 2002 were to continue, then both black and white Americans would dwindle to extinction, but blacks would disappear sooner.

Now the reasons for the sub-normal fertility of Americans over the past three decades are perfectly evident. Since the 1960s increasingly effective contraceptive technologies have been developed. Since 1970, contraceptive programs have been heavily funded and promoted by the federal government. And in 1973, unrestricted commercialized abortion was imposed on the entire nation by the Supreme Court. Compared with the pre-1970 era, these factors have produced substantially lower birth rates and substantially higher proportions of births outside of marriage.

Lower total fertility and higher proportions of births out of wedlock have affected all Americans, regardless of race. But what can explain the recent disappearance of the demographic advantage black Americans have had over white Americans for as long as statistics have been collected?

The answer lies in the abortion statistics. All along, blacks have had a far higher abortion rate than whites. While blacks have represented about 15 to 20 percent of the women of childbearing age (the percentage has gradually increased over the years because of the historically higher birth rate among blacks), the abortion rate has consistently been roughly twice as high as that among whites. Consequently, blacks have accounted for approximately thirty to forty percent of all abortions. During most of the 1975 to 1995 period, the annual number of abortions totaled approximately 1.5 million, of which approximately one million were committed on white mothers and approximately half a million upon black mothers. During most of that time, there was approximately one abortion among whites for every three live births and two for every three live births among blacks.

* Not accurate. It doesn't separate out all hispanics.

Fox News complains about the inadvertant racism of abortion:

Blacks do, indeed, have much higher rates of abortions than whites or other minority groups. In 2000, while blacks made up 17 percent of live births, they made up more than twice that share of abortions (36 percent). If those aborted children had been born, the number of blacks born would have been slightly over 50 percent greater than it was.
The comparison with whites and other minorities is striking. Whites made up 78 percent of live births*, but only 57 percent of abortions. Non-black minorities had 7percent of live births and 5 percent of abortions. If the aborted children had been born for either group, the percentage increase in the number of children born to these groups would have been less than that for blacks: 16 and 32 percent, respectively.

People, do the arithmetic. Blacks are 13% of the population, up to 40% of abortions, and non hispanic black and white fertility levels are almost equal. Hispanics also have a disporportionately high abortion rate (22% of abortions vs though it might even out when one considers their higher birth rate).

You believe what you want about the heritibility of intelligence and figure out how that data can possibly add to abortion causing an overall drop in genetic IQ levels.

-More data on the women who are getting abortions (link) :

-Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]

-Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 69% among blacks and 54% among Hispanics are unintended.

-Each year, about two percent of women aged 15-44 have an abortion; 47% of them have had at least one previous abortion.[3]

-Women who have never married obtain two-thirds of all abortions

-The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty* (112 vs. 29 per 1,000 women[3,1]

-About 60% of abortions are obtained by women who have one or more children.

-Eight percent of women who have abortions have never used a method of birth control; nonuse is greatest among those who are young, poor, black, Hispanic or less educated.

Which of those people do you want having more kids? Which of those people are going to stop putting themselves at risk for unwanted pregnancy if abortion becomes illegal? And if it did become illegal, many of the women with 16+ years of education now could still obtain an abortion without too much effort. Can you say the same for the poor unwed minority women who already have a child and don't use protection?

Abortion culls the unwanted members of society. That does not make it right. Actually, any behavior the left side of the bell curve does much more than the right is usually an indication of the immorality of that behavior. Inductivist, Steve Sailer and a few others on the right try and create convoluted analyses to explain how an activity which prevents the existence of many times more poor people and NAMs over the financially responsible and AMs can be called problematic in the long term. However, if you know how to add, subtract and multiple, you can see what's really going on for yourselves.

Ozzie and Harriet are dead. Time to move on.

My previous on the relation with fertility rate and rates of maternal employment did not consider a few confounds, including the improperly tallied Hispanic population. While I found population data that categorized Asians, Native Americans ans blacks as separate ethnic groups as far back as 1980, Hispanic fertility rates were not tallied as separate until even later. Now data is sometimes separated into white, non Hispanic white and Hispanic. This is interesting because it is indeed possible for Hispanics to be basically white. Many Cubans, Central Americans and even Puerto Ricans could easily pass for western Europeans. I do not know what their genetic intellectual capacity is, but it is possible that their fertility rate can be counted with the overall white fertility rate for HBD purposes.

However, some points from that post still stand. The first is that although a rise in total female employment rate correlated with the general drop in fertility in the 1960s and 1970s, the sharp drop from a white fertility rate well above replacement to one well below replacement in the early seventies (2.48 to 1.88) occur ed during a time when the rate of female employment increased only marginally (43.3% to 44.7%).

The second issue is that there are several westernized countries which culturally idealize the breadwinner/homemaker model for family life, and all of these countries have extremely low fertility rates. the Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan and South Korea all have very low rates of employment of mothers (below 40%), and all have fertility rates below 1.35. Those are all also homogeneous countries with minimal immigrant populations, so they have not yet succumbed to any pressure to replace declining native populations with imported substitutes.

I find the Czech republic most interesting out of those countries. I studied abroad in the Czech Republic, and I lived with a host family, so I know the culture fairly well. People in the Czech Republic are not career focused go getters. Only about 14% of the population has college degrees (link), and the culture generally does not prioritize intense career development. Most people seem to spend time with their close friends at bars, at ski resorts and weekend gardening cabins. It is a fairly organized and punctual culture, and people are willing to work at least eight hours in a day (they are not in many European countries), but the Czech work ethic didn't seem to come with the ambition that one is accustom to seeing in the US.

Soviet rule imposed many practical tenets of feminism onto Czech culture such as access to birth control and employment of women, but the concept of feminism is rather foreign to the culture. Only Czech academic types are familiar with feminism, and most people are rather attached to their traditional gender roles. Most people I spoke to in the Czech Republic expressed unquestioning praise for the breadwinner/homemaker family model. However, the Czech republic now has a fertility rate of 1.23, the highest divorce rate in Europe and one of the lowest rates of mothers in the workforce in the world. At first it might seem surprising that such a traditional culture could have such an extreme degree of problems born from liberalization, but note that the Czech republic does have a very high percentage of atheists (50%+ link). What might be occurring is that the culture's secular thinking overrides their traditional family values. Even though the men and women aren't pursuing big dreams of individual self actualization, they still don't have a reason to raise children. They'd rather earn the minimum and spend it on beer and skis.

Contrast this with Iceland, another homogeneous country which has a negligible immigrant population. Iceland appears to have the highest rate of mothers participating in the workforce in the world and also the highest fertility rate in Europe. I should note that Iceland also has a rather low rate of atheism for Europe.

It would seem as though a culture that encouraged women to spend their time and energy on child rearing instead of career and educational development, which simultaneously encouraged men to accept their roles as breadwinners, would end up with higher fertility rates and lower rates of family break down. However, it seems that once people are at all secular minded, they become aware of their birth control options and their options of living a single life, and nothing stops them from opting out of family life entirely. Thus, just because 1950s America had a low divorce rate and a high fertility rate, does not mean that aiming for some kind of return to the behavior of this era would cause a decline in divorce rates, a rise in marriage rates or a rise in fertility rates. It's really just as probably that we would end up like the Czech republic and experience a suicidal fertility rate with no improvement in family stability, especially given the nation's gradual secularization.

I also note that Italy's rate of religiosity approaches that of the US. Italy has a moderately low rate of maternal participation in the workforce and an extremely low fertility rate (1.3). Despite their Catholic beliefs and their high valuation of the traditional family structure, their awareness of secular culture seems enough to drive people away from family life and instead towards the bread and circuses of singledom.

My theory about the workforce participation of mothers and the fertility rate is based in common sense. If women work, they earn tens of thousands of dollars, which allows some of them to afford a child they might not have been able to afford otherwise. If women think that they should not work if they are to raise a child, it puts the pressure on them to find a breadwinner who is likely to provide them with a more enjoyable life than what single life can possibly provide. It's not possible for all women to attract a permanent partner of that caliber. If NAMs thought they needed such a precise set of circumstances to merit reproduction, their fertility rate would kamikaze too. Cultures that impose a choice between living the way an individual would want and living in a way appropriate for raising children end up producing a lot of people of both sexes that choose living for themselves instead of raising children.

Palin's Angry Mob

Sometimes one feels like taking a shower after reading Steve Sailer's commenters...

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-nobody-says-about-sarah-palin.html

And this guy wants respect from the republican mainstream? LOL! Steve Sailer's partisan fans are the most despicable elements of GOP supporters. They are everything the GOP strives to avoid. They want to pain Palin country as filled with hard working, straight forward welcoming Christians. They are the good people of America neglected by the media elite. Everything falls apart for them if Palin country is revealed as knee-jerk reactionary racists/anti-semites.

But hey, what can you expect from the readers of a man who says that poor Sarah's intellectual competence must be judged in the context of her family size? Forget environmental considerations when we judge the behavior of the wrong kind of minorities. Affirmative Action is for Sarah Palin only.

Mothers at work and the US fertility rate

A commenter in my previous thread about maternal employment and fertility asked, Has there been a meaningful change in U.S. white fertility rates during the post-baby boom years in which female work force participation increased?

Fertility decreased sharply for white women between 1970 and 1975 and since then has slowly increased. This article notes the general trend,

The recent resurgence in fertility may be more than a temporary fluke. This is because the total fertility rate for white women, which fell off a cliff in the early 1970s (from 2.48 in 1970 to 1.88 in 1973), is showing a long-term trend toward recovery. Whites still comprise a majority in the population and a majority among women of childbearing years, so a trend in this demographic sector is particularly significant. The Total Fertility Rate for white American women stayed below 1.80 for fourteen straight years, from 1973 to 1986, but rose above that line in 1987 and, with some very minor fluctuations, has continued to increase. In 1999 the TRF for whites broke above the 2.00 mark and it has remained above that level (but still below the theoretical replacement line of 2.11) ever since then.

First of all, note this portion of a data table on overall female employment rates-


(Source: Current Population Survey, U.S. Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Despite the sudden sharp fertility decline from 1970 to 1973 of 2.48 to 1.88, the rate of total female employment barely increased in that period (43.3% to 44.7%). Those figures note the rate of total employment of women, not only the employment of mothers as I could not find year to year data for mothers in the workforce before 1975. However, the rate of total female employment seems to rise and fall in step with the employment of mothers of young children in post 1975 data, so it might be generalizable to mothers too.

Here is a data table I made for employment rates of mothers with children under the age of 6 and fertility rates for white women (rate = # of children 1000 women have on average in their lifetime).



Here is a graph of the data:



The correlation between the employment rate of mothers of children under six and fertility between 1975 and 1998 is a whopping .92! That's a remarkably strong positive correlation and one of the more perfectly linear correlations I've seen in sociological data.

If you look at the whole table (link), you can see the rates of employment for women without children under 18, women with children from 6-17 and women with children under 6. The increase of employment of women without children under 18 has been relatively small and was 45.1% to 54% between 1975 and 2002, whereas the increase in employment of mothers of children under age six is much greater and went from 39% to 64.1%.

A .92 correlation is no small deal. As for the issue of causality, we would have to identify causes that affect both the fertility rate and the employment of mothers of young children with children under 6 at almost the same rate. During 1975 to 1998, the employment of men decreased from 79% to 74.9% (link). What I find quite interesting is the the rate of fertility continued to increase during the early 80s recession era. While overall unemployment increased from 5.8% to 9.7% from 1979 to 1982, the employment of mothers of young children increased from 45.7% to 49.9%, and the fertility rate increased from 1.72 to 1.77. Thus, it is quite possible that overall economic health is not the causal factor in determining both the employment rate of women and the fertility rate. It is quite possible that the employment rate of mothers is itself the cause of fertility rate changes or at least closely connected with the cause.

So, to answer the original question, it's a resounding yes. And as was discussed in the previous thread, the only prosperous westernized countries with fertility rates above replacement level are New Zealand and Israel (if you count it). All the rest are below 2. All countries with rates of maternal employment below 40% have fertility rates below 1.35. I hypothesize that if increasing fertility while remaining a first world economy is a priority, it is unwise to recommend an increased cultural valuation of homemaking.

The Story of O

The other O, Oprah!

She's calling it quits!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6926328.ece

What this means for the world:

1) Oprah Winfrey/Michelle Obama 2016!

Please God, let it happen! What's left for Oprah beyond total world takeover?

Mothers working improves national fertility rates

I crunched some numbers on fertility rate and the employment rate of mothers in first world countries.

Nation Master listed rates of employment for mothers and fertility rates. The data on working mothers comes from OECD and tallies the working proportion of mothers with children under 6 years old 2001. The data on fertility rates comes from the CIA world factbook in 2003-2008. Here is a table which compares the employment rates of working mothers to the fertility rate of the country.That table gets some countries in all regions of the developed world including East Asia, the better parts of Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America.



Here is the data in graphical form:






The correlation(r) between employment and fertility is moderately positive at .55.

It isn't surprising that a higher rate of employment of mothers of young children correlates with a higher fertility rate. Mothers who work earn a significant amount of income for the family which allows the family to afford a second child.

One Interesting feature of this data is that several anglophone countries have high fertility rates. The US is at 2.1 (with non-Hispanic whites at 1.9), Australia is at 1.98, Ireland is at 1.85 though the UK and Canada are much lower. Several Scandinavian countries also have high fertility rates with Iceland at the highest at 1.91 (also the highest in Europe). There was no OECD data for working mothers in Iceland, but this book from 1994 claims that the rate of working mothers with one child in Iceland is 95%.

The US and Scandinavia generally have very divergent tax structures and views towards state funded social programs. The US is the most free market driven developed country and the Scandinavian countries are the most socialist. The fertility rate of white women in the US is 1.9, which is pretty much the same as Iceland's fertility rate of 1.91.

This information just relates to the overall fertility rate of developed countries. It does not address the level of dysgenic fertility, which is the point that matters most to us people. I don't have much data on this issue yet (much is presented by Lynn and I like a second opinion when that's the case), but I noted one paper that showed more dysgenic fertility in Japan than in Sweden.

Anyways, it looks like our choices are as follows if fertility rate is a priority-

1) We can forcibly indoctrinate ourselves into a religion which requires us to multiply and be fruitful. However, Iran tried exactly this method and has experienced a fertility drop from 7 to 1.71 in less than three decades, making the current fertility rate lower than a number of Scandinavian countries anyways. It also happens to suck to live in Iran.

2) We can abandon modern civilization and ignore the fact that reliable birth control methods are known to humankind. We can return to a traditional agrarian life where people have many children because they rely on child labor. In essence, we can live like the people in third world countries who have a lot of children.

3) We can encourage increased participation of mothers in the workforce.

What is g loading?

I asked uncle google and wasn't particularly impressed with the answer.

http://www.iq-tests.eu/iq-test-Validity-and-g-loading-of-specific-tests-1000.html


Tests also differ in their g-loading, which is the degree to which the test score reflects general mental ability rather than a specific skill or "group factor" such as verbal ability, spatial visualization, or mathematical reasoning). g-loading and validity have been observed to be related in the sense that most IQ tests derive their validity mostly or entirely from the degree to which they measure g

Can anyone explain the specifics to me? What is the exact process for determining the g loading of an IQ test question?