Half Sigma

Beverly Hillbillies in reverse

That's the hilarious description Steve Sailer gives to the story of a Mexican immigrant family who fled the immigrant ghettos of Los Angeles for a more civilized lifestyle in Kentucky.

NY Times gives bad advice to college bound students

Yesterday's NY Times has some incredibly bad advice for college bound high school students, telling them to not seek a spot in the most prestigious colleges:

Higher education experts have this message for those squabbling over a handful of spots: you’re probably not going to room with the next president anyway. Pay less attention to prestige and more to “fit” — the marriage of interests and comfort level with factors like campus size, access to professors, instruction philosophy.

In case any high school students are reading this, let me give some better advice. When you're looking for a job, employers aren't going to give a crap about whether you "fit" your college or not. They just care about the degree, and a degree from Harvard looks a hell of a lot better than some bogus college where you "fit" better.

Men who choose not to work

There's an article in today's NY Times about working-age men who choose not to work.

Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

I respect these guys who are enjoying their leisure instead of working. They haven't let themselves be brainwashed by conventional middle class values which say that every man has to work otherwise he's a loser.

Some of the men who don't work receive disability benefits which pay better than a minimum wage job. If I were getting disability benefits, and the only jobs I could find paid only a little better than what I could make by not working, I wouldn't bother to work either.

The disability program, in turn, is an obstacle to working again. Taking a job holds the risk of demonstrating that one can earn a living and is thus no longer entitled to the monthly payments. But staying out of work has consequences. Skills deteriorate, along with the desire for a paying job and the habits that it requires.

If the goal is to encourage people to work, means tested benefits are bad policy because they provide the wrong incentives.

Scott Adams predicts elimination of Islam

Scott Adams says (hat tip Catallarchy for pointing me to Scott Adams' blog):

From my point of view, the terrorists will never stop, and we’ll never kill enough of them, and their weapons and tactics will improve without end. At some future point, only Draconian methods will end the threat. That’s why I predict that some hawkish Christian leader will emerge with an idea for eliminating Islam. And as horribly evil as that will be, no one will have a better idea.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating that solution. I just predict it will happen.

I think this is a reasonable prediction.

The Israel/Hezbollah conflict is an example of the likelihood of this happening. Israel doesn't have the balls to completely wipe out Hezbollah (like blowing up Mosques, intentionally targeting civilians, attacking anyone who resupplies Hezbollah), so eventually there will be a ceasefire, and then Hezbollah will be resupplied by Iran and Syria, and more Shiites will join up because they were inspired by Hezbollah's ability to stand up to the Jews. Eventually Hezbollah will be even more powerful than it was before the attack.

Now some will say "ah ha! This means it was a mistake for Israel to attack." This ignores the fact that Hezbollah was growing stronger and stronger before the Israeli attack. Shiites were joining up inspired by Hezbollah's ability to kidnap Israeli soldiers and get away with it.

So you see, whether Israel does nothing, or attacks Hezbollah half-hearted way (the current strategy), Hezbollah grows stronger.

Believers vote for Bush

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush

I think the above quote from a NY Times article about an evangelical pastor who doesn't preach conservative politics best explains America's new emerging voting patterns.

The article portrays the pastor, Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, as a good guy for his refusal to preach for the Republican party and patriotism, but it's also clear that he's an oddball among evangelicals, and his political stance has resulted in white middle class parishioners leaving his church, to be replaced by more black and minority congregants (groups who dislike Republicans).

Modern man: bigger, fatter, healthier

The NY Times article du jour is about how people have gotten bigger and healthier.

We are informed that in 1850, the average man was 5'7.4" tall and weighed 146 pounds (considered a "normal" weight by the obesity police), and today the average man is 5'9.5" tall and weighs 191 pounds (considered to be "overweight").

The healthiness and life expectancy of the big and "overweight" modern man is much better than for the "normal" weight 1850 man.

The empirical data shows that "overweight" people have better health, but why look at empirical data when the "Americans are too fat" theory seems to make everyone feel better.

* * *

No one really knows why people are so much bigger today. One guy has a theory that it's better health of pregnant mothers.

Maybe the supposedly unhealthy food like Big Macs that we eat so much of today is actually good for us. Maybe it's the artificial hormones and antibiotics in the beef? No one knows.

Maybe big people have more children than small people? It's something that no one ever considers.

Marueen Dowd's semi-bogus claims about IQ and marriage

In her famous NY Times essay What's a Modern Girl to Do?, Maureen Dowd writes about how men don't like smart women. She backs this up with supposed facts, such as "A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men."

Maybe the United Kingdom has a completely different culture than the U.S., or maybe the study is bogus. But it certainly doesn't apply to men in the United States.

I've prepared two charts below which comparing the marital categories of General Social Survey respondents with their score on the 10 item Wordsum vocabulary test (a good proxy for I.Q.). The charts are restricted to white respondents, born in the United States, aged 45 or older (because it's extremely rare for people to get married for the first time after the age of 45), and to survey years 1990-2004 (in order to show modern trends).

Statistics for SEX = 1(MALE)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		MARITAL
		1 Married	2 Widowed	3 Divorced	4 Sep- arated	5 Never Married	ROW Total
Wordsum	0	.0 0	19.8 0	39.1 1	.0 0	41.2 1	100.0 2
	1	57.1 12	4.8 1	28.6 6	.0 0	9.5 2	100.0 21
	2	56.2 25	9.0 4	21.3 10	.0 0	13.5 6	100.0 44
	3	59.2 45	12.0 9	21.9 16	1.1 1	5.9 4	100.0 75
	4	59.8 99	14.8 24	17.5 29	1.8 3	6.0 10	100.0 165
	5	71.3 175	8.3 20	13.0 32	1.8 4	5.6 14	100.0 246
	6	67.9 236	6.7 23	17.4 61	2.1 7	5.8 20	100.0 347
	7	73.6 182	5.4 13	10.9 27	1.7 4	8.3 21	100.0 248
	8	68.1 147	7.9 17	15.0 32	1.4 3	7.6 16	100.0 216
	9	69.5 120	4.6 8	15.2 26	2.3 4	8.3 14	100.0 172
	10	60.9 73	5.0 6	17.9 21	4.2 5	12.0 14	100.0 120
	COL TOTAL	67.2 1,113	7.7 127	15.8 261	1.9 32	7.4 123	100.0 1,657

Statistics for SEX = 2(FEMALE)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		MARITAL
		1 Married	2 Widowed	3 Divorced	4 Sep- arated	5 Never Married	ROW Total
Wordsum	0	25.0 1	50.0 2	25.0 1	.0 0	.0 0	100.0 4
	1	23.2 5	59.1 13	13.3 3	.0 0	4.4 1	100.0 23
	2	28.7 13	55.5 25	11.4 5	2.2 1	2.2 1	100.0 46
	3	42.0 34	39.4 32	11.1 9	1.2 1	6.2 5	100.0 81
	4	43.0 70	37.8 62	16.1 26	.6 1	2.4 4	100.0 164
	5	49.9 156	33.0 103	14.0 44	1.1 4	1.9 6	100.0 313
	6	52.1 237	23.3 106	18.4 84	2.3 11	3.9 18	100.0 455
	7	53.5 210	24.1 95	15.2 60	2.3 9	5.0 19	100.0 392
	8	48.7 153	25.6 80	15.4 48	3.0 9	7.3 23	100.0 314
	9	49.9 136	20.6 56	22.5 62	1.0 3	6.0 16	100.0 273
	10	52.4 105	13.4 27	24.0 48	.5 1	9.7 19	100.0 201
	COL TOTAL	49.5 1,121	26.6 602	17.2 390	1.7 39	5.0 113	100.0 2,265

Although Maureen Dowd is correct that smart women are less likely to get married, she's completely wrong about smart men. In fact, smart men are even less likely to get married than smart women. As much as men are turned off by smart women, women are even more turned off by smart men (which explains why smart men are the most likely to have paid for sex).

According to the GSS, men are more likely than women to go through life without ever getting married. This is an expected result of the fact that there are 105 boy babies born for ever 100 girl babies. There aren't enough women to go around for every man to have a wife. (See my post on The Woman Shortage.)

One interesting difference between the sexes is that smart women are more likely to be divorced than smart men. The charts don't tell us who's at fault for the divorce. Are men divorcing smart women because they make for bad wives? Or do smart women leave their husbands because smart women are picky and find more faults with their husbands?

Don't feed the humans

Las Vegas created a city ordinance making it illegal to feed poor people in public parks (the NY Times article doesn't state exactly how that's worded).

This ordinance demonstrates how lawmakers in Vegas possess an extraordinary amount of common sense. By taking away the incentive that the poor people have to go to the park, the park will become a much nicer place for the middle class.

The author of this blog wouldn't want to hang out in a park full of indigent people recieving free food.

$30 rent on Bleeker Street?

According to the Simon and Garfunkel song Bleeker Street, "thirty dollars pays your rent on Bleeker Street."

Thirty dollars per day would be damn cheap rent to live on Bleeker Street. Can someone help me find this apartment?

Match.mom

One of today's most emailed NY Times articles is about parental matchmaking.

When reading these types of NY Times fluff pieces, one must be aware that (1) they are only talking about trends affecting the college educated class (the people who read the NY Times); and (2) sometimes they make up trends that aren't really happening.

Nevertheless, a return to matchmaking by parents seems like a sensible solution to the problem of young people not getting married until they are too old to have children (assuming we consider this a problem).

Matchmaking surely has a eugenic affect on IQ, because it probably most helps the high IQ young people who seem to have problems forming matches on their own. And parents seem more likely to choose practical mates who have higher IQs then the less practical but more sexually appealing mates preferred by their children.

Democrats completely wrong on college issue

This policy statment by the Democratic Leadership Committee exemplifies why I can't stand Democrats.

The DLC's stated goal is to make "college as universal as high school," which is a completely bogus goal. Why do people flipping hamburgers at McDonald's need college degrees? If students can't learn basic reading and math skills by the time the graduate from high school, what in the world does the DLC think that college is going to do for them?

The DLC proposal talks about how college graduates earn a lot more money than non-graduates. Of course I agree with this fact, and when examining the data in the General Social Survey I have not found any other demographic factor that's even as close to being as determinant of earnings as a bachelor's degree or a graduate degree.

But the DLC proposal also mentions that "[s]tudents who don't finish college don't earn much more than their counterparts who never entered." which seems like proof to me that that primary benefit of college is the credential and not the actual knowledge capital which college may, or may not, impart on its attendees.

The credential is just a zero-sum transfer of wealth, and college as a whole seems like a negative-sum game, because it's likely that the actual value of the knowledge is less than the cost of tuition plus lost earnings from not working. This means that the more people who attend college, the worse our economy becomes.

The best way to make society more fair is to work towards ending the reliance on credentials. Credentialism will always favor the children of the rich whose parents can afford to buy them better credentials.

Israel should destroy the mosques

Randall Parker has an interesting thought in his blog:

While many Jewish neoconservatives dream of overthrowing Arab governments that have firm grips on their people and borders Israel hasn't been attacked by such goverments in decades and the attackers who are Israel's biggest headaches operate in territories over which no government exercises firm sovereign control. Israel's strategic problem is how to cause fragmented territories to come under firm control of elites which can exercise sovereign power over their territories. It is not clear that most Israelis understand this.

It’s actually wrong to say that Hezbollah isn’t being controlled by elites. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah is running the organization, and he is assisted by other elite members of the Shia clergy. Nasrallah especially seems like a pretty bright guy. Maybe it’s the glasses?

Neither the government of Israel nor the left wing media gets the fact that Shiite Islam is the enemy. When the U.S. attacked Iraq, we targeted government buildings for destruction in order to destroy the Iraqi leadership. Without leadership, the army has no orders and is easily conquered. Similarly, Israel needs to target and destroy all the Shiite mosques. The mosques are Hezbollah’s equivalent of government buildings.

Intelligence and evolutionary biology

I've demonsrated that more intelligent people have lower sex drives, are more likely to be celibate if unmarried, and the clear result is fewer children.

I've also demonsrated that high intelligence people have the undesirable characteristic of being less athletic.

The United States clearly has a dysgenic breeding pattern today. Each generation is about 1/10 of a standard deviation less intelligent than the previous. This doesn't sound like much, but over the course of another century it will probably mean the collapse of democracy in the United States, because another hundred years of dysgenic breeding will bring the average IQ of the United States to the level of countries where democracy doesn't work very well.

The interesting question is, if high intelligence creates a survival disadvantage, how did the human race become so intelligent? For how long has intelligence been decreasing?

My theory is that, before the safety nets and advanced healthcare of modern civilization, the less intelligent and their children had a greater chance of dying. War, famine, disease, and accidents killed a greater share of the less intelligent, more than making up for their greater fertility. But at the same time, higher intelligence people still had less children, preventing the human race from becoming smarter. So mankind reached an evolutionary stable average level of intelligence.

The evolutionary stable average level of intelligence varied by civilization, because the rules set up by society might favor higher or lower intelligence. But each civilization would reach its own evolutionary stable level in which the average intelligence members of society had, on average, the most surviving children.

This theory would explain why highly intelligent people are less attractive to the opposite sex compared to people of average intelligence. If people of average intelligence were predicted to have the most surving children, then favoring sex partners whose intelligence is above or below the average would lead to having fewer surviving children. This theory perfectly explains my chart which shows that unmarried General Social Survey respondents with a Wordsum score of 6 (the median score) were the least likely to have gone the preceding year without sex. People of average intelligence have the easiest time attracting sex partners. Men in the highest IQ category are the most likely to have to pay a prostitute in order to get sex.

Sex drive decreases as intelligence increases

The following chart compares self-reported frequency of sex for married white U.S. born respondents aged 18-39:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		WORDSUM
		1 0-4	2 5-7	3 8-10	ROW TOTAL
SEXFREQ	0: NOT AT ALL	2.0 5	.3 3	.3 1	.6 9
	1: ONCE OR TWICE	2.2 5	2.2 22	1.9 7	2.1 34
	2: ONCE A MONTH	5.2 13	5.6 55	9.5 35	6.4 103
	3: 2-3 TIMES A MONTH	14.5 36	17.6 173	21.9 80	18.1 290
	4: WEEKLY	24.5 61	27.7 273	29.2 107	27.5 441
	5: 2-3 PER WEEK	33.4 84	37.4 370	31.0 113	35.3 567
	6: 4+ PER WEEK	18.3 46	9.3 91	6.2 23	10.0 160
	COL TOTAL	100.0 251	100.0 987	100.0 365	100.0 1,603

This table overstates the effect of intelligence on sex drive, because sex drive also declines with age, and the higher Wordsum respondents in the sample tend to be older because higher Wordsum respondents marry later and because Wordsum increases with age up to the forties.

Doing a regression analysis on the same sample reveals that one point of Wordsum is equivalent to 1.5 years of age. In other words, based on these coefficients, a person of Wordsum 6 who is 30 years old is predicted to have the same frequency of sex as a person of Wordsum 10 who is 24 years old.

The R value for the regression analysis is only 0.179, so age and intelligence only account for a small amount of the variation in the sample.

Fertility and IQ for people born before 1911

Using the General Social Survey, I created a chart showing the number of children for people who were born before 1911. It is restricted to white people (RACECOMB=1) who were born in the United States. We see that respondents who scored higher on the Wordsum vocabulary test had less children.

This demonstrates that the lower fertility of people with higher IQs is not some new fangled trend, but existed in the 1920s and 1930s (when these respondents were getting married and having children).

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		WORDSUM
		1 0-4	2 5-7	3 8-10	ROW TOTAL
CHILDS	0: NONE	21.6 41	21.5 58	23.3 27	21.9 126
	1: ONE	21.6 41	19.3 52	27.6 32	21.7 125
	2: TWO	17.4 33	22.2 60	19.8 23	20.1 116
	3: THREE	12.1 23	16.3 44	14.7 17	14.6 84
	4: FOUR	8.4 16	9.6 26	6.9 8	8.7 50
	5: FIVE	6.8 13	3.0 8	5.2 6	4.7 27
	6: SIX	2.1 4	4.1 11	2.6 3	3.1 18
	7: SEVEN	4.2 8	1.1 3	.0 0	1.9 11
	8: EIGHT OR MORE	5.8 11	3.0 8	.0 0	3.3 19
	COL TOTAL	100.0 190	100.0 270	100.0 116	100.0 576
Means		2.49	2.22	1.80	2.22
Std Devs		2.33	1.96	1.58	2.03
Unweighted N		190	270	116	576

Self-funding terrorism

Steve Sailer points out that support for terrorism is self-funding for oil exporting nations.

If Iran exports 2.6 million bbl/day of oil, and the war between Israel and Hezbollah creates a $3/bbl risk premium for oil which lasts 30 days, then Iran makes an extra $234 million of profits (assuming all of its export oil is sold at the spot price), which maybe pays for two years of Hezbollah's funding. Or maybe a lot less than two years, know one really knows how much money Iran is spending on Hezbollah.

But the real winner is Sunni Saudi Arabia which exports more than three times as much oil as Iran.

Unathletic men earn less money

I did a multiple regression analysis using the ATHLETIC variable along with dummy variables for age, educational attainment and region.

Men who said they were in the two least athletic categories suffered a $7,000 loss of income (t=-2.4). In comparison, there was a $13,000 gain in income for having a bachelor’s degree, and a $35,000 gain income for having a graduate degree. This is based on a relatively small sample size of 567 men who reported working full time. This is one of the higher coefficients to appear in my income analyses.

Surprisingly, men who placed themselves in the most athletic category didn’t have any increased income with respect to their peers of average athleticism. This is very similar to what I found with men’s height using the 1991 National Health Interview Survey. Men who were shorter than average had lower income, but men who were taller than average didn’t have higher income than men of average height. And like the athleticism coefficient, being 5’7” or shorter was the income equivalent to losing approximately half of a college degree.

Do businesses discriminate against men who look unathletic (as well as men who are short)? Or does this have something to do with adolescent experiences?

Does good health cause exercise?

People who exercise more are supposedly healthier, and "everyone knows" that exercise causes better health.

But I've always wondered if the opposite was the case, that good health causes people to enjoy exercising more.

Greg Mankiw expresses the same thoughts, demonstrating that he's one of the few bloggers in the blogosphere who is as deep a thinker as I am.

Middle class leaving the cities

An article from Sunday's NY Times talks about how cities are becoming places for the rich and the poor but not the middle class.

Unfortunately, the article fails to address the two main reasons for why the middle class have left the cities:

(1) Zoning laws prevent new housing from being constructed, raising the cost of housing so that the middle class can't afford it. But ghetto neighborhoods and public housing remain resistant to increases in housing costs, so the poor remain even though the middle class are forced out.

(2) School systems full of racial minorities and poor children scare away middle class families to suburbs with more homogenous public schools. Only the rich, who can afford private schools, or the poor who don't care because it's their children who are ruining the schools, remain in the city.

NY Times on genes, personality, and appearance

An article in today's New York Times dramatically illustrates how personality is genetic:

On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted.

The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars.

“Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats....

Of course the article is talking about animal personalities and not human personalities, but the breeding experiments work on several different species of animal, so it goes to follow that if humans were bred for personality characteristics we would see just as dramatic a change in a few generations. Humans aren't so much different from animals as some would like to think.

The other point of interest is that when animals are bred for tameness, their appearance changes:

... other changes appeared along with the tameness, even though they had not been selected for. The tame silver foxes had begun to show white patches on their fur, floppy ears, rolled tails and smaller skulls.

This is proof that that genes which affect brain function also affect other physical features.

Earlier today I blogged about the theory that some genes which cause higher intelligence also cause lower athleticism. The animal experiments support the hypothesis that different personalities or levels of intelligence lead to a different physical appearance in humans.

Smarter people are less athletic

People in the two highest IQ categories (based on the 10 item Wordsum vocabulary test of the General Social Survey) report being less athletic.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ATHLETIC
		1 a very good description	2 a good description or a fair description	3 not a very good decription or not a good description at all	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	1: 2 to 4	12.4 18	49.5 74	38.1 57	100.0 149
	2: 5 to 7	13.1 84	49.7 321	37.3 241	100.0 646
	3: 8	10.3 15	51.6 76	38.1 56	100.0 148
	4: 9	3.8 4	45.0 44	51.2 50	100.0 98
	5: 10	3.3 2	45.2 27	51.5 31	100.0 60
	COL TOTAL	11.3 124	49.2 542	39.5 435	100.0 1,101

It turns out the smart nerd/dumb jock stereotype has some truth to it!

I previously pointed out that smart people have less sex and unathletic men have less sex. Maybe part of the reason is that a larger percentage of intelligent men have unathletic bodies which turn off women?

I previously noted that the most intelligent men are more likely to have paid for sex. 9.2% of men (N=131) who said they are very athletic ever paid for sex, compared to 14.1% of the rest of the sample (N=754). This confirms my theory that men who are getting sex for free are less likely to pay a prostitute.

ENVIRONMENTAL THEORIES

(1) Unathletic people have more time to read so they develop better vocabularies.

(2) Smart people have other intellectual interests so they have less time for athletic activities.

GENETIC THEORIES

Jason Malloy left a comment in which he pointed me to an article by Satoshi Kanazawa arguing that smart people should be better looking because of cross-assortative mating, which is the tendency for desirable genetic characteristics to clump together in the upper class. (For example, a smart rich man attracts a pretty wife, so they have children who are both smarter and better looking than average.)

So based on Satoshi’s theory, intelligent people should be more athletic and not less athletic, because athleticism is a desirable trait. But this would only hold true if the genes controlling the two traits are independent of each other.

From the evidence in the chart above, I think it’s likely that there exist genes which simultaneously cause higher intelligence and lower athleticism. This demonstrates that during the course of evolution, mankind faced strong selection pressures in favor of higher intelligence, even to the detriment of other useful attributes.

Does pornography prevent rape?

Via Sixteen Volts I discovered this story which reports that rape has declined by 85% since the 1970s. That's a whoppingly huge drop.

The author suggests pornography as the reason for the decline:

One theory about the causes of rape, however, has been thoroughly demolished. Among religious conservatives and left-wing feminists, it's an article of faith that pornography leads inexorably to sexual abuse of women and children. But while hard-core raunch has proliferated, sexual assaults have not. Could it be that pornography prevents rape?

This kind of makes sense. Would be rapists are sexually satiated by masturbating while viewing pornography on the internet, so they are less likely to go out and rape a woman.

This is the opposite of the conventional wisdom which holds that viewing pornography sends men into a sexual rage which results in increased incidents of rape.

Athletic men have more sex

Peter wrote in a comment that unathletic men aren’t getting any sex.

Amazingly, the General Social Survey gives us a means to see if there is any truth to this statement. In the 2004 survey, the following question was asked:

ATHLETIC 985. For each of the following, please indicate how well the description applies to you by circling one number: ... C. An athletic person. Is this ....

The following chart is restricted to unmarried men aged 18-39 who were born in the United States. PARTNERS refers to the number of sexual partners the respondent had during the last year. Note that the 2004 data uses a “non response adjustment,” which means that the percentages don’t exactly match the numbers.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		PARTNERS
		0	1	2 or more	ROW TOTAL
ATHLETIC	1: a very good description	6.1 2	47.8 20	46.1 19	100.0 41
	2: a good description	14.5 10	37.9 26	47.6 33	100.0 69
	3: a fair description	15.2 13	44.3 37	40.4 34	100.0 85
	4: not a very good description	27.3 9	37.6 13	35.0 12	100.0 35
	5: not a good description at all	46.3 2	12.2 0	41.5 1	100.0 3
	COL TOTAL	15.7 36	41.6 97	42.8 100	100.0 233

From the above chart we observe that, as self-reported athleticism decreases, the chance that an unmarried man has had no sex during the last year increases dramatically. Furthermore, men in the top two athletic categories were most likely to have had more then one sex partner.

It turns out that Peter’s theory has some truth to it.

Smartest men most likely to have paid for sex

EVPAIDSX 1304. Thinking about the time since your 18th birthday, have you ever had sex with a person you paid or who paid you for sex?

16.7% of male respondents say they have paid for sex at least once in their lives. But of 187 respondents with the highest intelligence (Wordsum=10), 22.2% say they have paid for sex.

This is evidence that smarter men are less attractive to women. They are more likely to have to pay in order to get a woman to have sex with them.

Greg Mankiw says that intelligence is genetic

In a blog post, Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw implies that IQ is genetic.

Unfortunately, he leaves readers with the impression that IQ is directly related to income. In fact it's educational attainment that's related to income, and IQ only predicts how much education a person will attain.

Formal education is a subset of track record human capital.

The real news is that a Harvard professor, from the same school which fired Larry Summers, is able to publicly state that positive outcomes are caused by genes.

Four types of human capital

Human capital can be divided into four categories:

(1) Biological capital
(2) Knowledge capital
(3) Track record capital
(4) Social capital

Biological capital includes your innate biological characteristics such as intelligence, sex, age, and health. Biological capital is the only one of the four types of capital which decreases with age. Not only does intelligence decrease with age (after it peaks in your twenties), but your entire body eventually wears out and dies.

Knowledge capital is everything you've learned. As I pointed out in my previous human capital post, most learning occurs on the job and not through formal education.

Track record capital is your track record of accomplishments, including your education (credential capital). It's correlated with your knowledge capital and biological capital, but it's far from a perfect correlation.

Social capital is your acquired social influence. It's who you know.

The former two types of capital, biological capital and knowledge capital, are positive-sum capital. This capital adds to the world's economy.

The latter two types of capital, track record capital and social capital, are zero-sum capital. This capital enables you to transfer wealth from other people to yourself, but it doesn't create value.

If someone earns a massively huge salary (a CEO for example), it's probably because he possesses a great amount of zero-sum capital.

I previously blogged about how worker pay is not based on what the worker is capable of contributing to the economy. This post explains what it's based on: track record capital and social capital.

Smarter people have less premarital sex

As intelligence (as measured by the Wordsum vocabulary test of the General Social Survey) increases, people are more likely to think that premarital sex is okay:

PREMARSX 217. There's been a lot of discussion about the way morals and attitudes about sex are changing in this country. If a man and woman have sex relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		PREMARSX
		1 ALWAYS WRONG	2 ALMST ALWAYS WRG	3 SOMETIMES WRONG	4 NOT WRONG AT ALL	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	28.1 18	12.5 8	17.2 11	42.2 27	100.0 64
	1	34.3 61	10.1 18	17.4 31	38.2 68	100.0 178
	2	36.2 140	10.6 41	14.5 56	38.8 150	100.0 387
	3	32.2 221	8.7 60	19.0 130	40.1 275	100.0 686
	4	30.2 370	9.6 117	18.2 223	42.0 514	100.0 1,224
	5	29.4 590	9.0 181	19.8 398	41.8 841	100.0 2,010
	6	28.3 760	9.0 241	20.7 555	42.1 1,131	100.0 2,687
	7	24.1 474	9.8 192	23.0 452	43.0 845	100.0 1,963
	8	23.9 298	10.7 133	21.7 271	43.7 545	100.0 1,247
	9	20.4 195	10.4 100	25.1 240	44.1 422	100.0 957
	10	13.7 94	9.3 64	28.7 197	48.3 332	100.0 687
	COL TOTAL	26.6 3,221	9.6 1,155	21.2 2,564	42.6 5,150	100.0 12,090

If you have been reading my blog, you should have expected the above results. I've consistently demonstrated how more intelligent people have more "liberal" views on non-economic issues.

What's surprising is the fact that, despite their more positive view of premarital sex, smarter people are less likely to report having premarital sex.

The following table is restricted to repondents who are (1) not married; (2) born in the U.S.; and (3) aged 18-39 (because after 40 people have less sex):

PARTNERS 1291. How many sex partners have you had in the last 12 months?
PLEASE CIRCLE ONE ANSWER.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		PARTNERS
		0	1	2 or more	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	28.6 2	71.4 5	.0 0	100.0 7
	1	17.8 5	62.5 16	19.7 5	100.0 25
	2	16.4 9	56.0 32	27.6 16	100.0 58
	3	16.0 17	62.1 65	21.8 23	100.0 105
	4	17.4 36	67.0 138	15.7 32	100.0 206
	5	15.0 52	64.9 224	20.2 70	100.0 346
	6	14.0 65	62.9 292	23.1 107	100.0 465
	7	19.6 66	61.1 207	19.3 65	100.0 338
	8	19.9 36	57.0 104	23.1 42	100.0 183
	9	30.2 32	54.6 59	15.2 16	100.0 108
	10	34.7 24	50.9 36	14.4 10	100.0 70
	COL TOTAL	18.1 345	61.7 1,179	20.3 388	100.0 1,912

We see a dramatic increase in celibacy as the Wordsum score increases above 6. (It's interesting to note that people with the median Wordsum score of 6 are the least likely to be celibate.)

Why do smarter people have less sex? It can't be because they find it immoral. Below are three theories. I have no idea which ones, if any, are correct:

(1) Smarter people understand that sex carries the risk of disease, and smarter people have better impulse control, so they avoid this desirable but unhealthy activity.

(2) Smarter people have lower sex drives. (A strong possibility because, for married respondents, frequency of sex decreases with intelligence.)

(3) Smarter people are less desirable sexual partners, so they have less opportunity to have sex.

Are CEOs becoming less intelligent?

From a year old article at USA Today, we learn the the percentage of CEOs with Ivy League degrees has been decreasing:

A study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart found that the percentage of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies who were educated at Ivy League schools declined from 16% in 1998 to 11% in 2004. Even the Harvard MBA shows signs of erosion. Among large-company CEOs who have MBAs, 28% received their degrees at Harvard, according to the 1998 study. By 2004, that had slipped to 23%.

A survey by the Wharton School at the Ivy League's University of Pennsylvania indicates the trend extends back 25 years. In 1980, 14% of CEOs at Fortune 100 companies received their undergraduate degrees from an Ivy League school. By 2001, 10% of CEOs received undergraduate degrees at one of the eight Ivies: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and Yale. The percentage of CEOs with undergraduate degrees from public colleges and universities shot up from 32% in 1980 to 48% in 2001.

Why is this happening?

There are two features of Ivy League degree holders:

(1) They have a better credential
(2) They have a higher average IQ. (Hi IQ people can go to non-Ivy schools, but it's harder for lower IQ people to get admitted to Ivy League schools, thus the higher average IQ for Ivy League graduates.)

If credentialism were becoming less important at the very top, that would be a good thing. But I suspect that what has really happened is that the average IQ of CEOs has declined. High IQ is less valued by boards of directors than it was in the past.

The General Social Survey doesn't tell us what's going on at the very top of society, but in the part of society the GSS covers I have observed that intelligence is becoming less correlated with income even as educational attainment is becoming more important.

The same thing is probably happening at the very top.

ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION

The career tracks which lead to CEO have become less appealing to Ivy League graduates.

Human capital is NOT formal education

Greg Mankiw writes about human capital, and the implication from his post is that human capital is synonymous with formal education.

This is a completely false understanding of human capital.

For the purpose of this post, I define human capital as that mysterious something which allows one person to make $200,000/year or even $1 million/year, while other less fortunate people are earning the minimum wage.

It should be obvious that education is only a tiny part of what constitutes human capital, because immediately after a person graduates from college he is able to earn only a slight bit more than he was before he had a college degree. There are many college grads waiting tables, working at Starbucks, etc. The market puts no value at all on their college degree, indicating that the college education is not what’s creating the human capital.

It is the work experience which allows people to earn more money, so this means that people accumulate human capital by working at jobs.

One may even go so far as to say that a college degree, instead of imparting human capital, actually acts as a barrier to entry limiting the number of people who can board career tracks where they obtain the genuine human capital.

Another double standard

If a man has an affair with his secretary, then he's a lowdown dog.

But there's a NY Times article about women having affairs with their contractors, and the article has nothing bad to say about it. "It’s fast, sexy, hot, but it doesn’t mean a lot — it’s like sexual chocolate, like sneaking out and getting that double scoop of ice cream in the afternoon."