Half Sigma

Distressed jeans

Once upon a time, if your jeans had stains and/or holes in them, this meant it was time to throw them out and buy a new pair of jeans. But today, this probably means you bought them that way. In fact, it is becoming hard to find jeans without at least some type of distressing.

If I were to try to make sense of this strange fashion trend, I would argue that, in the past when jeans cost a lot of money relative to poor people's income, wearing distressed jeans meant you were too poor to afford jeans that were in better condition. But today, using child labor in third world countries, brand new jeans are easily affordable even to the poorest of Americans. So today, the rich people wear distressed jeans because they are more expensive to manufacture. First the jeans have to be manufactured the regular way, then additional labor is required to distress them.

Distressed jeans seem related to untucked shirts. They both display lack of neatness. Dressing neatly is no longer cool. I even heard that's it's now considered dorky if your clothes are ironed. Does anyone know if this is true?

Notes on other blogs

There is a new blog called Grey Swan, written by "an Ivy League graduate who believes no topic should be off limits." Half Sigma is the only blog on Grey Swan's blogroll. I am honored that someone thinks that Half Sigma is the only blog in the entire blogosphere worthy of inclusion on a blogroll.

I'd also like to mention Black Female Interracial Marriage. The author of this blog is a black woman married to a white man who has devoted her blog to trying to convince other black women that they should consider dating and marrying white men. I think that the white guy with the gorgeous black wife pictured in this post is especially lucky.

A defense of Lou Dobbs

David Leonhardt goes on an anti-Lou Dobbs rant in today's NY Times where he accuses Lou Dobbs of lying. Leonhardt loses this debate:

For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population).

Notice how Leonhardt has changed the subject. Dobbs was talking about federal prisoners, and Leonhardt is talking about the entire state plus federal prison population. What a great way to accuse someone of playing loose with facts. Play loose yourself in rebuttal. Furthermore, in the linked to transcript of the show, it was clearly stated that they were talking about non-citizens and only assuming, probably correctly, that a large percentage of those non-citizens were in the country illegally when they were charged with their crimes.

Most of Leonhardt's column is devoted to complaining about a guest on Dobbs' show who apparently misunderstood how Leprosy statistics are reported. Per this Wikipedia article, Leprosy statistics are commonly reported as people who are registered as having the disease (which is a chronic condition) and not the number of new cases. I agree that there's no excuse that the guest didn't understand what she was talking about, but this is hardly the first time I've seen a guest on a TV news show who didn't know what she was talking about. To be fair to talk show hosts and producers, it's really impossible to ensure that everything a guest will say in spontaneous live discussion will turn out to be true.

Newspapers routinely get their statistics wrong and newspapers have much less of an excuse because there is time to check facts before printing an article. My previous two blog posts talked about misleading statistics in a NY Times op-ed piece, and that's hardly the first time I've blogged about such problems. My own personal faith in the accuracy of any numbers in newspapers ended when the Washington Post reported, as the gospel truth, that Jessica Cutler was 24, when she was really 26. The news media routinely reports uncorroborated statements as if they were fact. In other words, instead of stating "Jessica Cutler told us she is 24", the paper will state "Jessica Cutler is 24." The first statement is true, the second statement is false.

Of course the Jessica Cutler lies are minor compared with major gaffes like reporting that all of treasures of the National Museum in Baghdad were looted when in reality the majority of pieces had been stored in safe repositories before the war started.

So in conclusion, I give a big thumbs down to Leonhardt for making a big deal about nothing.

David Brooks and the "quasi-religious"

I previously wrote about David Brooks' op-ed column from Friday's NY Times (reproduced by a kind blogger) and discussed the Catholics are wealthier angle.

But the majority of Brooks' column is not so much about Catholics as it is about the "quasi-religious." First, David Brooks defines the term:

Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.

He sounds like he has a fond affection for the quasi-religious, similar to his feelings about "bobos." Probably because Brooks is quasi-religious himself, and rather than face the hypocrisy inherent in such a viewpoint, he chooses instead to praise it.

Do the quasi-religoius adhere to their faith because they actually believe in the faith, or is it just about guilt and/or fear of change? I don't think that people who adhere to a religion without believing it are deserving of any sort of praise.

But Brooks goes in the opposite direction, and seems to actively encourage people to be quasi religious. In the early part of his column, he mentions the historical contributions of the quasi-religious:

Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.

And then at the end of the column, he writes about the modern day benefits of being quasi-religious:

In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.

The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”

Here is a link to a preliminary version of the paper written by Margarita Mooney. Brooks goes out of his way to tell us that "college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t," but I suspect that this is an incorrect interpretation of Mooney's paper.

Mooney's paper includes a multiple regression analysis which includes a hodgepodge of variables including two measures of religiosity (attendence and a self-rated measure of religious observance), and also the respondents' SAT score and high school GPA. SAT is a very good measure of intelligence, which is why it has the strongest correlation with college GPA of any of the input variables used in the regression. High school GPA has the second strongest correlation with college GPA.

Based on my previous research on religion and intelligence, I assume that SAT would be negatively correlated with religious attendence and religious observance. In other words, the students who attend religious services are probably less intelligent than students who don't attend services, so probably these religious students have lower GPAs. It is only when you compare two students with equal SAT scores and equal high school GPAs that we find that a Protestant student who attends religious services is predicted to have a GPA that's 0.04 points higher non a Protestant student who doesn't attend services. On the other hand, a Jew who doesn't attend religious services is predicted to a GPA that's 0.08 points higher.

(Why don't I go to the data myself and find the truth? I downloaded the SPSS .sav file, but I don't have SPSS so this doesn't do me any good.)

Is there a point in any of this? Well, I guess that I put a lot of effort into demonstrating that Brooks has misled us. But probably he's correct that the quasi-religious have the most success in America (even though he presents no evidence to back this up). Why do I believe he's correct about this? Because within any religion, the least religious members of that religion are predicted to have the highest intelligence, and high intelligence is correlated with success.

I also think that the quasi-religious might be more successful than admitted atheists. There are two reasons for this. (1) The quasi-religious have the benefit of the social network they get from participating in their religion. And (2) atheists tend to be social misfits for reasons other than just their atypical religious beliefs.

In many cases, the only real difference between a quasi-religious person and an atheist is that the quasi-religious person is telling the survey taker the socially correct answer.

I think I previously pointed out that atheists tend to be ugly. Ugly people are more likely to adhere to contrarian views because they receive less benefit from the status quo. So atheists, libertarians, communists, and any other weird type of movement, has a disproportionate share of ugly people. And I don't have to explain why being ugly is a detriment to success.

Does Catholicism make you wealthier?

According to David Brooks' op-ed column in Friday's NY Times (reproduced by a fellow blogger), Catholics are enjoying a lot of financial sucess.

And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.

According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.

Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”

Now this is interesting news to me, because I previously published my own original reserach demonstrating that Catholics lag significantly behind Episcopals and Presbytarians, and all Christians lag significantly behind the Jews.

For those who are curious, Lisa Keister's research paper, in PDF format, is available for free. I give this paper a low grade for talking about "mainline Protestants" without adequately defining the term in the paper, but instead referring to some other paper that's not available on the internet. However, a little research shows that "mainline Protestant" refers to Episopals, Presbytarians, Lutherans, and and Methodists. My previous research demonstrated that Catholics had slightly higher incomes than Lutherans and Methodists, so if you average all those "mainline" Protestant religions together (and I may point out that Lutherans and Methodists outnumber Presbytarians and Episcopals--at only 3.9% of Protestants, the Episcopals represent the elite), and then exclude Hispanic Catholics (as Ms. Keister did) who are surely dragging down the Catholic average, then it's not so surprising that white Catholics are at parity with the average mainline Protestant, but I bet they are still behind the highest earning Episcopals and Presbytarians.

An important advantage that Catholics have over Protestants is that Catholics live in areas of the country with higher average incomes. According to the GSS, in New England, the wealthiest GSS region, Catholics make up 51.1% of the population. Catholics also comprise 40.0% of the Middle Atlantic region and 24.6% of the Pacific reigion, the other high income regions. This is compared to a nationwide average of only 24.9% Catholic. Catholics make up a very low percentage of the population of the Deep South which is the poorest part of the country.

Lisa Keister and David Brooks try to tie in the Catholic financial success with aspects of the Catholic faith, but there may be a much simpler demographic explanation, which is that white people living in New England and the Middle Atlantic states of NJ, PA and NY have higher than average income and net worth.

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I will write more about the "quasi-religious" in tomorrow's blog post.

Biological basis for sex differences in math ability

That there is some biological basis behind the observation that men are better at math than women is plain old common sense, because there have never been any sociological explanations that made sense. Via Steve Sailer, I read an article about some scientific research that more definitively points to a biological connection.

Scientists have known that different levels of the hormones testosterone and estrogen in the womb account for the different finger lengths ...

Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer. Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.

To test the link to children's scores on the College Board's Scholastic Assessment Test (for which the name has changed a number of times in the past 100 years), Brosnan and his colleagues made photocopies of children's palms and measured the length of their index and ring fingers using calipers accurate to 0.01 millimeters. They used the finger-length ratios as a proxy for the levels of testosterone and estrogen exposure.

The researchers then looked at boys' and girls' test performances separately and compared them to finger-length ratio measurements. They found a clear link between high prenatal testosterone exposure, indicated by the longer ring finger compared to the index finger, and higher scores on the math SAT.

Similarly, they found higher literacy SAT scores for the girls among those who had lower prenatal testosterone exposure, as indicated by a shorter ring finger compared with the index finger.

The important thing to get out of this is that there is an intra-sex correlation between sex hormones and math scores, and this is in the direction one would expect. More prenatal exposure to the male sex hormone testosterone correlates with higher math scores. This suggests that sex hormones also explain why men, on average, have higher mathematical ability than women. Larry Summers should wave this research paper in the faces of those at Harvard who got him fired.

However, I also believe that this finding, by itself, does not fully explain the connection between math ability and sex hormones. The stereotype is that the kids who are good at math are the nerdy non-athletic kids, the opposite of the high-testosterone football playing kids. So although there is a scientifically validated correlation between prenatal testosterone and math, there is an anecdotal opposite correlation for teenage boys. Less testosterone in the teenage years seems to predict higher math performance.

A Muslim fifth column inside our borders?

I read the Pew Research Paper linked to by the commenter Turamber.

There are approximately 2 million Muslims in the U.S., and 5% of Muslims surveyed reported having a "favorable" view of al Qaeda. So this means that al Qaeda has approximately 100,000 supporters in the U.S. And then there are the 27% who didn't answer the question. Maybe they didn't answer the question because they didn't want to go on the record for having a favorable view of al Qaeda. Maybe there are as many as 640,000 Muslims in the U.S. with a favorable view of al Qaeda.

The Pew study tries to, in a very PC manner, tell us that Muslims are just like us. Maybe it's true for 80% of Muslims, but if 20% are not like us, that's a large fifth column living amongst us.

Pew didn't have the creativity (or perhaps chutzpah is the right word) to compare the 60% of Muslims who don't believe that "groups of Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks" to the 88% of blacks who thought the O.J. jury reached the correct verdict.

Untucked shirt at BAR/BRI

I noticed that I was committing a fashion faux pas in my first week of attending the BAR/BRI bar review class by tucking my shirt into my jeans. Most of the class is in their twenties, and the most common style for male attendees is to wear their shirts untucked. I didn't want to look like an old man too stupid to understand the latest fashion trends, so I capitulated to the untucked shirt movement.

Steve Sailer has often commented that men today are too lazy to tuck in their shirts (as he did in this post). In fact, it's not at all about laziness, because it's a lot easier to stick one's shirt into its natural place, which is inside one's pants. This certainly makes it a lot easier to use the men's room, because you don't have a shirt flopping around in front of you when you are trying to answer nature's call. But fashion is what it is.

* * *

Astute blog readers will note that I previously passed the NY Bar, but unfortunately I didn't fill out the character and fitness section within the three years required by the rules, so I need to pass the exam again in order to be able to practice law in NY.

Palestinian children's TV show

It sure ain't Sesame Street. Please watch.

The generational wealth gap

An article in USA Today explains the very alarming generational wealth gap:

How wealth and income have changed for two age groups, after adjusting for inflation:

•Ages 55-59: Median net worth — the middle point for all households — rose 97% over 15 years to $249,700 in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available. Median income rose 52%.

•Ages 35-39: Median household net worth fell 28% to $48,940. Median income fell 10%.

One question some people will ask is whether this is even a problem? Well I am almost certain that the declining birth rate among the college educated has to do with the resource insecurity that results from this generational wealth inequality. And a situation in which the smartest people have the least children is definitely a serious long run problem.

The wealth gap explains why more young men are living at home with their parents. This is because there is a limited supply of housing due to zoning restrictions, and poor young people are shut out of the market by rich older people who bid up the prices.

The unanswered question here, and even I don't have an answer, is will the poor young people today be as rich when they are in their late fifties as those currently in their late fifties? Do young people simply have to wait their turn? Or have we witnessed one time wealth transfer (helped by the massive asset inflation in the stock and real estate markets) that young people today will never experience for themselves? This means that, in the future, inheriting money from one's parents will become a much more common way of gaining wealth, and young people whose parents lack wealth will be disadvantaged when compared to the older generation.

Africa's "crumbling" universities

This NY Times article about Africa's "jammed and crumbling" universities is full descriptions of how bad they are now. Unfortunately the tone of the article is that it's the West's fault for not giving away enough money to properly fund the universities. Instead of giving the West credit for building the universities in the first place, the West is only criticized because African countries are incapable of maintaining their own institutions.

Reading between the lines of the article, it seems that universities worked well in the past because they were elite institutions that only let in a small number of Africa's best. The number of students were massivley expanded, as evidenced from the following description of Cheikh Anta Diop formely known as the University of Dakar: "Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000 dormitory beds."

First of all, common sense would tell you that it costs approximately twelve times as much to educate 60,000 students as it does to educate 5,000 students. Secondly, the 5,000 most elite students are probably smarter and better suited to be students than the 55,000 expansion students.

The situation is obviously not going to be fixed:

Attempts to reduce the student population by admitting fewer students are seen as political suicide — student unions play a big role in elections, and the country’s leaders are fearful of widespread discontent among the educated youth.

So the West is blamed by the left wing New York Times because Senegal's government is set up in such a way as to make the maintance of an elite university politically impossible. If anything, this shows once again that the concept of democracy doesn't work in poor and mostly uneducated countries. Africa would be much better off if its nations were set up so that only the top 5% or so of the population were allowed to vote.

Weddings keep the poor people poor, part II

I previously wrote about how weddings keep the poor people poor. Nothing demonstrates my point better than this excerpt from a NY Times article about how Americans are in debt:

When the couple met through Yahoo personal ads in 2003, they did not discuss debt. She wrote that she liked snow; he said he looked like Babe Ruth. ...

Their debt escalated when they decided to get married. They paid for rings, a reception, a honeymoon and a new bathroom — about $50,000 in a seven-month stretch.

“In such a short period of time, there’s no way to do it other than credit card debt,” Mr. Moellering said.

As a public service announcement, someone needs to tell Americans that if they want a happy marriage then they shouldn't spend so much money on their weddings.

More buildings for Manhattan

There's an article in the NY Times about the plans to develop the area west of Penn Station. Development sounds like a great idea to me, because the ridiculously high prices for apartments in Manhattan indicates that Manhattan needs a lot more residential units in order to meet the demand. So a few seventy story apartment buildings is exactly what Manhattan needs.

What gets me incredibly mad is the whining attitude of people opposed to this development:

Developers insist that any requirements for affordable housing or parks will increase their costs by $100 million, reducing the price they can pay. Critics contend that the sale of public land should lead to community benefits, and that the cost of those benefits is a small price to pay for a rare commodity: land in Manhattan.

“It’s a vast undertaking, and it pitches these competing public goals against each other,” said Anna Levin, a member of Community Board 4. “I understand that the entire burden shouldn’t be placed on developers. But this is a public undertaking. There have to be public resources that can be brought to bear, otherwise this will become a gold coast that doesn’t serve the entire city.”

No, Anna Levin, you are a moron. There is already massive affordable public housing in Manhattan north of 96th st, and that neighborhood sucks. The entire rest of Manhattan is already a "gold coast." Putting up more residential units is what we need to make the "gold coast" more affordable to more people. "Affordable housing" should be built in the outer boroughs--subway service to jobs in Manhattan is perfectly adequate from many places in the outer boroughs. Randomly awarding, by lottery, a few super-expensive apartments to poor people does not make the city as a whole more affordable, it just unjustly enriches few lucky lottery winners. Maybe it assuages some misplaced liberal guilt, but it's bad public policy.

The taxes that will be collected from the rich residents of the new buildings, who might otherwise be living somewhere else, do serve the city. Maintaining Manhattan as the world's preeminent location for fincance and commerce does serve all residents. If Manhattan ever loses that, then we become the next Detroit.

More intelligence genes discovered

Scientists have discovered more genes correlated with higher intelligence.

Sudha Seshadri at Boston University and colleagues assessed the cognitive abilities of 705 healthy adults with standard tests and used MRI scans to measure the volume of their brains. The researchers also scanned 100,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms - small variations in the genome sequence - in participants' DNA for links to mental performance.

The strongest links were in the genes SORL, involved in abstract reasoning and the processing of amyloid protein in Alzheimer's disease, and CDH4, which seems to predict brain volume.

If we gave genetic tests to random people of different races, which races would have a higher percentage of high IQ genes, and which races a lower percentage of such genes? I presume that this is an experiment that no one wants to do because the world will punish the bearer of the news.

Exercise does not raise your metabolism

It is often repeated that exercising raises your metabolism and through this means helps you to lose weight.

According to Dr. Gabe Mirkin, this is most often not true:

A review of the world's literature from the University of South Australia in Adelaide shows that you have to be in very good shape to exercise vigorously enough to increase your metabolism (Journal of Sports Science, December 2006). This means that most exercisers are not able to exercise hard enough to burn extra calories for a significant time after they finish exercising, so increased post-exercise metabolism does not cause most exercisers to lose weight.

It sucks to be a doctor

An article from NY magazine about the woes of physicians.

It's actually pretty obvious that working for a big HMO is going to be a lot worse than owning your own practice.

Code Monkey like you

Thanks to this NY Times article, I discovered the Code Monkey music video, made from images captured from World of Warcraft. Not as nerdy as it sounds.

Plumbers earn more than doctors

This startling conclusion is mined from a NY Times article:

... over a lifetime a plumber has a higher standard of living than a physician with a general practice because the doctor starts earning later, pays higher taxes and high malpractice insurance premiums.

So the lesson for wannabe doctors is to make sure you go to a prestigious medical school so you can get into a high paying speciality. Otherwise your standard of living will be less than that of a plumber.

The Skinny Man Effect

In the following tables, I compare body mass index (BMI) with family income, using the 1991 National Health Interview Survey. Remember that all data is self-reported, and people lie on surveys. Men, specifically, lie about their heights if they are shorter than 6'0".

Variables
Role	Name	Label	Range	MD	Dataset
Row	hs_bmi(Recoded)	BMI	1.0000-7.0000		2
Column	incfam(Recoded)	family income	1-3		1
Control	sex	sex	1-2		1
Filter	age(35-60)	age	0-99		1

Statistics for sex = 1(male)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		incfam
		1 0-19,999	2 20,000-49,999	3 50,000+	ROW TOTAL
hs_bmi	1.0000: <20	48.0 118	46.7 115	5.3 13	100.0 246
	2.0000: 20-<22.5	33.9 338	56.6 564	9.4 94	100.0 996
	3.0000: 22.5-<25	26.0 534	61.6 1,265	12.3 253	100.0 2,052
	4.0000: 25-<27.5	24.1 661	63.4 1,740	12.5 343	100.0 2,744
	5.0000: 27.5-<30	26.3 407	62.2 963	11.5 178	100.0 1,548
	6.0000: 30-<35	26.9 335	62.9 784	10.2 127	100.0 1,246
	7.0000: 35+	34.7 140	58.1 234	7.2 29	100.0 403
	COL TOTAL	27.4 2,533	61.3 5,665	11.2 1,037	100.0 9,235

Statistics for sex = 2(female)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		incfam
		1 0-19,999	2 20,000-49,999	3 50,000+	ROW TOTAL
hs_bmi	1.0000: <20	28.7 307	57.5 616	13.8 148	100.0 1,071
	2.0000: 20-<22.5	27.3 606	62.2 1,380	10.5 233	100.0 2,219
	3.0000: 22.5-<25	29.5 678	60.1 1,384	10.4 239	100.0 2,301
	4.0000: 25-<27.5	34.6 654	56.8 1,072	8.6 162	100.0 1,888
	5.0000: 27.5-<30	44.1 453	48.9 503	7.0 72	100.0 1,028
	6.0000: 30-<35	41.3 595	50.9 733	7.8 113	100.0 1,441
	7.0000: 35+	48.9 391	45.9 367	5.1 41	100.0 799
	COL TOTAL	34.3 3,684	56.3 6,055	9.4 1,008	100.0 10,747

These tables demonstrate what I call the Skinny Man Effect.

For women, the lower their BMI the higher their predicted family income. Remember that this is family income, so it includes her income if she works, and her husband's income if she's married.

But men have a different distribution. It turns out that men who are officially "overweight" with a BMI between 25 and 27.5 have higher incomes than men who have a "healthy" weight. So if you're a man, being thin may be good for your health (if we are to believe the people who make these definitions), but it's bad for your wallet.

You hear over and over again that poverty is a risk factor for obesity, but as we see above, for men, poverty is also a risk factor for having a "healthy" weight.

There is other evidence that men of lower weights have negative outcomes in life. Thus I call it the Skinny Man Effect.

Let's talk about confounding factors for a minute. As age increases, so does BMI. Age also has a positive correlation with income. I used ages 35-60 because it's an age range with less change in these factors. Men have a big increase in both BMI and income as they progress from 18 to 30, but by 35 that effect is leveling off.

Despite the above confounding factors, I am certain that the Skinny Man Effect is real, because I still see it when I plug in a much narrower age range.

Fat people more religious than skinny people

In the 2004 General Social Survey, the interviewer had to report his impression of the respondent's weight. It's a real shame that the GSS didn't do this earlier, but better late than never.

It turns out that a person's weight has a strong impact on his views about the Bible:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		INTRWGHT
		1 Below average	2 Average	3 Somewhat above average	4 Considerably above average	ROW TOTAL
BIBLE	1: WORD OF GOD	17.9 12	31.3 223	37.6 71	51.2 20	32.3 326
	2: INSPIRED WORD	49.7 33	50.3 359	50.3 95	36.2 14	49.7 501
	3: BOOK OF FABLES	25.2 17	17.0 121	9.7 18	12.7 5	16.0 161
	4: OTHER	7.3 5	1.4 10	2.4 5	.0 0	2.0 20
	COL TOTAL	100.0 67	100.0 713	100.0 190	100.0 39	100.0 1,008

As we see from the table above, as a person's weight increases so does his religiosity, as demonstrated by his beliefs about the Bible.

I previously demonstrated from GSS data that religious people have more children.

If fat people are more religious, and religious people have more children, this lends further evidence to my theory that fat people have more children, and because obesity is genetic, this partially explains the "obesity epidemic."

Phi on feminists and alpha males

The blogger who identifies himself with the Greek letter phi has an interesting blog post about Feminists and the Alpha Male.

Cooking schools are ripping off their students

There's an article in the NY Times about how cooking schools are ruining their students lives by leaving them burdened with student loan debt, yet only eligible for $10/hour jobs.

My complaint with the article is the title: "‘Top Chef’ Dreams Crushed by Student Loan Debt." It implies that the blame is on the cheapskate taxpayer, not willing to properly fund students' education. Cooking is obviously a skill that people can learn easily enough on the job, because there are a lot of chefs who never went to cooking school at all. The taxpayer should not be funding an unnecessary credentials race.

The problem with the student loan industry is that the schools themselves suffer no financial pain when students suffer extreme financial distress. Debtors should be allowed to discharge their loans in bankruptcy after a certain number of years have passed, and the schools themselves should have to share some of the cost of the bankrukptcy. This would force schools to be more proactive in ensuring that their graduates' have good careers, and it would mean that educational programs that aren't capable of getting their graduates into worthwhile career tracks would have to shut down.

Advice for wannabe chefs: the only school worth going to is the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, and even then it's not clear that it's worth the $60,000 it will cost you to get a two-year degree. But at least the top cooking school will open doors for you.

Say no to Down syndrome

There's a NY Times article about how some parents of children with Down syndrome are trying to prevent genetic testing and abortion of fetuses with the syndrome. I find this attitude repugnant.

According to the article, new technology allows doctors to determine if a pregnant woman's fetus has the syndrome without a possibly risky amniocentesis. This means there is no longer any need for children to be born with Down syndrome. There is no longer any need for society to waste money on research and expensive care for people with this syndrome.

Women who would still choose to give birth to such a baby should not be given any taxpayer funded medical care or special education for their children's problems.

Fat people have more children

In a comment to my previous post about how weight is genetic, Dennis Mangan wrote:

The environment is just as, if not more, important than genetics. The gene pool hasn't changed over the last thirty years, but the number of overweight and obese has massively increased.

Well, if fat people were having more children than skinny people, then this would easily explain why the number of overweight and obese people is increasing.

Doing some research on the web, I discovered that the question was answered by a Duke University study:

The researchers examined data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a national survey designed to study health, social, and financial issues in middle-aged Americans. The HRS study includes information on more than 12,600 Americans, collected from 1993 to 2000. Most respondents were age fifty-one to sixty in 1992. The study is a cooperative agreement between the In-stitute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Aging. For the Duke analysis, the researchers used data only from a baseline survey completed in 1992. Only married respondents and spouses between the ages of forty and seventy with children were included in the analysis, which comprised a total of 9,046 men and women (4,523 couples). Single or divorced individuals with children were excluded. The number of children reported by the couples ranged from one to nineteen, and included both biological and adopted children. Of the sample, 79 percent were white, 12.5 percent were African American, and 8.5 percent were Hispanic.

Because the researchers focused their analysis exclusively on the connection between number of children and obesity, they controlled for age, household income, race and ethnicity, work status, physical activity, and tobacco and alcohol use. "After adjusting for all these factors, the number of children played a statistically significant role in the obesity of both men and women," says Truls Ostbye, senior author on the paper and professor of community and family medicine at Duke.

Ostbye says that, while the increased risk for obesity in women was 7 percent for each additional child and only 4 percent for men, the difference between these two figures was not statistically significant. "Obesity associated with number of children is not just a problem linked to physiological changes in women during pregnancy," he says. "There are social, cultural, or psychological mechanisms that bring about this weight gain, and this is illustrated by our results that showed men were also at a greater risk of obesity."

The researchers are implying that having children somehow causes obesity, but I strongly suspect that they have the cause and effect wrong, and actually what is happening is that heavier people have more children.

UPDATE

After posting the above, I found the more detailed study, and the authors cite many other studies showing the link between weight and the number of chidren:

Several investigators have found an association between reproductive history and obesity among women and, in one cohort, among men but we did not locate any studies that have examined the association in couples. A study published in 1956, which included 583 women attending a diabetic clinic in Oxford, England, found an increasing prevalence of overweight women with increasing numbers of pregnancies.[24] In a Swedish study of twins, an average 2 kg increase in weight after pregnancy was observed in women with two or more children compared with childless controls.[25] A population study from Finland found that number of children among women aged 25–84 was closely related to the prevalence of obesity, independent of marital status, occupation, and smoking habits.[17] The strongest relationship between number of children and BMI was in the youngest age group (25–34), although the relationship persisted even among the women aged 75–84. In a more recent study from Sweden, number of children was also associated with obesity among 5464 women ages 45–73.[26]

Similar associations between number of children and obesity have been observed in the United States. In the Nurses' Health Study, an increase in BMI was found with increasing number of children among women aged 42–67.[27] Among 41,000 Iowa women, BMI increased with number of children in a linear fashion after adjustment for age, education, marital status, and smoking status.[9] In a case-control study, women (n = 1716) from Massachusetts (age range 45–69) with five or more births were more frequently obese (defined as a BMI of >/=29) compared with women with no births.[28] Among U.S. women aged 45–74 who participated in the first NHANES follow-up study, as well as among women aged 35–68 who participated in the Framingham Heart Study, investigators found a significant increase in BMI with an increase in number of children.[3]

The Rancho Bernardo Study found an association between number of children and obesity among women and men many years after child-bearing.[29,30] In this cohort study of women and men ages 55–84, the mean age-adjusted BMI was positively associated with number of biological children.[29] Among men 50–89 years of age (n = 1039), those who had five or more biological children were significantly more obese (as estimated by BMI and waist/hip ratio) than men with no biological children.[30] Several investigators have proposed socioeconomic status (SES) as a significant confounder in the number of children and obesity relationship.[31,32] Men and women with less education or of lower social class are at higher risk for obesity,[33] and this effect may be related to personal habits, such as excessive caloric intake, as well as number of children.

The evidence is pretty clear. Heavier people have more children. Weight is genetic. Thus the reason for the "obesity epidemic."

Weight is genetic

A NY Times article today lays out the overwhelming evidence for the fact that body weight is genetic and has hardly anything to do with environment or factors we can control.

(1) When fat people are given a starvation diet in order to lose weight, the weight is very quickly gained back, and it's nearly impossible for them to avoid this. The body goes into a starvation mode.

(2) When thin people are given a high calorie diet in order to gain weight, the weight is very quickly lost after they go back to their normal diet.

(3) Adoption studies show high correlation with natural parents' weight and no correlation with adoptive parents' weight.

(4) Identical twins reared apart have nearly identical weight.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

Interestingly, intelligence has the same amount of inheritance. This means there is enough environmental influence over body weight for people who are in denial to deny the genetic link to weight, just as people deny the genetic link to intelligence.

It's also interesting that weight has a negative correlation with intelligence. Is it possible that some of the same genes control both?

How come white men never rape black women?

I have been asked to comment on this article at FrontPage Magazine, The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States. Dennis Mangan has a blog post about the article and the controversy.

The article was based on the stats in a U.S. Department of Justice Publication documenting crime statistics in 2005.

There were 160,270 single-offender rapes/sexual assaults reported in 2005. 48.% of the offenders were black, an impressively high total considering that blacks are only 13% of the population.

What's more interesting is when the race of the victim is compared to the race of the offender. For the 111,490 cases where the rape/sexual assault victim was white, 33.6% of the time the perceived race of the offender was black, compared to 44.5% white.

But for the 36,620 cases where the rape/sexual assuult victim was black, 100% of the time the offender was reported to be black. (And we are told that 0% means 10 or fewer reported cases, so it's possible that there have been as many as 10 cases of non-black men raping black women in 2005.)

This is a pretty strange statistic if you think about it. There were approximately 74,029 rape/sexual assaults commited by non-black men, but in no more than 10 of these cases was the victim black? What's wrong with black women that no one wants to rape them? I'd think that 2% of the time the victim would be black so there'd be 1,480 cases of non-blacks raping blacks. But in fact, this happened 10 times or less.

Because only 31.4% of rapes are committed by strangers, the best way a black woman can avoid being raped is to only know white men. (This is not likely to happen, because black women aren't romantically interested in white men.)

Are Midwesterners ruining Manhattan?

At Isabella's on the Upper West Side, the woman at the table next to me, who looked like she was in her seventies, told me that New York City isn't as "cosmopolitan" as Paris because "everyone in New York is from the Midwest."

This is the first time I heard that there were too many people here who are from the Midwest. It was such an interesting comment that I thought it deserved its own blog post.

Most pointless NY Times article ever?

Pink Shirts Welcome is perhaps the most pointless article ever to make the NY Times Most Emailed list.

“Everyone here was tall,” Ms. Fitzgerald said. She was standing out front smoking with her friend Carrie Lieberman, as a doorman shoed away an inebriated-seeming pedestrian who was acting as if he was trying to look up the dresses of women sitting on Netti’s front benches. “So we made dinner reservations this week. We like tall preppy guys.”

As of 11 p.m. Ms. Lieberman had given out her number to one man. She didn’t know much about him except for one thing. “He was tall.” she said.

Insights into the strange thought processes of the opposite sex are always interesting, but I don't think that's the point of the article.

Virginity and the Zodiac

Using the General Social Survey, I discovered that 5.8% of male respondents born in the U.S. are virgins. But 7.2% of men born under the sign of Sagittarius are vigins, and 7.0% of Scorpios are virgins.

Have I discovered that there really is something to this astrology thing? I don't think so.

Sagittarii are born between November 23rd and December 22nd. Many school systems have a grade cutoff of December 31st. Children born January 1st or after will be in a lower grade in those school systems. This means that Sagitarrii are likely to be the youngest children in their grade, and thus the least mature physically, emotionally, and intellectually. This puts them at a disadvantage relative to their older classmates and more likely to grow up lacking the social skills necessary to lose their virginity. This is the same effect as the findings about adolescent height and labor market outcomes.

Scorpios are born between October 24th and Novermber 22nd, which explains why they are also more likely to be virgins.

On the other side of the cutoff date, only 5.4% of Aquarii (born January 20th to February 19th) and 4.7% of Pisces (born February 20th to March 20th) are virgins.

The conclusion is that there may be some social benefit to having your male children be among the older children in their grade at school. (This creates a negative sum game when parents try to game the system and get their kids held back a grade. 20% of children will always be the youngest 20% in their grade, and it's not in society's interests for people's entrance into the workforce to be delayed by a year.)

UPDATE

There has been some confusion in the comments about the cutoff date. The most common cutoff date today is actually September 1, but in the past the most common cutoff dates were 12/1, 12/31 and 1/1, and the later cutoff dates probably apply to most of the GSS respondents.

Here is a research paper on this very issue, and there is a chart at the end of the paper showing the years that states changed their cutoff dates.

Laptops in high school: waste of money

Laptops for high school kids always seemed like a dumb idea to me. After all, I got through high school without any computers in the classroom (except for a single class in Pascal programming).

Now, according to a NY Times article, research shows that kids in high schools with "one-to-one" computing programs had no better performance on tests.

Kids mostly used the computers to play games, instant message each other, and view pornography.

Publicly funded computers for high school students are just a big waste of the taxpayer's money.