Social sciences as branches of biology

Satoshi Kanazawa asserts that "social sciences are branches of biology". On the surface, that seems reasonable, but Kanazawa once again overreaches and oversimplifies when, at the end of his article, he states:

In my next post, I will explain why, contrary to what most social scientists believe, all good science is reductionist, and all human behavior must be explained at the level of the genes (and molecules, and atoms, and particles).

All good science is indeed reductionist, but genes aren't necessarily the level that controls all human behavior. For instance, it can be easily shown that the obesity epidemic has had profound consequences for human behavior, society, public health, sex relations, and probably lots more. Yet the obesity epidemic was not caused by genetic changes; our genes are still pretty much the same as they were 30 years ago. The environment has changed. So, while obesity is certainly driven by human biology, culture has caused the epidemic, culture in the form of promotion of low-fat diets, cheap food especially soft drinks, even a reduction in smoking. Genetics can explain hunger, or the desire for carbohydrates, but these have always been with us and thus don't explain the epidemic.

Economics, a branch of the social sciences, has biological elements, for instance humans seem to be hardwired for risk aversion, and time preference seems to have a genetic component as well. But just try explaining the housing bubble and the subsequent crash by reference to genes.

It's not so simple, Dr. Kanazawa.

HBD and the Puzzle of Winter Births

An article in the WSJ, New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies, discusses the work of two economists who attempted to solve the winter birth conundrum. Births in winter have been linked to schizophrenia, brain tumors, asthma, and socioeconomic disadvantages. The question is why. various explanations have been offered, such as parasitic infections or vitamin D intake. The new explanation: human biodiversity.

The two economists examined birth-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 52 million children born between 1989 and 2001, which represents virtually all of the births in the U.S. during those years. The same pattern kept turning up: The percentage of children born to unwed mothers, teenage mothers and mothers who hadn't completed high school kept peaking in January every year. Over the 13-year period, for example, 13.2% of January births were to teen mothers, compared with 12% in May -- a small but statistically significant difference, they say.

So, women with lower IQs and lower future time orientation tend to bear children more in winter than other women. In turn, why these women would tend to give birth in winter remains a mystery.

Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman aren't entirely sure yet. Perhaps it has to do with fluctuations in employment; married women tend to conceive when unemployment is higher, research has shown. They also speculate it might be due to cooler temperatures in springtime, which don't adversely affect the fertility of poor parents, who may not have air conditioning, like hot temperatures do. Or they wonder if there might even be a "prom" effect at work. January is, after all, about nine months after many of those soirees.

The difference in births is small but statistically significant, but I'm at a loss at even imagining any biological factor. Nevertheless, it appears that the season of birth doesn't matter, it's who the mothers are.

The Dow/Gold Ratio

 

The Dow/gold ratio is simply the Dow Jones Industrial Average divided by the price of one ounce of gold. (Good explanation here.) It appears that even many investors aren't familiar with it, though it's of course well known among gold bugs. As you can see, the ratio hit 1 in 1980, and in my view could well do so again, as we're in an economic crisis the likes of which haven't been seen since the Great Depression. In 2000, at the height of the tech bubble, the ratio was at an all-time high and has been declining ever since. Notice also that the swings have become more erratic since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

The ratio suggests an easy way to invest, switching between stocks and gold when the ratio is at extremes. Anyone who did so would have outperformed probably everyone. The ratio currently stands at just under 10. At a Dow of 4000 and gold at $4000, not an impossible scenario in my view, we'd be back to 1.

Conservatives and Liberals

"The thinking conservative finds his chief allies in the self-complacency of comfortable mediocrity, in the apathy and stupidity of the toil-worn multitudes, and in the aggressive self-interest of the privileged classes.

The honest radical draws much of his support from self-seeking demagogues and reckless experimenters, from people who want the world changed because they cannot get along in it as it is, from poseurs and dilettanti, and from malcontents who love disturbance for its own sake."

-- Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., quoted in The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris.

HBD and Food

Over the past year or so, whenever I've written anything diet- or health-related, many commentators who one expects come here only for political or HBD type material have chimed in with either their agreement or interest in such matters, or with anecdotes or information that indicate that they're more than up to speed on paleo or low carb diets. (A tiny coterie of morons left disparaging comments indicating their unwillingness to read such material as well as questioning the legitimacy of my birth.) So, why do HBD types seemingly take a greater than average interest in this, and why do they seem so knowledgeable that low-carb/paleo diets are the way to go? Gig commented:

so the HBD/Roissy blogosphere has definitely embraced the Atkins/Gary Taubes/Mark Sisson diet views that refined carbohydrates and sugar ARE poison?

Yes, I'd say that, judging by a completely unscientific sampling method, the Steveosphere and Roissysphere have indeed embraced the Taubes-Atkins-Paleo-Eades way of looking at diet. The following might be a few reasons why.

Evolution and biology: HBD types already recognize the importance of evolution, the theoretical underpinning of human biodiversity. They recognize that man's long evolutionary history is still with us and that knowledge of it can be usefully applied in considering problems of human behavior. That man may have an optimal way of eating, conditioned by his evolution, will not come as a surprise to HBDers. In fact, my own awakening to low-carb/paleo eating came with reading Loren Cordain's The Paleo Diet, whose subtitle says it all: "Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat". Even if not correct in every detail - and no doubt there will be much more to discover in this area - it's one of those books which make one think, like Huxley, that one must have been stupid not to have thought of that.

Skepticism: HBDers are by nature and definition skeptics. Just as the mainstream of liberal creationists denies human biodiversity and promotes government-backed special creation, so do mainstream medicine and science deny that evolution might be important in relation to our food and promote the government-backed low-fat dogma. HBDers try to see through the clouds of obfuscation thrown up by those with vested interests, whether it's race hustlers and liberals or tenured professors and Big Pharma.

Search for truth: Those knowledgeable about race realism and HBD have had to seek out this knowledge, as it isn't exactly on the front page of the New York Times. They probably have a greater appetite for truth than the average bear, who usually only like to have their opinions confirmed. So they seek out other areas where the truth may be more or less hidden or undiscovered, nutrition being one of these areas.

Masculinity: Most HBD types are men and are therefore more objective and less prone to frivolity. Eating meat appeals to men more than women as well. Think about the sexual division of labor in barbecuing.

Religion: Most HBD types are probably not very religious to say the least. The modern low-fat dogma contains many religious elements, notably asceticism, which in the nutritional version exhorts us to deny ourselves. Deny yourself that delicious, saturated-fat laden meat and eat carrots, it's good for your soul, says the dogma. Eating meat, it also says, is bad for the planet, and Gaia must be propitiated. Even if one doesn't see right through the religious elements of modern dietary asceticism, they will certainly have little appeal to one more inclined to pleasure than denial.

Saturated fat intake and heart disease

Here are two charts showing the relation between dietary saturated fat in European nations and their corresponding level of coronary heart disease. The chart on the right gives correlations based on various confidence intervals. Both come from Free the Animal.

Saturated fat appears to be very good for your heart. This data came up in the context of a guest post by Dr. Michael Eades at Tim Ferriss's blog in which he recommends more saturated fat in the diet. Ferriss's readers were for the most part incredulous, having been well-schooled in contemporary low-fat propaganda.

A Crisis of Epic Proportions

The price of gold just achieved its first ever weekly close of over $1,000 an ounce. Since the price of gold correlates with distrust of the government's fiat currency, gold's price is telling us that investors are worried and believe that the government will continue in its determination to debase the currency by printing money. Even Alan Greenspan, printer of dollars extraordinaire, knows this:

Gold prices that jumped above $1,000 an ounce this week are signaling that investors are buying metals to hedge against declines in currencies, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said.

The gains are “strictly a monetary phenomenon,” Greenspan said today at an investment conference in New York. Rising prices of precious metals and other commodities are “an indication of a very early stage of an endeavor to move away from paper currencies,” he said. [...]

“What is fascinating is the extent to which gold still holds reign over the financial system as the ultimate source of payment,” Greenspan said.

According to Professor Antal Fekete:

Historically, every regime of irredeemable currency has met its Nemesis in no more than 18 years. The present experiment with irredeemable currency has been going on for twice that long. Of course, gold futures trading is a relatively new invention that was not available to the managers of the assignats, mandats, or the Reichsmarks. Nor was it available to the managers of the most recent experiment with the Zimbabwe dollar. But, as the relentless fall in the gold basis clearly shows, people cannot be conned forever. The clock is ticking. Sand in the hourglass keeps dropping. When it runs out, the present experiment with fiat dollar will also meet its Nemesis, as all the earlier experiments have.Source, pdf.)

The crisis I have in mind isn't just about the price of gold, which is merely a symptom. The government, in thrall to the banks as well as to the system which buys votes through handouts, just can't help itself when it comes to printing money. Just as the prudent will be paying for the profligacy of deadbeats, so the debasement of the dollar comes at the expense of those who saved, invested, and took on little or no debt.

The image above shows the putative flow of capital during a systemic crisis, moving from least to most liquidity and safety. Gold requires no counter-party, unlike every other financial instrument, including cash, which requires that one trust the federal government to keep their end of the deal.

The price of gold is telling us that lots of investors have begun to buckle their seat belts in anticipation of what is to come.

IQ and Conscientiousness: Gifts or Virtues?

Bruce G. Charlton argues that our common moral views of intelligence and the personality factor known as conscientiousness require some revision, namely that intelligence should be evaluated more as a virtue than it currently is, and conscientiousness as less of one.

The psychological attributes of intelligence and personality are usually seen as being quite distinct in nature: higher intelligence being regarded a ‘gift’ (bestowed mostly by heredity); while personality or ‘character’ is morally evaluated by others, on the assumption that it is mostly a consequence of choice? So a teacher is more likely to praise a child for their ["their"?... tsk, tsk, Dr. Charlton - ed.] highly Conscientious personality (high ‘C’) – an ability to take the long view, work hard with self-discipline and persevere in the face of difficulty – than for possessing high IQ. Even in science, where high intelligence is greatly valued, it is seen as being more virtuous to be a reliable and steady worker. Yet it is probable that both IQ and personality traits (such as high-C) are about-equally inherited ‘gifts’ (heritability of both likely to be in excess of 0.5). Rankings of both IQ and C are generally stable throughout life (although absolute levels of both will typically increase throughout the lifespan, with IQ peaking in late-teens and C probably peaking in middle age). Furthermore, high IQ is not just an ability to be used only as required; higher IQ also carries various behavioural predispositions – as reflected in the positive correlation with the personality trait of Openness to Experience; and characteristically ‘left-wing’ or ‘enlightened’ socio-political values among high IQ individuals. However, IQ is ‘effortless’ while high-C emerges mainly in tough situations where exceptional effort is required. So we probably tend to regard personality in moral terms because this fits with a social system that provides incentives for virtuous behaviour (including Conscientiousness). In conclusion, high IQ should probably more often be regarded in morally evaluative terms because it is associated with behavioural predispositions; while C should probably be interpreted with more emphasis on its being a gift or natural ability. In particular, people with high levels of C are very lucky in modern societies, since they are usually well-rewarded for this aptitude. This includes science, where it seems that C has been selected-for more rigorously than IQ. Indeed, those ‘gifted’ with high Conscientiousness are in some ways even luckier than the very intelligent – because there are more jobs for reliable and hard-working people (even if they are relatively ‘dumb’) than for smart people with undependable personalities.

Makes lots of sense. Regarding how psychological attributes "are usually seen", that is "higher intelligence being regarded a ‘gift’ (bestowed mostly by heredity)", I'd say that this assumes a much greater awareness of the importance of heredity and HBD than truly is the case among, say, teachers. Current dogma has it that IQ is malleable through more education or the reading of books, and perhaps Charlton has spent so much time amidst the Steveosphere that he's forgotten that the heritability of IQ is a fact that the mainstream keeps suppressed as much as possible. Years ago, Linda Gottfredson and colleagues published a statement in the WSJ, Mainstream Science on Intelligence (pdf) in which they pointed out that science and mainstream opinion differ dramatically in their views on IQ. In my experience, ordinary people do in fact praise high intelligence as a virtue, as they to a large extent believe that buckling down to an education made the intelligent what they are.

As for conscientiousness, the notion that it contains a highly heritable component is, as far as I know, quite new, and if true - as it seems to be - quite startling. The idea that future time orientation greatly affects life prospects is well known, at least in this corner of the blogosphere, but that conscientiousness, from which future time orientation (or its inverse, time preference) comes, is 50% or greater heritable, not so much. (I would think.) That would mean that life prospects are even more set in stone than would be the case were IQ alone to be considered. According to Dr. Charlton's thesis set out above, conscientiousness indeed should be evaluated less in moral terms; the high achievers in life just can't help it.

Addendum: Over the past few weeks I've had lots of new readers coming to this site, so for those who aren't familar with Bruce G. Charlton, I recommend reading his book, Psychiatry and the Human Condition, available in its entirety at the link, and which was discussed here in the post Why We're Unhappy: The Truth of the Noble Savage?

Debtors' Revolt, or Deadbeats' Revolt?

A video making the rounds has led some commentators, for example at Naked Capitalism and Karl Denninger to speak of a "debtors' revolt". In the video, an ordinary middle class sort of woman tells the story of her long business relationship with Bank of America, how the bank raised ("jacked up") her credit card rate to 30%, and that she has decided not to pay them any more. She says that she has always paid her bills and that, even though she's laid off, she can make ends meet. It's the interest rate that has her blood boiling.

In my humble opinion, she should have paid much closer attention to the fine print on her credit account. The bank is doing nothing illegal by raising her rates. That banks have benefited from a taxpayer bailout isn't relevant.

Many of those who bought residential real estate at the top of the market and are now underwater have stopped paying their mortgages, and banks seemingly take forever to foreclose and repossess. Many anecdotal reports indicate that lots of people are sitting in houses on which they haven't paid the mortgage in over a year. No doubt they're feeling justified in doing so, and in fact that's the correct decision from a business or investment standpoint.

But the fact remains that many or most of those who made very bad decisions over the past 5 to 10 years won't face anything much in the way of consequences for their decisions, other than perhaps a bad credit report, which can be repaired over time and which doesn't seem too relevant these days anyway.

Those who have been prudent all along are the ones being punished: paying for all the profligacy with our taxes and watching the dollar being debased.

The deadbeats, whether they're on Wall Street or Main Street, are exploiting the rest of us.

Highest-earning college majors nearly all male fields

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more.

(Source.)

The chart doesn't lie: all the college degrees that produce the highest-earning graduates form practically an all-male bastion. Despite so many women going to college to study anthropology or "communications", you can't fool Mother Nature: the majors the ladies love are just unwanted by the real world. If you go further down the list (at the link), you'll see things like the "fact" that an Art History major makes over $36,000 to start, but that's highly misleading: the numbers come from a poll of those actually working in each field; there's no indication whether most of the graduates who have studied a given major will even be able to land a job, and you can bet that those top ten majors have a much higher percentage, possibly approaching 100%, of graduates who actually get jobs. In the current climate, an Art History degree, obtained through college loans, looks like a ticket to the poorhouse.

Charles Murray recently wrote:

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges.

And those students who, according to Murray, shouldn't be in college, are decidedly not studying chemical engineering. (This, by the way, shows some of the real world consequences of HBD ignorance; not everyone is either smart enough or man enough for college, yet we as a nation just pretend otherwise.)

The government continues to throw money at universities and their students; just as the consequences of cheap money for real estate caused the bubble and its subsequent bursting, so in the present case we've got an education bubble, one the country and its citizens can not afford. Bring on the burst. As a welcome consequence of a burst, some of the most pernicious institutions in American society will lose power, along with their power to indoctrinate.

See also Rolfe Winkler's Extra credit could bankrupt students, in which he pours cold water on the notion that a college degree is a magical ticket to advancement:

A common misconception is that a college degree is worth a million dollars over the average working lifetime. But a paper published late last year by the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges pegs the value at close to a tenth of that, $121,539. [...]

In the long run this will be very destructive for the economy. Those who need to buy assets are being forced to pay prices that are artificially inflated because the government is providing too much credit to finance the purchase. The price isn’t being allowed to fall, so buyers who don’t have oodles of cash lying around are forced to pile on the debt.

The government should get out of the way and let the price of college fall. If it doesn’t, many who would otherwise want to buy a college education will refuse as the costs race ahead of the benefits.

Roissyism refuted?

Audacious Epigone, in a comment here, expressed considerable doubt whether "HBD realists" and game advocates are correct in their thesis that the sexual landscape has changed.

It is silly that self-described HBD realists so easily dismiss hundreds of thousands of years of human sexual selection--that is, the refined ability to detect what is a genuine fitness indicator and what are fraudulent attempts at self-ornamentation--insisting that role-playing an unnatural personality is going to be a major game changer. [...]

Male or female, black, white, Asian, or other, the more sexually promiscuous a person is, the fewer children that person has. Monogamy has been progressively selected for among humans probably since we split from chimpanzees (which are far, far more promiscuous than any contemporary human society is, including urban gang-bangers) and the data suggest pretty clearly that it continues to be the case.

He links to a post by Agnostic at Gene Expression, Your generation was sluttier, which attempts to demonstrate that sexual promiscuity among young people has been decreasing.

Agnostic's post may or may not do what he says it does, but the real thesis behind game isn't necessarily that women are "sluttier", it's who they sleep with. That 20% of the men get 80% of the sex (or some such figure) isn't dependent on an alleged decrease in sexual activity, and in any case, the data used to show this shows that the percentage of high school students who have had sex with 4 or more partners declined from 18.7% to 14.9% from 1991 to 2007, a decrease of about 20% in 16 years, hardly anything to get too excited about. However, the rate from 2001 to 2007 has increased some 5%. In any case, discussion of the current sexual landscape isn't really about high school students, it's about the behavior of all men and women. That the divorce rate has rocketed from the 60s until now, and that women initiate up to 75% of divorces, would seem to be facts of great importance.

AE claims that "the more sexually promiscuous a person is, the fewer children that person has", and that this is relevant to a refutation of Roissyism. But I don't see how it's at all relevant. Sure, maybe in a few generations, whatever genetic tendency toward mating with alphas will be more or less bred out of the population, but we're talking about the situation on the ground right now. AE also claims that "monogamy has been progressively selected for among humans", which I don't see at all. The existence of polygamous societies, many of which endured for a long time, many of which still exist, means that even were humans somehow adapted to monogamy, people and societies can buck the evolutionary trend for a good long time. Besides, during most of history, a woman's choice of mate was constrained by family or wealth, and undoubtedly many women found themselves in polygamous relationships without having explicitly chosen them. AE's post on the topic claims that women have fewer children the more promiscuous they are, but says nothing about men, which is the issue here. I don't know the data, but I'd be surprised if men with a greater number of sexual partners didn't have more children. And in any case, that's not needed to show that Roissyism, which claims that women are forsaking betas for alphas, is correct.

Addendum: If I'm not mistaken (I don't have the time to look for the source at the moment), around 80% of women reproduce during their lifetimes, the corresponding figure for men being under half, historically speaking.

China encourages its citizens to buy gold and silver

The Chinese government has recently started to promote the ownership of gold and silver to its citizens, including through TV ads. (Watch this clip from a Chinese newscast.) While this development has implications for investors (for example), more interesting is what this says about differing attitudes toward money in China versus the U.S.

China can see the writing on the wall: the United States is currently in the process of massively debasing the dollar. Since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and since the Chinese currently hold more than $700 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds - with Japan holding another $700 billion - they would like to protect their hard-won wealth. If When the dollar tanks, the Chinese bond holdings will be at risk, and gold and other precious metals will soar in value. The Chinese aren't stupid; they're tired of financing American deficits and can see that there's no end in sight to them.

Compare what we've been doing in this once-great nation: printing money, encouraging citizens to borrow more (e.g., Cash for Clunkers, the $8,000 housing credit). Our dear leader wants to socialize health care at a cost of trillions of dollars. The Fed is taking worthless assets from the banks as collateral.

Instead of forcing the trillions in worthless debt out into the open, instead of liquidating it, the government wants even more debt, and is prepared to thoroughly debase the dollar to do so.

The Japanese recently elected a new party into power for the first time since 1955, and this party is making noises about selling their treasuries too. It looks as if the world is starting to see our government as cut from the same mold as Madoff, and are determined not to be had like Madoff's clients were.

If the U.S. had a responsible government, it would be encouraging its citizens to be prudent, like the Chinese government is doing. Instead, it's spend, spend, spend, have no thought for the morrow, and God will provide.

Which seems a pretty risky, not to mention dumb, strategy to me.

Baltic Beauties and Sociosexuality

Sociosexuality is a measure of differences in relative mating strategies: a low score on the Sociosexuality Orientation Inventory (SOI) signifies a relatively restricted mating strategy, i.e. more monogamous; a higher score means relatively unrestricted, or more promiscuous. (See this paper (pdf) for details.)

Here's how sociosexuality scores correlate with sex ratios (ratio of males to females in a population):



As can be seen, the Baltic nations are all in the upper left of the graph, with a low sex ratio and high SOI, and in the lower right are Asian countries, with high sex ratio and low SOI.

So here's an explanation for the abundance of beautiful women in the Baltics: a low sex ratio means that women face stiff competition for the available men, and therefore attempt to appear more physically attractive, i.e. they put more effort into looking the way a man wants a woman to look. When I was in Ukraine, I was stunned by the number of incredibly beautiful women, and while they may very well have a genetic advantage in beauty, that the women took great pains with their appearance was obvious. Most women wouldn't consider leaving the house unless wearing a dress or skirt and heels. (This was in the early 90s, so things may have changed in that regard, though Ukrainian women still have quite the reputation for beauty.)

This explanation doesn't necessarily clash with the notion, often posited in the blogosphere, that women in Eastern Europe and Russia gained a beauty advantage due to the numbers of men killed in wars and by the state, the remaining men having their pick of the most beautiful women with whom to mate, thus producing more beautiful offspring. Both processes are probably at work.

Contrast with the fact that lesbians are twice as likely to be overweight or obese than straight women. It looks like the same principle is at work: lesbians don't need to satisfy male standards of beauty, and women, lesbians target demographic, are much less oriented toward physical appearance in sexual attraction. On the other hand, lesbians have higher incomes than straight women, are better educated, and even appear to own laptops at twice the level of straights, all of which could mean that lesbians seek to appeal to female standards of sexual attractiveness, which values high status.