FAMILY SIZE AND CONSERVATISM

Steve Sailer has an article up at the moment which is getting a lot of attention. He shows an extraordinarily high correlation between birth-rate and voting for GWB. States with high birth-rates were almost all "red" and states with low birthrates were almost all "blue".

I am afraid that I have to issue a warning about what statisticians call "ecological" correlations, however -- and that's nothing to do with Greenies, surprisingly. Ecological correlations are correlations based on grouped data and grouping people only on the basis of the state they live in is very coarse grouping indeed. Such correlations are not comparable to correlations between individuals, allow no direct inferences about correlations among individuals and are commonly higher than correlations betweeen individuals. I say a bit more about them in the course of one of my academic articles here. So the correlations are a little less startling than Steve seems to think.

With all that statistician's caution out of the way, however, my best guess is that the results reflect failure to have children at all rather than family size per se. I think average birthrate is low in the blue states not necessarily because families are smaller there but because families with children are fewer. Lots of intellectual ladies never have children at all. I should know. I married two such women. My son comes from a third marriage to an intelligent but non-intellectual woman. And the low birthrate among highly educated people has long been a subject of much comment and heartburn anyway.

Why highly educated people tend Left is a subject I cover at some length here.

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ELSEWHERE

A quite hilarious but very popular post among Leftists at the moment is this one. Now that I have had time to stop laughing, I will tell you what it says. It says that George Bush is like an abusive husband towards all those poor 56 million who voted against him! I kid you not. I don't think even Einstein could work out how George Bush stands in anything like a husband relationship to the gang of special interest groups who tried to oust him but apparently the analogy makes lots of sense to lots of Leftists. I could go on but what's the point....

David Boxenhorn thinks he has discovered a conservative streak in Paul Krugman. I think he is wrong. Krugman is a plainly off his head when it comes to politics, but as far as economics goes, he is mainstream -- which SOUNDS conservative only because it is mainly conservatives who take much notice of economic rationality. Leftists tend to believe in all sorts of economically irrational things such as price controls, punitive taxation, protectionism etc. David also thinks Krugman's criticism of complex explanations is conservative. I think the reverse is the truth. Leftists are simplistic thinkers. Can you get any more simplistic than the core Leftist doctrine of "All men are equal"? So Krugman's rejection of complexity is perfectly Leftist. Where David might have a point is that Krugman does appear to criticize innovation for innovation's sake and says that older explanations are the best. I think that this is specifically a criticism of the economic modellers, however. And I don't think you have to be a conservative to be aware that mathematical models are mostly just a pretentious form of guessing.

Well, there seems to be one Democrat columnist who thinks that George Lakoff (See my post of November 24th) is the goods. She thinks that the donks should abandon moves towards the middle ground and just assert their own values. I hope they take her advice. It would be interesting to see how low the donk vote could go.

First class economic growth continues: "The US economy - helped out by more brisk consumer and business spending - grew at an annual rate of 3.9 per cent in the third quarter, a performance that was stronger than previously thought."

Reliapundit says that Leftists attack conservative blacks so furiously because Leftists explain everything by what group a person belongs to. So people who don't fit the group that they are in upset the Left's entire explanatory scheme.

Bob Hayes makes the undeniable point that all political parties are supported by particular interest groups. He says however that the Democrats have far more interest groups to please than the GOP does. So you have to accept an awful lot of strange stuff to support the donks. He says the GOP is much less demanding and more tolerant -- making support for the GOP a lot easier. I think there is a lot in what he says. Conservatives certainly seem a lot more laid back and less fanatical than the Left are.

"Lawyers Against the War": "This group claims to be "a Canada-based committee of jurists and others with members in thirteen countries" and is demanding that the government of Canada refuse George Bush admission to this country on the basis of his being accused of crimes against humanity. There is no mention of who actually filed the charges against Bush or where. hey write, "The evidence of President Bush's past and ongoing criminality is overwhelming. A recent editorial in the Washington Post commented on some of the now well known facts..." According to these two brilliant jurists, if the Washington Post or any of the other liberal media write that someone is guilty of war crimes, then it must be true. As such ban Bush from Canada. End of Story. Oh and let's lock up anyone who supports him, as well.... Prof. Mandel's letter is indicative to what lengths left wingnuts will go in efforts to get their way. They will threaten the Prime Minister with the possibility of jail. They will threaten the press with the possibility of jail. They will do anything necessary by whatever means to achieve their goals.

Drug companies are a favourite Leftist whipping-boy. The Leftist alternative to drug companies is truly moronic, though. They argue that we would be all better off if pharmaceutical research and development were taken over by the government, or if we at least put in national price controls to keep prices down. I wonder if they know how many new drugs countries with price controls like Canada put on the market each year. The answer is none. Price controls or nationalization of the industry would be equivalent to morphing the current energetic, innovative, productive private-sector drug industry (think FedEx) into the Rx equivalent of the U.S. Post Office."

Did the homosexual "marriage" issue help Bush? "In states that voted on the gay-marriage ban, Bush increased his vote share from 53.33% in the 2000 election to 54.17% in the election just past. That's an increase of 0.84%. In states where gay-marriage bans were not on the ballot, Bush increased his vote share from 48.82% to 50.78%. That's an increase of 1.96%. Bush's vote share rose more than twice as much in states where voters didn't have a chance to ban gay marriages. The evidence suggested that the gay marriage measures actually hurt Bush -- and hurt him substantially. And this makes a lot of sense, if you think about it."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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