Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde "super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids. . . . William Bennett, the former drug czar . . . wrote a 1996 book with DiIulio on the topic, titled "Body Count," which attributed the problem to moral decay. . . . It never happened. . . . Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. . . .

[Why?]

Probably more important than tighter school security . . . were these factors:

In the decade of economic expansion that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at full-time jobs dropped by nearly a third. . . . Prosperity . . . gave teens more and better options to crime. . . .

The Latino population in central cities swelled as teen crime declined. . . . Their influx . . . brought more intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation - and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated. "Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other than the street." . . .

Criminologists decided in the `90s to track what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps didn't work. . . . Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents worked better than lock-ups if foster parents were well trained and the goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents. Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't work. . . . They found that if one parent is strong and consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing delinquency.

The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000 adults to 4 from the `80s to today, and it has many foes. But . . . jailing more adults sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult accomplices.

Economist Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed but isn't as big a factor
as Levitt argues.

From here.

These gems come from a blog associated with The Atlantic magazine, linked to at Enik Rising.

It ties into a Denver Post rehash of a local think tank report on population growth in Denver neighborhoods that I saw today. Three of the top five: Green Valley Ranch, Stapleton, and Lowry, are unsurprising. They are neighborhoods that were previously uninhabited that have seen major residential development in recent years.

The other two, Five Points and Montbello, are cases that fit the dynamic described above in which neighborhoods that used to be predominantly black ghettos with dire poverty that have seen major influxes of Hispanics, as well as others, in a combination of ethnic shifts and gentrification as many black residents of these neighborhoods have moved to suburbs or to central city suburban style neighborhoods like multi-ethnic Green Valley Ranch.

Another place in the metro area that has seen a similar and rapid demographic shift is Old Town Aurora, once a center of blacks and lower income Korean immigrants, that is now increasingly Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Denver Post also announced the inauguration of a major overhaul of eleven Northeast Denver schools, a move that has been heralded as positive by some, while arousing extreme controversy, skepticism and complaints about insufficient community consultation from others. FWIW, I haven't followed the overhaul efforts closely and don't have a strong opinion on their merits as a result.

Aurora, also perhaps not coincidentally, has also recently announced a major urban effort directed at the area between Stapleton and Old Town Aurora, although it has been overshadowed by a bid by Aurora to develop a complex that would compete heavily with the convention center complex in downtown Denver.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but, in each case, major governmental initiatives to improve city services in metro Denver neighborhoods have coincided with declining African American populations in those neighborhoods.

Certainly, nothing as crude as Jim Crow racism as it work in Denver, that just elected a second African-American mayor despite having a fairly modest African-American population percentage for a major American central city (Hancock this time around, Webb the last time around), or in Colorado, which recently had an African-American state house speaker (Terrance Carroll). Nor does metro Denver as a whole want for predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that have been sorely neglected in the government services department. The cause and effect relationships here are more subtle and are not simple examples of racial or ethnic favoritism.

Northeast Denver, for example, has changed due to efforts like the Ballpark Neighborhood gentrification, the transformation of "North Capital Hill" into "Uptown" and the impact of the Stapleton and Lowry developments which sent middle class traffic through these formerly low income predominantly black neighborhoods and called attention to their potential to provide short commutes to downtown.

The housing bubble opened up a lot of affordable, quality suburban homes to people from Denver including families in Northeast Denver that have not been tainted by generations of covert and overt racial discrimination in the housing market that reached a critical mass that became self-sustaining where it has established itself.

Rising real estate values in Denver from a bubble collapsed low point in 1983 until an earlier than the rest of the nation slump, particularly in central Denver, transferred considerable wealth to inner city home owners.

As post from The Atlantic article that led me to the teen crime story that I quoted observed, underclass predominantly black dysfunctional ghettos are nothing to be nostalgic for, even if one is firmly committed to improving the well being of the people who lived in those communities a few decades ago and their children. The transformation of these dysfunctional neighborhoods wasn't a punishment inflicted on its residents; it was a reflection of the fact that the people who lived there have mostly found better alternatives and moved on when barriers to their exit from those neighborhoods became less steep. The neighborhoods weren't bad because they were non-white, they were bad because they had high crime, high truancy, governmental underinvestment, high teen pregnancy, few viable businesses, and high unemployment that had deep and obvious causes in American history.

Improving neighborhood well being makes neighborhoods tolerable to people who have any choice at all about where they live and has led to rapid population growth in these neighborhoods. Creating demand for housing in these neighborhoods boosts property values and makes life more tolerable for those who continue to live there. Even renters who are forced to leave due to rising rents in these neighborhoods spur the construction of newer and better rental housing in the metro area that if often better than what they left behind. The line between someone who is a slum lord who has received a windfall from the changes in these neighborhoods and someone who is a civic minded booster of a neighborhood is often a thin one.

Capitalism may not always seek out hard case situations to invest in for the long run, but it doesn't follow that it profits from large scale systemic socio-economic misery either. It encourages profitable mutual growth, it just sometimes has a hard time getting the ball rolling because not enough people have enough vision to bring the needed investment and suspicion abounds because it is hard to tell who gains and loses from the changes in advance. But, when your current neighborhood is one of the least desirable in the metro area, as was the case for a significant share of Northeast Denver in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it is hard for change, either to the neighborhood or for those who end up leaving the neighborhood as a result, to be a terrible thing or a case of downward mobility.

READ MORE - Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

The More Things Change . . .

Once upon a time, before I was born, the regressive wing of American politics was the province of Southern Democrats called Dixiecrats. Now, realignment is complete and the radical right Tea Party delegation in the U.S. Congress, a faction in the Republican, comes about two-thirds from the American South that accounts for about a quarter of the U.S. population (and the Tea Party is not getting any significant share of the black vote despite the fact that the South has a larger black population than any other region in the U.S. by a large margin), while only one hails from the Northeast. It is dominated by the same demographics that used to elect Dixiecrats. They are just as pernicious as they were before they rebranded and changed parties.

READ MORE - The More Things Change . . .

Overall new U.S. HIV cases stable

The most recent report from U.S. government health officials reports that 50,000 new HIV cases were diagnosed in the most recent year, stable compared to four years ago overall. About two-thirds were men who have had sex with men, about 9% were IV drug users, the rest were classified heterosexual cases, something fairly typical of prior years.

Cases were up for adult men who have had sex with men and are under thirty years old, including an increase of 48% for black men in that category compared to just four years ago, and since the overall numbers were down, presumably down in many other demographics compared to four years ago.

The media has reported the 48% increase for black men who have had sex with men and are under thirty years old as "gay men." But, I suspect that a significant share of those cases reflects men who were raped by other men, probably mostly in prison. Why? The numbers are much larger relative to the size of the population involved than in other demographics and following completely different trendlines. There is no particularly good reason to think that the black men are that much more likely to be gay than other men. While it wouldn't be surprising if the unsafe practices rate for gay black men engaged in consentual sex outside prison was higher in black men than for other men, the differences in rates of HIV infection and other serious STDs is so much higher in young black men than in demographics with much lower incarceration rates. There may be racial divides in the 2010s gay social scene, just as there are in other parts of American life, but the numerical gap is what you would expect if Jim Crow were still in full force in America; while my perhaps naiive take is that young gay men are no more segregated by race, and perhaps a bit less so, than other American demographics. Also, the numbers seem to suggest that significantly more black women receive HIV from black men who have had sex with men than in other demographics, which would suggest, at a minimum a larger share of men who have had sex with men who also have sex with women in this demographic than other demographics. If would take only something on the order of 0.5%-2% of the black male prison population to have new HIV infections each year to account for the discrepency, which would not be out of line with these cases making up a minority share of all estimated for prison rapes of black men each year. An indepth analysis post from 2005 on the subject at this blog is here and there have been several posts in between.

However, my conclusions are based only on numbers and I haven't seen an in depth non-statistical analysis, despite its importance from a public health perspective. For example, focusing public information campaigns on bars frequented by young middle class African American gay men is not going to solve the problem if most of the new cases are coming of young African American men who have had sex with men are coming from prison rapes (or, for that matter consentual sex in a prison environment by gay men who don't have access to basics like condoms and have a limited choice of partners).

The good news, however, is that people who are infected with HIV are living about twice as long and at greater levels of health as they did when the outbreak started, roughly twenty years instead of ten, in round numbers, mostly due to new drugs, but perhaps to some small extent also because most new infectious diseases grow less virulent in subsequent epidemic waves because the most virulent strains tend to die out with the people who are infected while having caused fewer new cases in the meantime.

READ MORE - Overall new U.S. HIV cases stable

An uneven wealth recovery

The wealth gap between whites and minorities widened during the financial crisis, quite the opposite of what many people, including me, had expected. Why?

The financial crisis was preceded by and largely caused by some regional housing bubbles (mostly in states that had mortgages perceived as non-recourse (California and Florida) or housing markets driven by investment from those states (Arizona, Nevada)). Measures of economical fundamentals in the housing market, like inflation adjusted housing prices and price to rent ratios have now returned to pre-bubble levels. So the wealth created by housing appreciation in regional housing bubble markets is gone and mostly likely gone for good. These regions are disproportionately Hispanic (wealth down about 66%) and Asian (wealth down about 50%).

The financial markets, meanwhile, which crashed on the housing bust, have largely recovered, because the financial markets weren't in nearly as much as a bubble as non-financial markets. Those assets are owned disproportionately by whites (wealth down about 16%).

I'm still surprised. While these results make sense for working class to upper middle class families, I'm surprised that the blows suffered by the upper class, who are disproportionately investing in investments like subordinated bonds and investment bank shares that were crushed in the financial crisis and have not recovered, and by stock options, which also seem not to have recovered, somehow weathered the financial crisis with surprisingly little long term harm to their net worth. Perhaps their investments in hedge funds, which did worse than billed but better than almost anything else in the financial markets, helped.

READ MORE - An uneven wealth recovery

GOP Getting More White, Democratic Party, Less So

Race has come to be a bigger factor in party identification from 2008 to 2011.

Whites have become more likely to ID as Republican. A majority of whites in every adult age group, and every income group of $30,000 per year+ is majority Republican. Low incomer income whites are still more likely to identify as Republican than Democratic, and have seen GOP party ID leap by ten percentage points in three years. GOP identification has also risen by ten percentage points among whites aged 18-29. Overall 52% of whites are Republicans and 39% are Democrats now. GOP identification rates are increasingly similar across all ages and income groups for whites.

There was a small increase in black GOP identification (from 6% to 8%), but that may be simply a statistical blip that is a produce of modest sample sizes; 86% of blacks identify politically as Democrats. Also, the two percentage point gain in blacks is still smaller in percentage point terms than the four percentage point gain for the overall population for Republicans: voters overall are 43% Republican and 47% Democratic in their political identity.

Republican identification among Hispanics has dropped six percentage points to 22% Republican and 64% Democratic. (The numbers don't total to 100% because one can be independent or affiliate with a third party.) The situation with Hispanics is really more complicated than it appears because on important Hispanic subgroup, Cuban-Americans, which is significant mostly in Florida, accounts for a disproportionate share of Hispanic Republicans.

This source doesn't have a regional breakdown. My suspicion is that Southern whites are Republicans at much higher rates than other whites. It may be the by far dominant party for Southern whites who are also more likely to vote the party line, while whites outside the South may be fairly evenly split between the political parties and less reliable in voting for their political party.

The apparent shift in party ID may mostly be a product of conservative white Democrats in the South (Dixiecrats) either dying, becoming Republicans (perhaps in response to President Obama's Presidency) or aging out of younger age brackets, while their children and grandchildren identify as Republicans from the start. In other words, it may be just one more manifestation of the continuing process of "realignment" in which the Democratic party becomes more purely politically liberal, and the Republican party becomes more purely politically conservative, rather than a shift in political opinion by race.

In terms of brand identification, realignment is great. It is easier than every to know what each party stands for and inform one's vote accordingly. But, since elected officials run on major party tickets, it may be harder than it used to be for a political moderate to get elected on either major party ticket. And, an absence of political moderates can produce the political deadlocks we see today.

READ MORE - GOP Getting More White, Democratic Party, Less So

SCOTUS Dislikes Class Actions

Today, a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, held that a sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart on behalf of its 1.5 million female employees could not be certified as a class action lawsuit. (There was wide agreement that the backpay due in the case could not be handled on a class basis, but there was deep dispute over whether the existence of gender discrimination at the company could be litigated in that manner.)

This is the latest of a string of cases that have disfavored class actions, such another this term that held that the right to conduct a class action arbitration could not be implied from a simple arbitration clause and that the fact that an arbitration clause expressly prohibits class actions could never be sufficient to render it unconscionable under a provision of the federal arbitration act that allows arbitration clauses to be invalidated if they would be unconscionable under state law.   The rulings have largely been statutory or based on court rules, thus they are more easily overriden than rulings based on constitutional grounds, but the rulings are colored by a deep distrust of the class action generally.

Concerns about class actions have also been a central to the tort reform movement, and have been an area where the movement has achieved more than one significant victory, by imposing major procedural limitations on securities law class actions, and by giving the federal courts jurisdiction over many class actions arising under state law that would not qualify for diversity jurisdiction.  Today's ruling, interpreting the class action rule in the federal rules of civil procedure, thus, has wider implications for class actions generally, than it would have a couple of decades ago, because more kinds of class action lawsuits are confined to the federal courts.

To some extent, the distate of big businesses for class actions, and plaintiff friendly group's support for them is simply a matter of mathematics.  In a situation where there are many people with small claims against a single business or small group of businesses, large numbers of people with claims will never choose to bring valid lawsuits because the litigation cost economics don't make sense, and except in the very clearest cases, the verdicts will be a mixed bag.  In contrast, a win in a class action will afford a remedy to everyone with a claim (or a proxy for them) and a win on behalf of all claimants is possible even when a win on the liability issue isn't a sure thing in any given isolated case.

There is also considerable controversy over the fact that "coupon settlements" and contributions to non-profit caues often replace money awards as typical class action remedies, that class actions are expensive to litigate and rarely result in a resolution on the merits by a judge, that there are often multiple competing class actions that must be consolidated arising from single incidents, that forum shopping can be especially problematic in these cases, and that the cases can seem to be attorney driven rather than focused on providing a remedy for a client.  The high cost and long litigation times involve in class action litigation don't speak well for a process which was invented to reduce litigation costs and handle numerous related small claims more efficiently than traditional litigation efforts.

On the other hand, class actions can put pressure on big businesses to comply with the law even when the state regulators of an industry are asleep at the switch, underfunded, run by a political appointee hostile to the agency's purpose, or are the victim of capture by the regulated industry.  Class actions can close the gap between the laws on the books regulating an industry or practice,  and the law as actually enforced.  It can function as a remedy to corrupt administration of regulatory laws.  Class actions are also an arguable preferrable way to regulate industries through decisions by private individuals rather than actions by state officials whom many people who are inclined towards libertarian political ideologies may distrust.

In employment cases, the key attraction of a class action is the question of proof.  It may be much easier to establish discrimination on a statistical basis than it is to prove that it was present in an individual case, and it may be easier to fashion an affirmative action remedy in response to statistically proven discrimination than it is to wade through the details of a money damage remedy on a case by case basis.

But, class action cases can appear to grant legislative or regulatory type authority to courts whose procedures are primarily geared towards resolving disputes that involve only narrow disputes between small numbers of people.  This tendency is particularly apparent in false advertising claims where very large numbers of people are exposed to advertising claims and considerably numbers of people may buy products that are falsely advertised, but the individualized consumer harm may be modest.  Negotiations between alleged wrongdoers and alleged victim's representatives may also lead to court sanctioned remedies, such as certain forms of affirmative action, that could never be approved as legislation in the absence of a violation of the law that is never provided on the merits in court.

The trend seems contrary to the trends in our economy, in which big corporations whose mistakes routinely impact large numbers of people in incidents with a common source, rather than isolated incidents of wrongdoing, are increasingly the norm.  If a big money center bank calculated interest rates on loans, or forecloses on houses improperly, it will usually be because some system has gone wrong or some computer program had an incorrect rule, with the error affecting hundreds of thousands of people nationwide, rather than because there was some isolated defect in one customer's particular case.  Serious misrepresentations to consumers in commerce not infrequently involve massive advertising campaigns rather than an isolated vendor and purchasers in an open air marketplace.  Serious discrimination in employment practices frequently flows from bad leadership at the top of an organization that guides subordinate managers, rather than individualized misconduct by low level managers.  In our modern era of quality control systems in manufacturing, systemic defeats in mass manufactured products are more likely to cause harm than isolated duds that aren't successfully removed from the assembly line: most defective products are the result of a design defect, either in the product itself or the manufacturing process.  An inability to remedy systemic wrongdoing by a big business in a collective way is out of step with an economic reality in which a large share of all wrongdoing has a systemic source.  In the long run, it may be more important to the functioning of our economic to solve systemic problems than to remedy the one off screw ups that can never be completely eliminated.

For what it is worth, big government agencies, like the I.R.S., have many of the same weaknesses in offering remedies to systemic errors that put individuals in low stakes cases in bind, that big businesses do.

Some problems in the way that big businesses and big government operate, may be flaws in how they do justice between third parties who deal with them, rather than actually benefitting these entities themselves.  For example, most securities fraud involves cases where a misrepresentation by a business causes a stock price to fail to reflect the truth for some period of time, which benefits some secondary market stockholders to the deteriment of other secondary market stockholders, while having little or no direct economic impact on the company itself and where only a tiny part of the benefit or harm accrues to company insiders.  Often the beneficiaries and victims of the misrepresentation have no knowledge that they are acting in the basis of a misrepresentation until after the harm has been done. 

Yet, if misrepresentations with immense economic consequences for stock traders routinely lead to no repurcussions for the parties who make them, the soundness of our financial system is seriously undermined.  Some of the parties most responsible in fact for the financial crisis, the major credit rating companies, had very little other than their pitiful compared to the amount at stake in the economy fees, in their decisions, and will bear no consequences for their mistakes, and there is a movement in the securities law world to treat accountants the same way.  Yet, if the people whose observations drive the market have little stake in being accurate, the financial markets are certain to repeat its world economy shaking mistakes.  Millions of people are out of work and have been for many, many months, in substantial part because the tiny number of people on Wall Street who determined how creditworthy bond issuers were had an insufficiently compelling incentive to get their decisions right.

Part of the barrier to the problem is that power dynamics and self-interest driven policy stances are often so transparent in the tort reform area and in the area of class action litigation in particular, that it is hard to separate and address sincere and legitimate concerns from merely self-serving ones in the policy arena.  Also complicating the effort to find a fair way to deal with the cases that drive class action litigation is that extremely loose class action standards and substantive law claims that can be brought as class actions in a handful of states like California create extremes of the process that suggest solutions that aren't necessarily appropriate for the more strictly regulated federal courts or courts in states like Colorado where class action litigation isn't nearly so common.

READ MORE - SCOTUS Dislikes Class Actions

Three Hots, A Cot, Medical Care and Safety

One of the foundational ideas of criminal justice is that the threat of incarceration discourages crime because it is worse to be in prison than to not be in prison. For most Americans, this is an accurate statement. For many young black men in the United States, this is a closer call.

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

From Evelyn J. Patterson, "Incarcerating Death: Mortality in U.S. State Correctional Facilities, 1985–1998," Demography, Volume 47, Number 3, August 2010, E-ISSN: 1533-7790 Print ISSN: 0070-3370, DOI: 10.1353/dem.0.0123.

READ MORE - Three Hots, A Cot, Medical Care and Safety

Merit v. Money In College Attendance

At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme. . . . [A]t Amherst. . . 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress. . . . [But] a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students. . . .

[M]any of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all. . . only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores. . . .

[T]op colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. . . .

The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges.

From the New York Times.

Amherst's efforts (which increased financial aid and replaced loans with grants for working class and middle class students) and the fact that even low and middle income students with good grades and standardized test scores have greatly reduced college attendance suggest that the gap in selective college attendance and in college attendance generally is driven to a great extent by financial need, not just the fact that children of smart successful people tend themselves to be smarter than their peers on average.

College campuses would still have student bodies from families that are far more affluent than the population at large even in the absence of alumni preferences in admission and financial need barriers. But, the low rate at which low and medium income families who are academically strongest attend college makes clear that we do not have a meritocracy and are wasting much of our nation's precious academic potential.

These facts drive my inclination to favor heavy funding of scholarships that are based on a mix of financial need and merit, rather than across the board per student subsidies, as an approach for public support of higher education at the state level.

A large share of the benefit of state funding for higher education benefits families that are already very affluent and can afford high tuitions without support from state taxapayers. Also, another large share of state funding for higher education in the form of tuition subsidies is devoted to students whose weak academic preparation for college leaves them unlikely to succeed, and a very large share of these students either swiftly drop out, or have mediocre academic performance and learn little they didn't come into school knowing.

In contrast, working class and middle class students who have the academic ability to prosper in selective institutions of higher education are often pressured by short term financial pressures to forego educations that would help them prosper and improve their socio-economic status, and would help the state and the nation make better use of its available supply of human capital. The evidence that these students would have a high likelihood of graduating, have good academic performance while in school and acquire a lot of genuine increased knowledge in the process, while enhancing their life chances and economic productivity is overwhelming. The evidence that it is financial need that is the main barrier to higher education for these students, much of which is recited above, is also solid. The current system does not provide these students with the level of financial support necessary to be meritocratic.

One of the least painful ways to change this lack of meritocracy would be to concentrate funds currently handed out indiscriminately to lower in state tuition for all at public institutions of higher education to provide grant aid to students with strong academic ability and financial need, rather than using those scarce public funds less efficiency to subsidize students from high income families and students whose marginal academic performance and standardized test scores to date indicate that they are likely to benefit less from higher education.

For example, if subsidies were denied to in state students from the top 25% in affluence in the current student body and from students in the bottom 25% in academic ability (two groups with not all that much overlap in raw number terms), the per student state subsidy for the remaining students could be roughly doubled, greatly increasing the affordability of higher education for academically able students, with no change in overall higher education spending.

This change in policy would probably actually increase the number of degrees awarded by public institutions of higher education, because increased enrollment and graduation rates for academically able students with financial need would probably have more of an effect than the decline in the number of academically marginal students who still manage to graduate and in the number of affluent students who decide not to go to college due to the absence of a state subsidy.

Of course, more funding for higher education may still be necessary. But it may be easier to secure public support for this spending when it is clear that it is being spent only to help those students who have both financial need and strong academic ability, and hence is more likely to produce economic benefits for the society at large.

Also, rather than assuaging our collective consciences by believing that we are doing a favor to academically marginal high school graduates admitted to open enrollment college and community colleges with state subsidies knowing full well that they are very likely to drop out in a year or two, possibly with student loans to pay and no degree to help them pay for those loans, we need to look harder at what kinds of programs and assistance for these kids would be more likely to produce results for them, particularly for those students who aren't inclined to enter military service, which has historically been one of the main American institutions providing a structured start in life to kids who aren't college bound.

READ MORE - Merit v. Money In College Attendance

Policy Beliefs Can Change

When you get immersed in the toil of electoral politics, it is easy to get into the rut of assuming that politics is all about getting people who agree with you to the polls at a higher rate that the people who don't agree with you, and that people's opinions, to the extent that they are based on more than trivial amounts of information, almost never change.

But, in the longer run, that isn't true. While an individual, and even a whole geographic community's place on the political spectrum is very stable over time, in the case of communities, even over more than a century, the location of specific policy stances on that political spectrum can shift dramatically in a couple of a decades or less.

A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. . . Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority. . . . opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

From here.

In New York State, likely voters polled earlier this year supported gay marriage by a 56-37 margin. In New York City suburbs support for legalizing gay marriage is 61-33. Roman Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than members of the population at large, notwithstanding church doctrine to the contrary.

If you told me when I started high school in small town Ohio in the mid-1980s that a majority of Americans would support gay marriage two and a half decades later, I would have thought that you were crazy. When I graduated from high school, only about 11% of those polled thought gay marriage should be legal, while about 72% oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that support for gay marriage back then was that high, I would have guessed that it was in the single digits, and maybe in small town Ohio it was. It is also possibly that the single pre-1994 poll's number was high and was made public at all only because it was a statistical outlier on the high end.

The AIDS epidemic had started to make most people aware that there were actually people who had intimate relationships with members of the same sex voluntarily, but even the notion that someone could actually identify as "gay" or "lesbian" in real life, as opposed to merely as an insulting and inaccurate description of someone, wasn't real clear to me at the time. I had never met anyone who had come out. I hadn't even seen or heard of anyone who had come out on TV, in a movie, on the radio, or in anything that I'd read in print. There were no organizations for gays, lesbians, transgender individuals that I was aware of in my town, and the only one that I was aware of nationally was ACT-UP. I was aware of a couple of same sex adult couples who lived together as a household, one of which involved an extended family member, but it had never occurred to me that a household like that would be anything other than platonic, and nobody in those households ever said a thing that suggested that more legal rights were necessary for them.

Since then, the trendline has been more or less steady and shows no sign of reversing. Nate Silver notes in the linked article that "If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012." Even if the growth in support reverts to the overall trend line, there will be a pretty safe majority that favors legalizing gay marriage by then, and some states will be ahead of that trend while others will be behind it.

Popular understanding of sexual orientation and gender identification has expanded dramatically in a quarter of a century. By the time I finished high school, I learned that there were at least a few people in my community who self-identified as gay or lesbian (I would not meet anyone who had a transgender identity until after I finished college). Oberlin, where I went to college, was a mecca for gay and lesbian students, who were often active in campus politics, were deeply involved in running one of the major social events of the year on campus (the drag ball), and made it a point to be out of the closet in daily life in class and around campus. A large share of our student body came from New York City and some students personally knew people who had participated in the Stonewall Riots.

But, while college changed my views, this took much longer for the rest of the nation. More than one book has recounted what happened in the years that followed, but my point is not to illustrate how this happened. My point is to note that it did.

Even a decade ago, even among liberal minded people and many people in the gay and lesbian community, some form of civil unions seemed possible and desirable, but gay marriage seemed like a remote possibility that might never happen anywhere in anything but the distant future (where author Kate Elliott, who I whose science fiction Jaran novels I was reading in the late 1990s had put a society that had gay marriage). It was a little hard to determine at that point what gay marriage would even mean at a practical level, because not a lot of attention had been given to the question by people in a position to know the answers.

Now, there are thousands of same sex legally marriage couples in the United States and more in Europe. Colorado doesn't legally recognize same sex marriage and doesn't even have a civil unions law (one was narrowly defeated in this year's session of the Colorado General Assembly). But, it does have a lot of same sex couples who view each other as spouses, who hold themselves out to the public as spouses, who live as a household and who raise children together. They are parents of children who go to school with my children. They are teachers. They are nurses. Their families are my neighbors. Those couples are my clients in large numbers.

It has become obvious to a large share of the population through countless examples that someone can be gay or lesbian as a matter of personal identity, and that a person's sexual orientation is a stable part of who someone is as a person that someone is generally aware of to some extent, even if they may not fully understand their feelings in some social contexts or may be confused at times, for most, if not all, of their lives. (And, who doesn't, at some point in life, find their potential romantic relationships to be confusing?)

It has become clear as well that gay marriage doesn't have negative externalities. It doesn't weaken the institution of marriage for opposite sex couples. It helps many children and harms none. It imparts dignity without taking it away from anyone.

There are still plenty of people in the world who still insist that same sex loves are sinful based on epistles written by John the Gospel writer a couple of thousand years ago, and stories and laws written by Jewish priests centuries before then. But, those scripturally motivated views don't last long in the face of encounters with real life friends, neighbors and colleagues. They don't have much credibility with young people, even those who are evangelical Christians who have grown up in a world that has allowed them to see gays and lesbians and transgender individuals living ordinary (and extraordinary) lives like anyone else.

Decisions from courts and politicians, like the recent Congressional repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military and the President's decision not to defend in court the part of the Defense of Marriage Act applicable to the federal government have provided the leadership that has changed the views of the majority, and willingness to hire a gay man as the White House social secretary. Once you abandon the sin theory of sexual orientation the rest flows pretty naturally, and the leadership that our nation's leaders have shown has pretty well discredited that understanding of sexual orientation.

The sin theory of sexual orientation is rapidly going the way of the equally scripturally supported and equally empirically inaccurate demon possession theory of mental illness. Despite the fact that the words in the Bible haven't changed, very few people walking the streets believe in an internalized way that mental illness is caused by demon possession, and likewise, the Biblically based defenses for the institutions of slavery are also now heart felt for only a tiny minority of American Christians.

Lots of people believe that faith healing (which the Gospels devote a great deal of time to) is possible, or at least once was possible, but very few people resort to a clergyman laying on hands as their sole means or even primary means for dealing with poor physical health.

The Pope's official position, reduced to writing ever since 1968 in "Humanae Vitae," is that using contraceptives is a sin. But:

A survey just one year later . . . found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

The sea change in public opinion on gay rights isn't the only recent example.

While he was living, Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's pre-eminent hero was the civil rights movement, was wary of pressing to strike down miscegenation laws and emphasized civil rights in the public sphere of work and commerce instead. Yet, in the wake of Loving v. Virginia, even prominent segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond eventually came around to the view (and I genuinely believe that at least that far it was sincere) that miscegenation laws were wrong and that there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage. Large percentages of white, usual Republican primary voters in Mississippi still haven't come around, and we are not a nation of color blind people. But, Jim Crow era laws to enforce segregation and discriminate on the basis of race have been utterly morally discredited for the vast majority of Americans today.

We haven't reached a comfortable answer that tells us how to balance work and family in a world where both men and women are part of almost all parts of the workforce. But, almost nobody wants to return to the status quo that was in place when I was born when the percentage of women in law school student bodies was in the single digits, and there were only a handful of jobs that were open to women, especially to married women. Likewise, almost nobody advocates a return to a legal regime in which women cannot own property, bring lawsuits or enter into contracts in their own name, as was the case when the Founders wrote the United States Constitution.

Similarly, nobody is advocating that the franchise be limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one as it was when the Founders wrote the United States constitution. Indeed, while non-whites can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on race, women can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on gender, and eighteen to twenty year olds can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on age, laws restricting the franchise to property owners would quite possibly not violate the federal constitution, although such laws would be politically impossible to pass at the moment.

Abortion remains controversial, but popular opinion today would never support the laws struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that made it illegal to use "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."

Support for legalizing marijuana is at about the same point that support for legalizing gay marriage was two years ago. The year that I graduated from high school, about 74% opposed that and 24% supported it. Now, about 50% oppose legalizing it, while 46% support legalizing it, and support for legalization has grown more or less steadily for the last fifteen years. According to the executive director of NORML:

Thirteen states have decriminalized marijuana, and that covers 130 million Americans. We now have fifteen states and the District of Columbia that have legal protections for qualified medical-marijuana patients, and that covers 90 to 95 million Americans.

The President has taken the position of not using federal law to punish people who use marijuana in compliance with state medical marijuana laws, and has paid essentially no price (and perhaps gains support) for taking this position.

In aspects of life where people have real experience and are affected in their daily lives, religious texts and doctrines and even community traditions are all but irrelevant to people's opinions. The previous generation's unthinkable possibilities can become the current generation's moral norms.

READ MORE - Policy Beliefs Can Change

Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

The race to bethe mayor of Denver has lost its highest polling female candidate, city council woman at large Carol Boigon, who in turn endorsed Michael Hancock. 

It isn't obvious, however, that many voters will be swayed by her endorsement of her city council ally.  He needs a boost in support if he is to displace Romer or Meijia, who are currently on track to make it to a runoff election in a race where no candidate is likely to win majority support in the first round.

Chris Romer, James Meijia, Michael Hancock and Doug Linkhart, in that order, are the strongest polling candidates remaining in what is now a nine way race for Mayor.  Boigon had been polling in fifth place with 8% support.  It isn't obvious whom supporters of eliminated candidates would support in a second round runoff election. 

Theresa Spahn, who was polling even more weakly than Boigon before Boigon dropped out of the race is the only woman left in the running, and may pick up Boigon supporters who would like to have a female Mayor.  Also running, but very unlikely to either win or even make it into the second round of voting are: Danny F. Lopez, Jeff Peckman, Kenneth Simpson, and Thomas Wolf.

Some people have characterized this race as a Romer v. not Romer race, but it isn't obvious that this is the case. Strategic voters who recognize that their favorite candidate is unlikely to make a runoff election may choose to vote for Meija or Hancock to influence who makes it into a runoff election.


The race looks likely to track the election that ultimately put Hickenlooper in office the first time around, with African-American plurality precincts likely to favor Hancock, Hispanic plurality precincts likely to favor Mejia and white plurality precincts likely to favor Romer.

Republicans in Denver have been most public in supporting Romer and Hancock in this official non-partisan race, although the momentum of Republican support appears to have swung towards Romer.  Linkhart is the most prominent progressive leaning social liberal in the race who has devoted much of his efforts while in office towards developing a less punitive and less expensive stance on criminal justice issues.

I hope to find time for another post on this race before votes are cast that sums up the key points that distinguish each of the mayoral candidates, as I will need to do that in any case before voting myself.
Ballots in the all mail election are already in the hands of voters, and they must be received by May 3.

READ MORE - Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

Race and Federal Sentencing

[I]f one looks closely at only those offenses in which 1000 or more cases were sentenced in FY 2010, one sees that in all but one notable instance, the percentage of offenders who were white is below 50%.  For drug trafficking offenses, for example, only 26% of sentenced offenders were white; for firearm offenses, only 29% of sentenced offenders were white; for fraud offenses, only 47% of sentenced offenders were white.  But for child pornography offenses, a full 89% of sentenced offenders in FY 2010 were white.

From here.

About 10% of immigration offenders are white (a category that makes up a third of the docket), while another third of the docket is made up of drug offenses.  The total federal criminal docket with a race coded defendant has about 75,000 sentenced offenders per year (about 10% of criminal defendants were not statistically coded for race).

Some of this result is due to disaggregation of white collar crimes.  Other majority white offender federal offenses (with less than 1,000 cases per year) are (with percentage white and total number of sentenced offenders of all races shown):

* antitrust (85%, n=13)
* gambling/lottery (77%, n=75)
* environmental/wildlife (77%, n=124)
* food and drug (72%, n=67)
* tax (66%, n=655)
* civil rights (67%, n=58)
* embezzlement (59%, n=404)
* arson (59%, n=75)
* other miscellaneous offenses (53%, n=1288)
* simple drug possession (51%, n=282)
* auto theft (51%, n=91)

The top offenses for which the 20,796 white offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1.  Drug Trafficing 6,087
2.  Fraud 3,200
3.  Immigration 2,500
4.  Firearms 2,293
5.  Child Pornography 1,665
6.  Larceny 659
7.  Robbery 479

The top offenses for which the 36,293 Hispanic offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1. Immigration 21,009
2. Drug Trafficking 10,378
3. Fraud 1,190
4. Money Laundering 307

The top offenses for which the 15,613 black offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1. Drug Trafficking 6,169
2. Firearms 3,961
3. Immigration 463
4. Robbery 428
5. Larceny 422

A large share of the offenders sentenced in federal court for certain offenses were of "other race" despite the fact that this category makes up just 3.6%, most of which is attributable to Native Americans on Indian reservations where state courts do not have jurisdiction over many serious crimes.  These offenses include: murder, manslaughter, sexual abuse, assault, arson, burglary and breaking and entering.

READ MORE - Race and Federal Sentencing

Pre-Clovis Strata In New World Definitively Dated

A Texas archaeological dig has cleanly established the existence of a human settlement from around 15,500 to 13,200 years ago. This is about two thousand years earlier than the distinctive Clovis culture strata that is found across North America, and about a thousand years older than the oldest archaeological remains found in South America. This age is consistent with an entry of the earliest hominins to the Americas via the Beringian land bridge (where Alaska and its Aleutian Islands are today) and an expansion beyond Beringia when glacial melt would have opened a passage to the continental interior.

This site is notable because its dating is particularly "clean", because it clearly pre-dates the Clovis sites, and because it is in the interior of North America. It had seemed possible before this find, that earlier pre-Clovis sites fit a pattern that could have arguably been confined to the Pacific Coast of the Americas and their near vicinity, rather than also including the interior of the Americas and Eastern Coasts.

Open Question: Why do the earliest skeletons in the Americas seem to look different from later skeletons in the Americas?

The new find does not have bones, so ancient DNA and physical anthropology describing the people who inhabited the earliest strata of settlements in the Americas is not possible from this site. Some of the oldest skeletons in the Americas are from people who would have looked physically very different from modern Native Americans in all eras starting a few thousand years later, and somewhat similar to the very oldest East Asian skeletons. It isn't clear if the differences between the oldest skeletons and the later ones in physical type are a case of population replacement, human evolution as a result of new conditions, or factors like disease that could produce a few fluke skeletons that have been misinterpreted as seemingly belonging to a different racial type.

It is clear from genetic evidence that the vast majority of Native American genes found today have their origin in a pretty small population that expanded almost everywhere at about the same time when humans first emerged onto the continent from Beringia. The biggest divide in Native American genetics seems to suggest, however, that the genetic mix in the Native American groups that settled the North American interior is somewhat different than the genetic mix in the Native American groups that settled the Pacific Coast. It isn't clear if this was a product of random founder effects, or if there was some degree of population structure in the Beringian source population for the Americas.

It also isn't clear if there were one or more subsequent waves of people who arrived from Asia, perhaps by boat or perhaps in separate waves of migration that were closely spaced in time (the Na-Dene are often seen as a candidate population that could have given rise to the genetic difference between North America and South America), outside of the circumpolar region, that had a minor but detectable impact of Native American population genetics.

Finally, we can't rule out the possibility that the wave of humans arriving in the New World via the Beringian land bridge initially included modern humans from Asia of both an "archaic race" (paleoindians) and a more "modern race" and that the archaic modern humans vanished due to some combination of failure to adapt to the New World, conflict between the two populations that they lost, and admixture to the point where they were diluted into invisibility in modern Native American gene pools.

The plausiblity of a scenario with a "lost race" that inhabited the Americas as the same time as the ancestors of modern Native Americans is enhanced by the fact that we know that at least two other human populations, the Vikings, and a paleo-Eskimo population that arrived after the closing of the Beringian land bridge and then were replaced by the Eskimos, arrived in the Americans only the disappear without leaving a notable genetic trace in contemporary Native American populations.

Open Question: When did human first arrive in America?

The new find does, however, help us to bette calibrate the amount of genetic mutation that is observed in the Americas in indigeneous populations to a time of divergence.

That task is complicated by the fact that we don't know how much time the proto-Native Americans spent as a genetically distinct population in Beringia and Northest Asia before entering into the interior of the Americas. In particular, it isn't entirely clear if the proto-Native American population was drawn from pre-Last Glacial Maximum populations of Northeast Asia, post-Last Glacial Maximum populations of Northeast Asia, or a mix of the two. In one scenario, there was a population that entered Beringia, was trapped their by ice in both directions for many thousands of years, and then expanded out afterwards (Beringia's weather would have been mild for its lattitude due to ocean currents and prevailing winds). In another scenario, the stayover of the proto-Native Americans in Beringia en route to the Americas would have been relatively brief.

But, in all of the scenarios not ruled out by contrary genetic evidence or other evidence, the proto-Native American population would have been in a bottleneck situation in Beringia for some period of time before rapidly expanding out into virgin territory across all parts of North America and South America. So, timing of the "breakout" into the Americas can still be inferred by the amount of genetic diversity in different regions of the Americas, without knowing too much about how long that population was in the Americas. And, in theory, one can look at the amount of genetic differences between all American populations and plausible source populations in Asia, to estimate the age of the most recent common ancestor of the two populations. By subtracting the apparent expansion date of the Native American popluations of about 15,000 years ago, from the apparent age of the most recent common ancestor of the Asia souce populations and the American populations, it ought to be possible to estimate how long a distinct proto-Native American population was genetically isolated either in Berginia itself or in some territory in Northeast Asia.

In practice, this isn't so easy, because the margin of error in dating the oldest human habitation sites discovered (roughly plus or minus 900 years) and the margin of error in estimating divergence times based on genetic evidence (roughly plus or minus a few thousand years) in large in relationship to the probable length of the time that this population was isolated pre-expansion, which is a few hundred years at the low end of theoretical expectation (i.e. about 14,500 years ago) and about seven thousand years at the high end of theoretical expectation (i.e. about 22,000 years ago).

Open Question: Where there pre-land bridge or post-land bridge waves of human migration to the Americas?

When glaciers melted, the land bridge between Asia and the Americas was submerged, effectively isolating the Americas from the rest of the world until the arrival of Columbus in 1492, with a handful of very limited exceptions:
* some circumpolar Eskimo and paleo-Eskimo interchange between North America and Siberia,
* a brief and failed interlude of Viking efforts to colonize a few places on the North Atlantic coast of North America about a thousand years ago, and
* a probable brief episode of contact (but not population exchange) between the Austronesians and the South Americans on the Pacific Coast that brough the kumara (a kind of South American origin yam) and some associated names for it that are used in South American languages, to the Polynesians sometime in the last two thousand years or so.

It isn't clear what lasting cultural impact, if any, this brief episode of Polynesian-South American contact had on the South Americans. There are musical similarites between South American music and the musics of some cultures in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, and this is one time that this musical culture could have arrived, but the music of Polynesian cultures does not share the traits found in both Southeast Asia and Melanesia on one hand, and South America on the other, so music as a cultural impact seems unlikely.

The circumpolar contacts are the only known contracts between the Americas and the rest of the world between the closing of the Beringian land bridge and 1492 CE, that are known to have had a genetic impact on modern Native American populations.

There are a couple of New World sites that claim much older ages (ca. 30,000 years ago), but there is considerable dispute over the methodology used to establish those dates from cinders that may or may not have had human origins and whose dating may or may not be reliable. If there were populations in the Americas that old, one also has to explain why modern humans expanding into the virgin territories of the Americas did not show the signs found in all other cases where that happened: megafauna extinction, widespread population expansion leaving archaeological traces, etc., yet did leave isolated traces at very far flung sites. And, one also has to presume a level of sea faring expertise greater than was known to be available in any candidate populations around that time. And, one has to explain the lack of the distinct population genetic signatures you would expect from that population.

Obviously, new discoveries can only push earliest Native American populations further back in time, but the knowledge we have of ancient climate and the timing of megafauna extinctions widely believed to be related to the arrival of humans in the Americas strongly disfavors a scenario in which humans arrived very much earlier. Even the sites with archaic modern human physical anthropology are quite close in time (within a few thousand years) of the sites with modern human physical anthropology quite simmilar to modern populations.

READ MORE - Pre-Clovis Strata In New World Definitively Dated

Ethnicity, Language and Religion In Modern Egypt

A nice analysis of the ethnic and linguistic make up of the eighty million people Egypt is found here, and its religious diversity is analyzed here.

Linguistically, most Egyptians speak one of two dialects of Arabic which are described as being roughly as similar a Spanish and Portuguese, one of which (Sa'idi) is spoken in Upper Egypt (the Southern part of the Nile Valley) and the other of which (Egyptian Arabic) is spoken in Lower Egypt (the Northern part of the Nile Valley). A Libyan dialect of Arabic is spoken on the Mediterranean coast beyond the Nile Delta region. And, Bedouin dialect of Arabic is spoken in the Sinai.

There is also a pocket of the Nile Delta where Greek is spoken, a small community on the Southern Red Sea Coast that speaks the Cushitic Beja language, and an oasis community in the Western Desert that speaks the Berber Siwi language. In the far South of the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt two Nubian (Nilo-Saharan) languages are spoken.

In addition to these linguistic minorities there are communities of Abazas, Turks, and Dom (Gypsies). "The Abazas . . . are a Circassian/Abkhazian people whose ancestors fled Russian assaults in the Caucasus in the 19th century; although they have long maintained a distinct identity in Egypt[.]" Estimates of the Dom population range from tens of thousands to a million, an estimate complicated by the apparently common practice of Dom publicly identifying as Palestinian to avoid discrimination. Egyptians who are not part of one of these minorities speaking one of the two main Egyptian Arabic dialects make up about 91% of the Egyptian population.

There are significant Christian minorities in Egypt, perhaps ten percent of the total in many Nile Valley and Northern Red Sea coastal areas, mostly Coptic Christian (perhaps seven or eight million in all), but perhaps a quarter million of whom are many other types of Christians (they seem to be concentrated around the Nile Delta), and there is apparently a Shi'ite minority in parts of the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt whose numbers are a matter of great dispute but may make up as many as a million people. Most Egyptians, of course, are Sunni Muslims and are generally not a part of the Wahhabi sect that dominates in Saudi Arabia and is evangelized by the Taliban.

In an international context, Egyptian Sunni Muslims are on the conservative/traditionalist end of the the scale on "social issues," although not necesarily as extreme as Wahhabi sect Muslims. Gender segregation in the workplace is favored by a narrow majority and most Egyptians favor the use of harsh Islamic law punishments for offenses like adultery and theft.

Still, despite pockets of diversity, the overall picture is of a relatively homogeneous core Egyptian population in the Nile Valley split mostly between Upper and Lower Egypt, with small, mostly geographically combat minority populations on its periphery. Upper Egyptians and Lower Egyptians, Sunni Muslims, Shi'ite Muslims and Coptic Christian alike, all have a strong Egyptian national identity, muted somewhat by a sense of also belonging to larger Muslim and Pan-Arab communities.

Any reasonably democratic process will produce a parliament in Egypt dominated by Sunni Muslims who speak one of the two main Arabic dialects of Egypt, with the more urban Lower Egyptian Sunni Muslims probably making up a majority or close to a majority.

READ MORE - Ethnicity, Language and Religion In Modern Egypt

Evidence That Value Added Evaluation May Be Unfair

Colorado's legislature has recognized that evaluating teachers and principals based on absolute levels of CSAP performance is unfair, because at the classroom and school level, CSAP performance is largely a function of student affluence and entire educational career school performance, rather than current teacher and current school performance.

As a result, the state has moved to a system where "value added" is measured for each teacher. This approach looks at CSAP improvement of children in a class during the course of a class. Are students improving more than average, less than average or typically?

Clearly, this is seems more fair. At the very least, it disentangles a lot of what happened before a child arrived in a teacher's class. But, does it really measure teaching quality?

A new twin study of U.K. twins finds that academic improvement measures like the system used in Colorado also have significant genetic components.

"These findings do not mean that educational quality is unimportant, in fact environmental factors were just as important as genetic factors. However, these results do suggest that children bring characteristics to the classroom that influence how well they will take advantage of the quality."

Surprisingly, according to the open access study, value added may actually be worse at assessing teacher performance than raw achievement scores:

Raw achievement shows moderate heritability (about 50%) and modest shared environmental influences (25%). Unexpectedly, we show that for indices of the added value of school, genetic influences remain moderate (around 50%), and the shared (school) environment is less important (about 12%). . . . At first glance, this high degree of genetic overlap between different cognitive and academic measures suggests that correcting achievement measures for general cognitive ability would remove the genetic influence on achievement. However, this genetic overlap is not 100%, so there could be residual genetic influences on achievement that are independent of those on general cognitive ability, or even previous measures of achievement. . . . The results were striking, indicating that even when previous achievement and a child's general cognitive ability are both removed, the residual achievement measure is still significantly influenced by genetic factors (heritabilities of 48% and 37% respectively for teacher-ratings and test data). The main point, to which we shall return, is that corrected-achievement scores are influenced by genetic factors that are independent of those influencing g or previous achievement.

Of course, great individual differences in educational improvement ability don't necessarily detract from a value added measure of teacher evaluation based on test scores if the mix in any given class of thirty kids in a classroom, or hundreds of kids in a school, tends to average out.

We know that raw achievement scores have a strong socio-economic component that varies greatly from school to school. We don't know, and the study doesn't tell us, if this achievement controlled improvement factor varies in a systemic way that is likely not to average out from school to school. For example, the study doesn't tell us, and U.K. data would probably not be very helpful in any case in measuring, if there were strong ethnic components to that variation.

If value added components are strongly heritable, but the genetic component of a value added effect controlled for raw achievement is randomly distributed from one classroom to the next, a value added measure is still valid.

But, if there is a clear pattern in which some category of students routinely improves a lot even after controlling for past achievement, while another category of students routinely improves little, then the new measure may simply create a more subtle version of the problem that causes Colorado to go from absolute performance to value added based evaluations of teachers and schools in the first place.

Eyeballing the latest round of Colorado value added evaluations data, the only distinct trend that I noted was that schools with a lot of English language learners seemed to have an edge in value added measures, presumably because poor English language skills of smart students suppressed their prior year achievement, but this effect presumably rapidly eased as the students gained English language mastery.

Colorado's system also addresses concerns that learning disabilities might have an effect independent of raw achievement levels, by limiting the way that the system can be used in classes with many special education students.

READ MORE - Evidence That Value Added Evaluation May Be Unfair

Egypt Is Population Dominant In the Region

I'd planned on doing this myself, but Yglesias has already done the work.

Algeria and Iraq have experienced regime change relatively recently, making those regimes probably less prone to being displaced than elsewhere. I would also add North Sudan (a bit under 30 million), Libya (6.4 million), Morocco (about 32 million), and Western Sahara (about 400,000) to his list.

I also note that the term "Arab" as used by Yglesias is basically a political self-identifier (as in the "Arab League") and as a proxy for a significantly Arabic language speaking population, rather than ethnically Arab populations.

The populations of North Africa and Egypt respectively are mostly not members of the same ethnic group as the once nomadic people of the Arabian Peninsula, despite their strong cultural affinities to each other relative to the rest of the world. While all of these populations historically spoke Afro-Asiatic langauges, prior to the expansion of the Islamic empire (ca. 700 CE plus or minus a few decades) the North Africans spoke mostly Berber languages, the Egyptians spoke mostly Coptic languages, and the Arabs spoke Semitic languages. The Islamic empire's expansion was not a population replacing one; mostly it grew by rapidly assimilating existing populations into new languages, religions and cultures.

READ MORE - Egypt Is Population Dominant In the Region

One in seven marriages is mixed race.

One in seven (14.6%) of new marriages in 2008 and 2009 is mixed race (in a method that counts a Hispanic-Anglo marriage as mixed race), according to a recent New York Times article reporting on a Pew Research Center study from June of last year. In 1960, the figure was 2.4%.

Among all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married someone whose race or ethnicity was different from their own.

Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. Some 22% of all black male newlyweds in 2008 married outside their race [in 1960 the percentage was 1.3%], compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds [in 1960 the percentage was 0.9%]. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. Some 40% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2008, compared with just 20% of Asian male newlyweds. Among whites and Hispanics, by contrast, there are no gender differences in intermarriage rates.

Rates of intermarriages among newlyweds in the U.S. more than doubled between 1980 (6.7%) and 2008 (14.6%). However, different groups experienced different trends. Rates more than doubled among whites and nearly tripled among blacks. But for both Hispanics and Asians, rates were nearly identical in 2008 and 1980. . . . ["High levels of Hispanic and Asian immigration over the past several decades helped drive both seemingly contradictory trends."] . . .

Native-born Hispanics are more than three times as likely as the foreign born to marry a non-Hispanic. . . native-born Asian-Americans are nearly twice as likely as those who are foreign born to marry a non-Asian. . . Among Asian men, the native born are nearly four times as likely as the foreign born to marry out. Among Asian women, the native born are only about 50% more likely than the foreign born to marry a non-Asian.

For U.S. born people, outmarriage rates were 41.7% for Asian men, 41.3% for Hispanic men, 37.4% for Hispanic women, and 50.3% for Asian women. For foreign born people, outmarriage rates were 11.7% for Asian men, 11.3% for Hispanic men, 12.2% for Hispanic women, and 36.8% for Asian women.

Mixed race marriage is much more common among the young than the old.

There are strong regional trends. The outmarriage rate for African-Americans in the West is 38% compared to 15.5% nationally and 11.9% in the South. Whites are most likely to outmarry in the West at 15.5%, compared to 8.9% nationally and 5.5% in the Midwest. Hispanics are most likely to outmarry in the Midwest (41.0% v. 25.7% nationally), although Colorado at 35% has a higher outmarriage rate among states with statistically significant numbers of Hispanic outmarriages than any other single state. Asians are most likely to outmarry in the South (36.8% v. 30.8% nationally). Outmarriage for whites is 20% or more in Nevada, New Mexico and California. Black outmarriage rates are 36% in California, the higher percentage in single states with a statistically significant number of black outmarriages, in contrast the lowest percentage of black outmarriages where numbers are statistically significant is found in North Carolina where the percentage is 9%.

These regional trends seem to be driven by a combination of outmarriage being more common when there are more other race and fewer same race options available, and by Hispanics and Asians being more likely to be U.S. born in areas with higher outmarriage rates. Differences in regional attitudes surely do have an effect, but a less intense one than one might expect.

The more education you have, the more likely you are to outmarry.

About 41% of mixed race marriages are Hispanic-white, about 16% are both non-white, about 15% are Asian-white, about 11% of Black-white, and 17% are "other" (which includes Native American, mixed race and "some other race").

In terms of expressed views, far more religious people are uncomfortable with having a child marry an atheist than are uncomfortable with having a child marry something of another race. Whites in 2009 were considerably less likely to have a problem with a child marrying someone of another race than they were in 2001, while blacks were more concerned in 2009 than in 2001 (although still more accepting of mixed race marriages in all time periods with all other races).

Caveats

This observation comes with caveats:

[S]ome sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

Any study of marriage rates also has to be conscious of the increasing number of parents and intimate couples were are not married. For African-American women, for example, most mothers are not married. The higher rate of interracial marriage for African-American men than for African-American women, for example, could reflect non-African-American women in serious relationships with African-American women placing a greater importance on recognizing that relationship through marriage than African-American women in serious relationships with non-African-American men do.

Analysis

This is a little less than half of what one would see if marriage were entirely random relative to race and ethnicity, although a significant share of the divide between truly random and what is seen is due to neighbor effects (i.e. mixed race marriages tend only happen to the extent that there is someone of another race geographically nearby), rather than actual race or ethnicity based selection of a spouse.

Intermarriage rates are higher for the college educated, despite the fact that the ethnic diversity of college campuses is considerably lower than the ethnic diversity of society as a whole. The gap between the intermarriage percentage that you would expect by random chance if people married others with the same level of education, and what is actually observed, is quite modest among college graduates, but its quite high for high school dropouts.

Asian and Latino intermarriage seems to fit the general profile of immigrant assimilation. Second and later generation immigrants assimilate very fully into their communities linguistically and otherwise, and often outmarry. The future of Asian and Latino marriage patterns may follow that of the "Southern European" identity, which ceased to be very ethnically distinct in the United States in a way that drives marriage patterns. Yet, the WASP v. non-WASP divide, which distinguished people from Catholic and Jewish immigrant populations, from Ireland and Southern Europe in the case of most of the Catholics, and from Eastern Europe in the case of most of the Jews, from non-immigrant American whites, has faded greatly from our ethnic consciousness.

My intuition is that interracial marriage rates for African immigrant populations (e.g. recent immigrants from Ethiopia and Kenya), are probably more similar to Latino and Asian immigrant populations than to African-American populations. For example, immigrant Africans in Denver's public housing projects are much more likely to be married than African-Americans in Denver's public housing projects, and there is probably less discrimination against African immigrants than there is against African-Americans in economic and social contexts.

Razib notes that "The article ignores the elephant in the room: that Americans do not treat African ancestry like they treat Asian (or Amerindian) ancestry. Someone with a black American parent may identify as mixed race, but there is a great deal of social pressure and expectation, such that they are de facto viewed as black." But, I am not so pessimistic.

While African-American outmarriage rates are lower than for U.S. born Hispanics and Asians (a little more than half as much for African-American men, and a quarter as much for African-American women), this has changed dramatically in the last fifty years when it was almost zero, and outmarriage rates have continued to surge in the last twenty years.

Anecdotal evidence that I have encountered, at least, suggests that "one drop" rule notwithstanding, that mixed race children with a black parent and a white parent are indeed a major bridge between the two groups in social settings. A many fold increase in the number of children of black and non-black parents, probably under reported by statistics that only measure actual marriages, means that the bonds between these two ethnic communities in the United States are probably much stronger than they were a generation or two and getting stronger all the time.

Social Class Implications

This elephant in the room is also shrinking as social class divides based on race and ethnicity fades.

The increase in rates of African-American outmarriage closely mirror the growing ranks of the black middle class in the same time period against a background of very low social class mobility in the United States generally..

Despite the fact that almost every statistic you may see on African-American socio-economic success is discouraging, in the big picture in the medium to long term, the story has been one of remarkable socio-economic progress.

Indeed, the rise of the black middle class made possible by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and social gains of second generation immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants, who have been able to advance further socio-economically than parents who were not native English language speakers and were not assimilated into American culture, explains a great deal of all of the social mobility in the United States in the last forty years. The flip side of this optimistic fact, is that social class mobility is probably considerably lower in the United States for Anglos than the overall figures suggest.

On the other hand, some of the apparently high social class mobility seen in many European nations may be a product of immigrant assimilation patterns seen in the United States, as most of the developed countries of Europe has experienced considerable immigration in recent times. Immigration in the United States in recent years has been typical of the developed world generally.

The seeming immutability of social class boundaries among American whites is remarkable given how fiercely we deny that social class divides exist in American culture (something that our obsession with race has helped make possible), and how irrelevant the distinctions between white ethnics have become in our society.

Perhaps we truly are developing a meritocratic society and perhaps social class divisions based for a couple of generations on real merit are more stable than divisions based on proxies for merit. But, it may also be the case that the weak social welfare system in the United States makes where you start more outcome determinative than it is elsewhere.

New Tribes

Professor Rainier Spencer, who is quoted in the article notes: “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe. A new Balkanization of race.” This may be the case. Definitions of race evolve and have changed in almost every census. The Latin American experience, the French colonial era experience in North America, and the experience in places like Jamaica and South Africa during colonial eras, has been to conceptualize mixed race identities as a "new tribe" or as "new tribes."

If you run mathematical models in which some people in each ethic category have strongly endogenous attitudes and others do not, in a surprisingly small number of generations, almost everyone but those with strongly endogenous tendencies ends up as mixed race, although the smaller a group is, that more quickly this happens.

The fact that more than half of U.S. born children of immigrants still do in marry, and that anecdotal evidence suggests that preferences are similar for third and later generation individuals to those of second generation individuals, suggests that some version of this kind of model makes sense.

My sense in reading political and identity politics rhetoric has been to see a tendency to conceptualize a large "brown" category that includes Hispanics, mixed race people of all types, North Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Arabs, that has been gaining traction relative to the "People of Color" conception that includes all non-Anglos. The latter is probably easy to measure with linguistic databases like Google's new toy, but the former, because "brown" is used in so many senses, would be harder to measure.

In the same vein, I find it quite interesting that white Southerners in the United States increasingly identify as "American" in ethnicity, while whites outside the South tend to see a connection to some ancestral place of origin in Europe. This is more than a question of style. It has some authentic base in reality and history.

For example, most whites outside the American South practice a religion that has clear historical roots in Europe. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Jews, Orthodox Christians and Catholics, for example, all practice religions with direct European sources and often have religious denominations that remain in communication with parent denominational authorities in West Eurasia. In contrast, the Evangelical Christians of the American South have far more cryptic ties to their European forebears. Colonial era European Baptists, for example, were closer theologically and in liturgical practice to American Quakers and Anabaptists than to the Southern Baptists whose denomination is the predominant white Baptist denomination in the United States. Evangelicals in Latin America, Africa and Asia trace their roots to the United States, not the other way around.

There are multiple narratives of people from the American South touring Europe and discovering just how non-European they are culturally, despite the fact that they look similar physically. An Evangelical Christian white Southerner is more distant culturally and in values from the European norm than a Bostonian Anglican, a Lutheran from Saint Paul, or a white Catholic in Buffalo. The 18th century Scotch-Irish society that those white Southerners who do not identify as "American" identify with barely exists any more outside United Kingdom's territory of Northern Ireland, as the herding and marginal farming economy that sustained that culture has faded away. Politically, the federal election Republicans of the American South (who are overwhelmingly white and whose politics are the overwhelmingly dominant ones of white Southerners) have few parallels in Europe apart from the far right neo-fascist parties.

The American South from the 1700s to the mid-1800s is really one of the better cases in recent history of ethnogenesis. In religion, culture, politics and dialect this cauldron created an ethnicity so distinct from its antecedents that its sources aren't easily traced to a single source anywhere. Few other places in the United States have been more of a melting pot and less of a mixing bowl.

Indeed, the fusion of this new culture and worldview has been so intense that ethnically identified non-Evangelical Christians have been increasingly pressured in reaction to abandon their more specific ethnic ties in favor of a united Pan-American mainline, liturgical Christianity. First, ethnic divisions within major denominational distinctions within Christianity by fusions of ethnically divided denominations of Reformed Christians, Lutherans and Orthodox Christianity, respectively, as these ethic divisions faded in favor of purely denominational ones going back to pre-ethnic division roots. Increasingly, institutions like the National Council of Churches and ecumenical efforts between particular mainline denominations are erasing even that level of division.

Ethnically and culturally, the descendants of Northern, Midwestern and Western white ethnics have been dissolved into an ethnicity that outsiders have described a "Yankee," as inapt as that may be to describing their real roots. How long will it be before whites outside the South start to identify their ancestry as "European" rather than Italian or German or Danish or French or English, in contradistinction to the "American" of Southerners?

Will people who have roots in both Europe and Asia start to identify themselves as "Eurasians," in ancestry, as distinct from Africans or those who self-identify as "Americans"?

I also think that it is possible that we may increasingly start to see a divide in self-identification between African-Americans from the South, and those who are from outside it.

I do think that racial categorization at a social level is basically inescapable. No matter how much the educational establishment and social elite urge us to leave in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s truly color-blind society, I seriously doubt that it will happen, at least not in my lifetime or even that of my grandchildren. But, I do think that the racial and ethnic divisions of the United States will grow increasingly balkanized replacing many categories with the stark black-white dichotomy, and that as we reach a point where there is no majority race or ethnicity in the United States, that those distinctions will become less pernicious.

READ MORE - One in seven marriages is mixed race.