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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Common regression-to-the-mean W.

I was going to say that it reminds me of how wealthy blacks underperform poor whites (and especially poor Asians) on standardized tests. However, to my pleasant surprise while looking up the previous link, I Noticed that Random Critical Analysis also has a post "Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics," where he concludes: "Race is a strong predictor of homicide rates at a county level. It predicts better than the poverty rate, median household income, racial segregation, income segregation, education rates, and so on and so forth."

Ah, but does it predict better than percentage of households headed by a woman?

Indeed it does, if we consider the percentage of households headed by women to be equivalent to single motherhood rates.

The literal next sentence after the brief blurb I pasted reads: "The single-motherhood rate is a close second though" (second to % black, in a bivariate correlation table). As shown in Section 3, black remains a significant predictor on top of single motherhood rates; that is, the black effect on homicides is robust net of family poverty and single motherhood rates.

Not that I necessarily believe blacks should be granted "credit" for family poverty and single motherhood rates as to excusing their high homicide rates. Akin to how we wouldn't adjust for homicide rates using battery rates. The same combination of heritable traits such as low IQ, high impulsiveness, and high time preference would result in high family poverty, single motherhood, and homicide rates.