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jacksonjules


				

				

				

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jacksonjules


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:24:10 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I prompted ChatGPT 3.5 with:




Here is a reddit comment I came across:


"Latin America, South African elites, Russia, east Asia, etc. are all partially hajnalized in a way India isn’t. Carving out a nice, clean community where the unwashed masses come in to clean houses and then leave once their job is done is much, much easier when you can say no to your extended family at least sometimes. I don’t think Kinshasa and pre-war Gaza had these nice gated communities either."


What does "hajnalized" mean in this context?




And ChatGPT responded with:




In the context of the Reddit comment you provided, the term "hajnalized" appears to be used in a way that refers to the concept of the "Hajnal line." The Hajnal line is a hypothetical boundary that has been proposed by scholars to describe a historical and cultural divide in Europe. It is named after the historian John Hajnal, who first identified this pattern.


The Hajnal line is often associated with certain social and demographic characteristics, including:


    

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    A higher prevalence of nuclear families: The idea is that areas to the west of the Hajnal line historically had a higher tendency toward nuclear families, where married couples and their children lived separately from their extended families.
    

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  • 

    A later age at marriage: People in areas west of the Hajnal line tended to marry later in life compared to those in areas to the east.
    

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  • 

    A higher age at first birth: Women in areas west of the Hajnal line typically had their first child at a later age than those in eastern areas.
    

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  • 

    Lower rates of cousin marriage: Marrying cousins was less common in regions west of the Hajnal line.
    

    • 



The comment you provided seems to be using the term "hajnalized" to describe regions or populations that have adopted or exhibit some of these social characteristics associated with the Hajnal line. It suggests that Latin America, South African elites, Russia, East Asia, and other places mentioned in the comment have certain social structures that resemble those to the west of the Hajnal line in Europe, in contrast to India, Kinshasa, and pre-war Gaza, which are implied to have different social structures and dynamics. The term is being used to draw a cultural and social comparison between different regions.




Or in other words: IQ isn't enough. You also need WEIRD psychology to replicate American + Western European prosperity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. 

    Your point about the "sex recession" being mostly driven by decreased sex among black people is an interesting one. However, black people are only 13% of the population. I would have to crunch the numbers to be exactly sure how much the decline is attribute to each ethnic group, but my default assumption is that US population trends can be safely substituted for white population trends as whites are still approximately 60% of the population (and a lot of the other 40% of the population are Hispanics who don't deviate that strongly from whites in their behavioral indicators).
    

    2. 

  2. 

    I don't think social class data would be as interesting as one would think. For one, we can't measure social class directly, but only proxy it by income. There is a strong correlation between income and social class, but not a perfect one: this would cause attentuation.
    

    3. 



Also, looking at data like SAT scores by parental income made me realize that there is a large difference between say the 90th percentile income and the 99.9th percentile. Basically, there is a small percentage of people who are upper class such that I worry that wouldn't be enough sample size to say anything interesting about them.


Also, because of (a) social media (b) the top-down nature of educational policy, I'm not sure that there are large differences in the school experience and media environment of teenagers across different socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, the decreasing gap between blacks and whites in risky sexual behavior constitutes strong evidence that there is an increasing homogenization of teenage life: everyone goes to school, goes straight home to Snapchat and play Fortnite with their friends. As virtually all households, regardless of wealth, have smartphones, gaming consoles, and WiFi, the social experience of teenagers is in the broad strokes the same across different income brackets. A big difference between different income brackets is I suspect the prevalence of extracurricular activities: lacrosse practice, piano lessons, starting a non-profit foundation, etc. But I don't think any of these activities have an impact a student's sexual life.


    

  1. 

    I agree that some proportion of the male-female reported sex gap is that men tend to include "third base" (non-penetrative "sex") as sexual partners while women tend not to. If I had to make up  numbers, it would that the gap is 50% attributable to differing definitions of sex, 50% attributable to lying (I'm agnostic about which sex is lying more often. If I had to guess, it would be men though).
    

    2. 

  2. 

    I agree that the current extracurricular rat race is both a waste of time and detrimental to the healthy development of teenagers. I don't think you're proposed solution would work, however. I could try and outline a detailed critique, but it comes down to the fact that colleges neither have the institutional resources nor the incentive to audit employment claims closely. So by default, I would expect any employment requirement to be gamed and manipulated by upper class parents just as masterfully as they've manipulated the extracurricular pageant show.
    

    3. 



A more feasible solution would be to (a) make college admittance solely be based on grades and test scores and (b) make it a lottery for the top X%. This would reduce incentives to compete endlessly to perfect your profile, but would create problems in that there would be no way for a one in a million student to distinguish themselves. This runs the risk that an alternative signalling ecosystem would emerge to replace the function that college currently performs.


Also, I think even with all of these changes, you wouldn't see the return of part-time jobs. It's not just that the opportunity cost of having a job is higher now, but the actual benefit (disposable income) isn't all the beneficial. Disposable income is useful so that you can buy a car and have money to spend at the mall. But if all your friends are at home playing video games, what's the point?


    

  1. I don't have data on what proportion of current black teenagers are descended from slaves versus Caribbean and African immigrants. But I would guess that Carribean and African immigrants make no more than 20% of the current black population, almost definitely closer to 10%--not enough to significantly effect the trend line either way.
    2. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What do you mean? "HBD" isn't the hypothesis that all group differences are entirely caused by genetics. That's not even a well-formed hypothesis. It only makes sense to say "given the current distribution of genetic and environmental causes, what proportion of the variance is explained by nurture vs nature?"


If I were to reduce to try to distill HBD into a simple hypothesis, it would something like: "By default, given two groups occupying the same location at the same time, we should assume that between-group differences are caused by the same forces as within-group differences." As there was no variation in smart phone and social media usage back in 1990 (since they hadn't been invented yet), "HBD" would be have nothing to say about the effects of introducing them into society.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
[Reason without restraint] Rates of risky sexual behaviors by race and sex in the United States


Reason without restraint is perhaps my new favorite HBD blog. While the topics that he writes about are nothing new (race & IQ, race & crime, etc.), he does a valuable service of marshaling all of the evidence in one place in an easy-to-consume format.


Here, he tackles the topic of racial differences in sexual behavior. He uses survey data taken of high school students where they report on various aspects of their sexual activity. The data starts in the year 1990 and extends to the present day. There are five sections to the article:


(1) Lifetime sexual intercourse
(2) Sexual intercourse before 13 years of age
(3) Sexual intercourse with 4 or more partners
(4) Use of condoms
(5) Use of birth control pills


Of the five sections, the first three are the most interesting. Based on the survey data, a couple things stick out:


The young people aren't having sex.


I am a bit, um, obsessed with the "sex recession": the dramatic decline in sexual activity in high school and college-aged people. Sex is perhaps the most human activity there is--the physical enactment of our Darwinian imperative, the raison d'etre of so many hormone-drenched adolescents. And yet: young people aren't having sex. Why?


Based on one of the graphs: in 1990, 65% of white 12th graders report having had sex. While in 2021 only 50% of white 12th graders report having had sex. This drop in sexual activity is not limited to white students, of course. It's a large drop across the board. Why?


Black people used to have a lot of sex but not anymore?


Look, I'm not stupid. At this point, I've had enough experience with the "stereotype literature" to know that, overwhelmingly, stereotypes tend to be true. But even I wasn't prepared for how much sex black teens were having in the 90s. I could cite a lot of different numbers, but just to choose one example: apparently, in 1990, more than 80% of black male 9th graders reported being non-virgins. Over 80%! And even if you rightfully suspect some exaggeration due to male ego, more than 65% of black female 9th graders report being non-virgins.


This is just incomprehensible to me. I'll admit that I grew up sheltered and nerdy, but still: none of my friends were having sex or really even close to having sex in middle school. Maybe the 90s were better after all?


What's interesting though is that there has been a rather dramatic decrease in black sexual activity. By 2021, only 30% of black male 9th graders report having ever had sex. And it's the same story for the other statistics as well: in 1990, black people were way more sexual active than Hispanics and Whites while by 2021, they have mostly converged, especially in the case of black females.


Asians don't have sex.


Not too much to say about this one. Pretty self-explanatory.


Condom usage seems... kinda low?


The survey reports that 60% of teenagers report using a condom during their last sexual encounter. Is that not kinda low given teenage pregnancy rates? I am a prude in real life who dislikes salacious talk, so I haven't talked about condom usage with my friends. So I don't really have a strong intuition here.


Overall, a fun article with lots of great graphs. What do I personally think explains the decline in sexual activity? I basically favor the consensus view as espoused by Jonathan Haidt and others: it's the phones (and social media). I think a lot of sex used to happen because people had nothing to do except each other.