There are three things seared into my mind whenever elite or mass opinion are mentioned. Will Wilkinson talking about how the average voter is a mass of knee jerk reactions, prejudices, and biases that amount to no coherent ideology at all. Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter with all the inherent biases of folk marxism and folk psychology that people hold, including the handful of PhDs I know with scarcely above 100 IQs. Third, the posts Arnold made more than 15 years ago about Philip Converse and “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass publics.” - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/12/notes_on_critic_1.html
Yeah, a quarter of Britons claim to want travel agencies nationalized but that also means *three-quarters* don't. Ditto that *two-thirds* might oppose nationalizing internet providers, and I would be willing to bet that the portions who support those positions are far more likely to be socially liberal than socially conservative in the Murrian sense. There's plenty of polling that indicates the poor to lower-middle class in the US have long opposed the social policies advanced by the Democrats even though they tend to vote for that party (for now). Proposition 8 (gay marriage ban), even though eventually overturned by the judiciary, won in California in the same year the state voted for Obama and majorities voted Democratic in most other state and federal elections. The more recent shifts in Hispanic voting patterns would also seem to indicate they are more supportive of economically and socially conservative policies, to the extent that the Republican Party can be identified with those.
People tend to be conservative about what they know best, and I trust that extends to people understanding what would improve their economic circumstances. Murray's observation is not true just in rhetoric but extends to elite support for policies that enable the behaviors they eschew. That makes them far more pernicious than Billy Bob who supports the 2nd Amendment, opposes gay marriage, and wants a trade war with China.
If 66%-75% of the public polled on the side of any issue it would be considered a landslide. People have no skin in the game on politics and the natural default is 50/50, so I'd read that as strongly against in context.
I keep hearing about right wing populists that want to implement socialism, but I haven't actually seen this happen anywhere. Mostly they seem to cut taxes.
I have a feeling right wing populist economic policy may differ a bit from libertarian orthodoxy on trade and immigration, but I don't think we are going to see a lot of industries nationalized. They may push back against woke capital, but I think that is pro-capitalist (I don't want corporations being political). And admitting you are never going to scrap Medicare is not so different from lying about the fact that you will never scrap Medicare.
I'm going out on a limb and predicting the managerial class is going to care about the poors a lot, and soon, as the poors are going to be beating down their doors. This is because nearly half the country is going to be broke: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-lurks-below-surface-reason-concern
The idea that Liberals "preach" the "misbehavior" they "tolerate" but hypocritically d not themselves engage in is a funny "conservative" idea. It is true that Liberals want to reduce the consequences of much "misbehavior"/bad decisions/minority lifestyle choices and it is a good question when the reduction goes too far. I wish "progressives" would contemplate the possibility that in many contexts the reduction has gone too far or is misdirected. Likewise I wish "conservatives" would be less angry about these misdirected reductions but realize that indeed some reduction is optimal.
Perhaps people on the left could figure out a way to "reduce the consequences of 'misbehavior'' that didn't involve (usually ineffectually) throwing big gobs of other people's money around.
I agree. I just want people on the "right" to help figure out how to do that, not JUST to point out errors. Should small gobs be throw? Instead of "around" should the large gobs be thrown with greater accuracy?
But how in any specific context? [Jumping subway turnstiles] is not a good thing. How do we minimize it at least cost? Or to be more persnickety, how do we optimize [turnstile jumping] and [turnstile jumping] prevention measures. Mutatis mutandis for street crime, net CO2 emissions, COVID spreading, gun violence, etc.
I mean...I'm no James Q. Wilson, but might I suggest that instead of the waist-high turnstyles that can in fact be easily jumped, perhaps one could invest in some full sized turnstyles instead?
I really shouldn't say anything a bout how people "feel" -- anger is just an emotion. What I'm after from Conservatives is a calm reproach of Progressive misbehavior, granting that it may stem from mistaken epistemic beliefs, not malign intent, and pointing out a preferred behavior. In other works exactly what I'm after from Progressives vis a vis Conservative misbehavior.
My sympathies lie closer to Progressives than Conservatives, so I'm likely not to be as evenhanded in practice as I should be in theory. Opining on a blog like In My Tribe is a good place to get called out for this bias as you often do.
I've consistently disagreed with Murray on "UMC liberals are really conservative". I think the proof is in the pudding of the fact that they marry and have children a lot less often. People are often fooled by a lack of divorce, but that is mostly because they aren't getting married and marrying very late.
Probably the closest to the truth is that they do genuinely not like poor people and are willing to write checks but otherwise want little to do with them. But that is pretty remote.
Is not having children less conservative than having 3 kids by 3 different men by the time one is 18? I would say that if someone doesn't want kids, then succeeding in doing so is more 'conservative' than accidentally impregnating/getting pregnant and producing a litter by sheer carelessness. If one looks at other behaviors one can assess irrespective of whether one has kids, upper middle class liberals probably are pretty behaviorally conservative. They probably have high savings rates, commit few crimes; I wouldn't be surprised if they're more likely to stand at the crosswalk when it says don't walk even if there are no cars coming.
Indeed, in that social class, being liberal is itself a conservative thing to do. One conforms to the established social norms and doesn't make waves. Most of the people I know are this type: rule-following, conformist people who get up early, don't swear, pride themselves on working a lot, listen to inoffensive music, and are all good liberals like they're supposed to be. There's no reason to think the beliefs themselves are even a serious stumbling block. After all they're surprisingly similar to Mormons, who likewise believe a bunch of ridiculous nonsense, much of which is probably inconsistent with their lifestyle.
Wordsum is vocabulary and acts as a decent IQ proxy.
In the top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.8-2.0 kids. Liberals have 0.63-0.96 kids.
In the second to top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.72-2.12 kids. Liberals have 1.04-1.21 kids.
At low IQ levels, ideology doesn't matter. But at high IQ levels it's essentially doubles or more your fertility. If all high IQ people were conservative, the entire fertility shortfall would go away.
This matches my observation of my peer group (all have at least a BA). The conservatives I know have minimum two kids, the liberals I know have maximum two kids.
Personally, I see liberals and conservatives acting out their ideology all the time, and the results for relationships and family formation are what you would expect.
> I think the proof is in the pudding of the fact that they marry and have children a lot less often
A lot less often than who? For NH whites, 2019 TFR vs maternal education data (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105234), which is the latest I could easily find, look like this:
pre HS 2.509
HS 1.823
pre AA 1.782
AA 1.359
BA 1.307
MA 1.508
PhD/prof 1.545
overall 1.610
There is a significant difference between women who never graduated from high school (I guess this includes Amish and similar groups), but other than that the differences are, I think, not dramatic enough to warrant your conclusion. If one can take advanced degrees as a proxy for UMC, UMC women have more children than the indifferently educated (AA, BA), about the same as the overall average. I should note that this TFR data is laggy, because it is based on current number of children of all women of reproductive age (usually defined as 15-45). As for marriage, recent CPS data (https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-declining-and-likely-deepening-inequality/) show that the top quintile by income has the highest currently married rate among people 33-44 (80%), well above the middle three (66%) and the bottom quintile (38%). This 80% rate has not changed significantly since 1979, which is evidence in favor of Murray's position. CPS data does not quite provide Handle's preferred metric - percent children under 18 living with both biological parents - but it has percent children under 18 living with two married parents, and in the top quintile this rate has again been stable at about 95% since 1979.
Wordsum is vocabulary and acts as a decent IQ proxy.
In the top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.8-2.0 kids. Liberals have 0.63-0.96 kids.
In the second to top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.72-2.12 kids. Liberals have 1.04-1.21 kids.
At low IQ levels, ideology doesn't matter. But at high IQ levels it's essentially doubles or more your fertility. If all high IQ people were conservative, the entire fertility shortfall would go away.
This matches my observation of my peer group (all have at least a BA). The conservatives I know have minimum two kids, the liberals I know have maximum two kids.
Personally, I see liberals and conservatives acting out their ideology all the time, and the results for relationships and family formation are what you would expect.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/liberalism-hbd-population-and-solutions-for-the-future/ is the post from which this graph comes. Jayman says it's 2000-2010 GSS data. The question is how to reconcile these two sets of numbers. One hypothesis might be that advanced degree holders on average score pretty low on Wordsum, but I don't find that very plausible. According to a GNXP post Jayman links to, 16% of the NH white population scores 9 or 10 on Wordsum. This is between a third to a half of all college-bound cohort, so it almost certainly contains not only advanced degree holders, but most BAs and many AAs. GNXP has another graph which shows that only 40% of post-BAs score 9 or 10 on Wordsum, but this graph is not broken down by race and ethnicity. Also, unfortunately neither Jayman's graph nor the CPS based numbers I quoted above give fractions of demographic for which numbers are given. This makes it difficult to interpret such features as for instance the lower number of children of extreme conservative 9-10 Wordsum women than of slightly conservative ones. We'd have to analyze data ourselves to get to the bottom. Here's what I suspect is going on, though. First, 9-10 Wordsum includes a lot of BA/AA who have the lowest TFRs in the Brookings numbers, and on the other hand quite a few NH white advanced degree holders may score below 9 on Wordsum. Second, notice that Brookings' CPS numbers give TFRs whereas Jayman's GSS data give number of children. That's not the same thing at all, and Jayman actually mentions this in his post ("this comes with the caveat that people in this age group probably aren’t quite done having children"). Given the well known effect of college on liberal self-identification of young women - i.e. there aren't that many 'slightly conservative' young women *in college* - and on the other hand the well known tendency of parents to become more conservative or at least moderate, I think most of the discrepancy is down to young women with or on track for advanced degrees, who haven't had children yet, or had just one who isn't old enough for school yet, responding that they were liberal or extremely liberal. Later on, many of these same women leave this category to bolster the moderate and slightly conservative categories, pushing up the TFR of advanced degree holders to 1.545.
And while highly educated people lean liberal, it's not like there are zero conservatives. Maybe this will change over time, but the split is not as bad as popular media portrays:
Then there is also the difference between party affiliation and ideological affiliation.
So let's say PHDs do have 1.5 TFR. It seems entirely likely that conservative PHDs hold a higher TFR then liberal PHDs. I don't think "PHDs have a 1.5 TFR, therefore extreme liberals have a 1.5 TFR" is an accurate read.
P.S. I don't know how advanced degree is defined for you, but if it includes masters in education that is going to get a lot of school teachers that vote democratic.
Not sure what the point about masters in education is - do you mean they have more children despite voting democratic and pull up the "advanced degrees" (that's supposed to be masters and PhD together, but I don't know what exactly CPS includes in those categories i.e. if MA in education counts or not) TFR? or vice-versa?
I don't doubt that there is an ideological gap. Perhaps it's not quite as huge as Jayman's numbers seem to imply on first sight, but we won't be able to settle that without analyzing the data ourselves, as the available aggregations are clearly not enough to judge. Also I think it's important to keep in mind that people don't stay in the same statistical pigeonholes - what I said about parents tending to become more conservative. This effect will depress TFR/number of children of the categories they are leaving. It's the same as if we calculated average number of children of an inner city or, to take an even more extreme example, census tract full of coeds: it will be much lower than national average, but it doesn't mean those coeds won't have children after they move out. Except the latter effect operates on geographical units and the former on temporal units. This is why TFRs broken down by small geographical units are hard to interpret when applied to such highly mobile populations as that of America and other modern countries.
In the US teachers get a massive boost in compensation if they get a masters in education, even though everyone agrees that its a joke degree. Teachers are generally at the bottom half of BA holders and likely drag down the IQ of "advanced degree" holders.
Tim Groseclose seems to have an opinion similar to West, "Groseclose combined his own findings and existing research to calculate that the average American voter has a “natural” PQ, or Political Quotient, of around 25-30, which is firmly in the conservative range."
There are three things seared into my mind whenever elite or mass opinion are mentioned. Will Wilkinson talking about how the average voter is a mass of knee jerk reactions, prejudices, and biases that amount to no coherent ideology at all. Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter with all the inherent biases of folk marxism and folk psychology that people hold, including the handful of PhDs I know with scarcely above 100 IQs. Third, the posts Arnold made more than 15 years ago about Philip Converse and “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass publics.” - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/12/notes_on_critic_1.html
"But West is suggesting that liberal sympathies for the poor are superficial."
This was demonstrated in no uncertain terms by the recent Martha's Vineyard fiasco.
In re populism
Yeah, a quarter of Britons claim to want travel agencies nationalized but that also means *three-quarters* don't. Ditto that *two-thirds* might oppose nationalizing internet providers, and I would be willing to bet that the portions who support those positions are far more likely to be socially liberal than socially conservative in the Murrian sense. There's plenty of polling that indicates the poor to lower-middle class in the US have long opposed the social policies advanced by the Democrats even though they tend to vote for that party (for now). Proposition 8 (gay marriage ban), even though eventually overturned by the judiciary, won in California in the same year the state voted for Obama and majorities voted Democratic in most other state and federal elections. The more recent shifts in Hispanic voting patterns would also seem to indicate they are more supportive of economically and socially conservative policies, to the extent that the Republican Party can be identified with those.
People tend to be conservative about what they know best, and I trust that extends to people understanding what would improve their economic circumstances. Murray's observation is not true just in rhetoric but extends to elite support for policies that enable the behaviors they eschew. That makes them far more pernicious than Billy Bob who supports the 2nd Amendment, opposes gay marriage, and wants a trade war with China.
If 66%-75% of the public polled on the side of any issue it would be considered a landslide. People have no skin in the game on politics and the natural default is 50/50, so I'd read that as strongly against in context.
The hilarious thing about that is they think travel agents are going to exist in any capacity in the near future.
I keep hearing about right wing populists that want to implement socialism, but I haven't actually seen this happen anywhere. Mostly they seem to cut taxes.
I have a feeling right wing populist economic policy may differ a bit from libertarian orthodoxy on trade and immigration, but I don't think we are going to see a lot of industries nationalized. They may push back against woke capital, but I think that is pro-capitalist (I don't want corporations being political). And admitting you are never going to scrap Medicare is not so different from lying about the fact that you will never scrap Medicare.
I'm going out on a limb and predicting the managerial class is going to care about the poors a lot, and soon, as the poors are going to be beating down their doors. This is because nearly half the country is going to be broke: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-lurks-below-surface-reason-concern
The idea that Liberals "preach" the "misbehavior" they "tolerate" but hypocritically d not themselves engage in is a funny "conservative" idea. It is true that Liberals want to reduce the consequences of much "misbehavior"/bad decisions/minority lifestyle choices and it is a good question when the reduction goes too far. I wish "progressives" would contemplate the possibility that in many contexts the reduction has gone too far or is misdirected. Likewise I wish "conservatives" would be less angry about these misdirected reductions but realize that indeed some reduction is optimal.
Perhaps people on the left could figure out a way to "reduce the consequences of 'misbehavior'' that didn't involve (usually ineffectually) throwing big gobs of other people's money around.
I agree. I just want people on the "right" to help figure out how to do that, not JUST to point out errors. Should small gobs be throw? Instead of "around" should the large gobs be thrown with greater accuracy?
Perhaps the answer is to minimize the 'misbehavior' in the first place.
But how in any specific context? [Jumping subway turnstiles] is not a good thing. How do we minimize it at least cost? Or to be more persnickety, how do we optimize [turnstile jumping] and [turnstile jumping] prevention measures. Mutatis mutandis for street crime, net CO2 emissions, COVID spreading, gun violence, etc.
I mean...I'm no James Q. Wilson, but might I suggest that instead of the waist-high turnstyles that can in fact be easily jumped, perhaps one could invest in some full sized turnstyles instead?
https://www.haywardturnstiles.com/category/full-height-turnstiles/
I can't imagine those are super expensive.
I think that's what Washington Mero is going to do.
So, conservatives shouldn't be upset if progressives make things worse. Got it.
I really shouldn't say anything a bout how people "feel" -- anger is just an emotion. What I'm after from Conservatives is a calm reproach of Progressive misbehavior, granting that it may stem from mistaken epistemic beliefs, not malign intent, and pointing out a preferred behavior. In other works exactly what I'm after from Progressives vis a vis Conservative misbehavior.
My sympathies lie closer to Progressives than Conservatives, so I'm likely not to be as evenhanded in practice as I should be in theory. Opining on a blog like In My Tribe is a good place to get called out for this bias as you often do.
I've consistently disagreed with Murray on "UMC liberals are really conservative". I think the proof is in the pudding of the fact that they marry and have children a lot less often. People are often fooled by a lack of divorce, but that is mostly because they aren't getting married and marrying very late.
Probably the closest to the truth is that they do genuinely not like poor people and are willing to write checks but otherwise want little to do with them. But that is pretty remote.
Is not having children less conservative than having 3 kids by 3 different men by the time one is 18? I would say that if someone doesn't want kids, then succeeding in doing so is more 'conservative' than accidentally impregnating/getting pregnant and producing a litter by sheer carelessness. If one looks at other behaviors one can assess irrespective of whether one has kids, upper middle class liberals probably are pretty behaviorally conservative. They probably have high savings rates, commit few crimes; I wouldn't be surprised if they're more likely to stand at the crosswalk when it says don't walk even if there are no cars coming.
Indeed, in that social class, being liberal is itself a conservative thing to do. One conforms to the established social norms and doesn't make waves. Most of the people I know are this type: rule-following, conformist people who get up early, don't swear, pride themselves on working a lot, listen to inoffensive music, and are all good liberals like they're supposed to be. There's no reason to think the beliefs themselves are even a serious stumbling block. After all they're surprisingly similar to Mormons, who likewise believe a bunch of ridiculous nonsense, much of which is probably inconsistent with their lifestyle.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/lib-cons-tfr-30-43-iq.png
Wordsum is vocabulary and acts as a decent IQ proxy.
In the top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.8-2.0 kids. Liberals have 0.63-0.96 kids.
In the second to top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.72-2.12 kids. Liberals have 1.04-1.21 kids.
At low IQ levels, ideology doesn't matter. But at high IQ levels it's essentially doubles or more your fertility. If all high IQ people were conservative, the entire fertility shortfall would go away.
This matches my observation of my peer group (all have at least a BA). The conservatives I know have minimum two kids, the liberals I know have maximum two kids.
Personally, I see liberals and conservatives acting out their ideology all the time, and the results for relationships and family formation are what you would expect.
> I think the proof is in the pudding of the fact that they marry and have children a lot less often
A lot less often than who? For NH whites, 2019 TFR vs maternal education data (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105234), which is the latest I could easily find, look like this:
pre HS 2.509
HS 1.823
pre AA 1.782
AA 1.359
BA 1.307
MA 1.508
PhD/prof 1.545
overall 1.610
There is a significant difference between women who never graduated from high school (I guess this includes Amish and similar groups), but other than that the differences are, I think, not dramatic enough to warrant your conclusion. If one can take advanced degrees as a proxy for UMC, UMC women have more children than the indifferently educated (AA, BA), about the same as the overall average. I should note that this TFR data is laggy, because it is based on current number of children of all women of reproductive age (usually defined as 15-45). As for marriage, recent CPS data (https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-declining-and-likely-deepening-inequality/) show that the top quintile by income has the highest currently married rate among people 33-44 (80%), well above the middle three (66%) and the bottom quintile (38%). This 80% rate has not changed significantly since 1979, which is evidence in favor of Murray's position. CPS data does not quite provide Handle's preferred metric - percent children under 18 living with both biological parents - but it has percent children under 18 living with two married parents, and in the top quintile this rate has again been stable at about 95% since 1979.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/lib-cons-tfr-30-43-iq.png
Wordsum is vocabulary and acts as a decent IQ proxy.
In the top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.8-2.0 kids. Liberals have 0.63-0.96 kids.
In the second to top IQ cohort conservatives have 1.72-2.12 kids. Liberals have 1.04-1.21 kids.
At low IQ levels, ideology doesn't matter. But at high IQ levels it's essentially doubles or more your fertility. If all high IQ people were conservative, the entire fertility shortfall would go away.
This matches my observation of my peer group (all have at least a BA). The conservatives I know have minimum two kids, the liberals I know have maximum two kids.
Personally, I see liberals and conservatives acting out their ideology all the time, and the results for relationships and family formation are what you would expect.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/liberalism-hbd-population-and-solutions-for-the-future/ is the post from which this graph comes. Jayman says it's 2000-2010 GSS data. The question is how to reconcile these two sets of numbers. One hypothesis might be that advanced degree holders on average score pretty low on Wordsum, but I don't find that very plausible. According to a GNXP post Jayman links to, 16% of the NH white population scores 9 or 10 on Wordsum. This is between a third to a half of all college-bound cohort, so it almost certainly contains not only advanced degree holders, but most BAs and many AAs. GNXP has another graph which shows that only 40% of post-BAs score 9 or 10 on Wordsum, but this graph is not broken down by race and ethnicity. Also, unfortunately neither Jayman's graph nor the CPS based numbers I quoted above give fractions of demographic for which numbers are given. This makes it difficult to interpret such features as for instance the lower number of children of extreme conservative 9-10 Wordsum women than of slightly conservative ones. We'd have to analyze data ourselves to get to the bottom. Here's what I suspect is going on, though. First, 9-10 Wordsum includes a lot of BA/AA who have the lowest TFRs in the Brookings numbers, and on the other hand quite a few NH white advanced degree holders may score below 9 on Wordsum. Second, notice that Brookings' CPS numbers give TFRs whereas Jayman's GSS data give number of children. That's not the same thing at all, and Jayman actually mentions this in his post ("this comes with the caveat that people in this age group probably aren’t quite done having children"). Given the well known effect of college on liberal self-identification of young women - i.e. there aren't that many 'slightly conservative' young women *in college* - and on the other hand the well known tendency of parents to become more conservative or at least moderate, I think most of the discrepancy is down to young women with or on track for advanced degrees, who haven't had children yet, or had just one who isn't old enough for school yet, responding that they were liberal or extremely liberal. Later on, many of these same women leave this category to bolster the moderate and slightly conservative categories, pushing up the TFR of advanced degree holders to 1.545.
Even with all those caveats, it's a huge gap.
And while highly educated people lean liberal, it's not like there are zero conservatives. Maybe this will change over time, but the split is not as bad as popular media portrays:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
Then there is also the difference between party affiliation and ideological affiliation.
So let's say PHDs do have 1.5 TFR. It seems entirely likely that conservative PHDs hold a higher TFR then liberal PHDs. I don't think "PHDs have a 1.5 TFR, therefore extreme liberals have a 1.5 TFR" is an accurate read.
P.S. I don't know how advanced degree is defined for you, but if it includes masters in education that is going to get a lot of school teachers that vote democratic.
Not sure what the point about masters in education is - do you mean they have more children despite voting democratic and pull up the "advanced degrees" (that's supposed to be masters and PhD together, but I don't know what exactly CPS includes in those categories i.e. if MA in education counts or not) TFR? or vice-versa?
I don't doubt that there is an ideological gap. Perhaps it's not quite as huge as Jayman's numbers seem to imply on first sight, but we won't be able to settle that without analyzing the data ourselves, as the available aggregations are clearly not enough to judge. Also I think it's important to keep in mind that people don't stay in the same statistical pigeonholes - what I said about parents tending to become more conservative. This effect will depress TFR/number of children of the categories they are leaving. It's the same as if we calculated average number of children of an inner city or, to take an even more extreme example, census tract full of coeds: it will be much lower than national average, but it doesn't mean those coeds won't have children after they move out. Except the latter effect operates on geographical units and the former on temporal units. This is why TFRs broken down by small geographical units are hard to interpret when applied to such highly mobile populations as that of America and other modern countries.
In the US teachers get a massive boost in compensation if they get a masters in education, even though everyone agrees that its a joke degree. Teachers are generally at the bottom half of BA holders and likely drag down the IQ of "advanced degree" holders.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/ctb/graduate-degree-fields
Something similar goes on with nurses.
Anyway, I have no problem stating that all those factors might narrow the gap, but its a mighty gap and I doubt a few footnotes will close it.
Tim Groseclose seems to have an opinion similar to West, "Groseclose combined his own findings and existing research to calculate that the average American voter has a “natural” PQ, or Political Quotient, of around 25-30, which is firmly in the conservative range."
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-biased-is-your-media/