Classification error and relative rates
Our latest big project on mugshots and race misclassification by the US law enforcement. It is currently going viral on X: You can start by reading the thread summary, or…
Norway’s big royal family marriage experiment
Historically, noble and especially royal families refused to let their children marry commoners. This would risk bad blood they said (according to movies). This practice flies in the face of…
Race and crime in Japan
(Guest post by anon.) Many are aware of disparities in crime rates among ethnic and racial groups in Western countries. But what patterns emerge in Japan, a country far from…
Migrant crime in Germany, redux
This new study is making the rounds, also in the English speaking world (e.g. Reuters): Higher proportion of migrants does not mean more crime, German institute says BERLIN, Feb 18…
The benefits of marriage
If we have to name the single largest problem with social science in itself it is that of confounding (in real-life social science, the bigger issue is probably statistical cheating…
Direct genetic evidence for ethnic differences in aggressiveness
My recent blogpost about Africans propensity to violence got some attention. In the post I noted that direct evidence was mostly missing. I've done some further reading, and discovered that…
Africans, violence and genetics
Over on Twitter/X, science journalist i/o writes: I get replies all the time under my posts that suggest or claim that wildly disproportionate black violence and the apparently unmovable US…
Is spanking your kids good or bad for them?
Administering physical (corporal) punishment has a long history. Public flogging or whipping used to be commonplace, and now they are mostly illegal, and we regard foreign countries who employ these…
Did high IQs protect top Nazis at Nuremberg?
The Nazis famously carried out a number of atrocities involving the populations under their dominion. Most famously, this involved the mass murders of Jews in Europe, but quite a number…
Money and crime: the relationship that wasn’t
There must be 10,000s of studies and news articles reporting findings that wealth or income is negatively related to crime. In other words, poverty causes crime. The popular theory being…