Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.
I like the following anecdote of Darwin's (though it's from quite a bit later in time):
Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spiritous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. (6. The same tastes are common to some animals much lower in the scale. Mr. A. Nichols informs me that he kept in Queensland, in Australia, three individuals of the Phaseolarctus cinereus [koalas]; and that, without having been taught in any way, they acquired a strong taste for rum, and for smoking tobacco.) Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behaviour and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected.
I am impressed that you like baboons so much that you have developed a preference for a favorite documentary about them. This conjures an image of you having a shelf full of many different baboon documentaries but having one set aside as the favorite.
Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence suggesting an infusion of Indian immigration (~5000 years ago so maybe a distinct event from this). One plausible explanation is that some Dravidian seafarers crash-landed in Australia and got absorbed by the local population. From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.
The sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post.
It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never made it past Paleolithic hunter-gathering.
If you're a remotely rational government, why would you not subsidize it? The dividends you could reap from a population with greater health, intelligence, self-control, low time-preference, etc., would be ridiculous.
Of course maybe people will want to use it for more zero-sum things like height or looks, so maybe you ban or don't subsidize that, but inequality in more positive-sum traits is unlikely.
> 90% of genetic variance in human races exists in the African continent
Counting neutral variation (the vast majority of genetic variation). You can get plenty of variation in non-coding DNA from drift without any effect on the variance in a trait. In fact, you rarely actually get effects on highly polygenic traits from drift without selection (imagine random directions chosen independently for each of the relevant alleles, and think in terms of the law of large numbers).
If you're getting this from Oded Galor or Deidre McCloskey, they're generally smart people but don't understand population genetics well.
I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....
It's a bit hard to judge since there are only a few crimes where measurement has been consistent and good, e.g., homicide and violent crime. And there you have to take into account the decline in lethality due to better medical care:
>I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....
That's true. However there are estimates that historically, during periods in peace and without severe economic hardship, the murder rates had settled at very low numbers in America (lower than today). In the data I linked it is 1/100,000 in 1800 which is lower than around 4 today, and around 50 in several cities. However, there are problems with the datasets as you mentioned, but some of those problems would make the historical homicide rate even lower than higher (i.e. better survival rate from medical care).
I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.
Why doesn't someone just ask him why he's giving the money.
He's participating the democratic process, would be interested to hear his rationale rather than a bunch of speculations about what he may or may not believe.
Chinese nationals were in the top 2 of both measures of dishonesty (which didn't correlate all that well in general, so I'm not sure "honesty" is all that easy to measure), while British nationals were in the bottom 2 of both. One of the correlations they found was that rates of honesty were correlated with rates of Protestant Christianity.
It would be interesting to see results of that game played for a million dollars. You go into a room alone and flip a coin. If you flip heads you win the million dollars. If you flip tails you win nothing.
It's also interesting that in situations like the Wells Fargo scandal, honesty didn't even matter. If you were honest, you were simply fired.
Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for this Monty Python skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8.
Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.