Via Lauren Williams at Stereohyped, The New York Times' Freakanomics blog seems intent on calling into serious doubt its methodology with some of it's conclusions about "mixed-race childen."
- Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to those in which black children grow up: similar incomes, the father is much less likely to be around than in white households, etc.
- In terms of academic performance, mixed-race kids fall in between blacks and whites.
- Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average.
The really interesting result, though, is the next one:
- There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.
If you're like me, you're just a little bit curious about how exactly Steve Levitt and his buddies measured the relative "attractiveness" of its subjects. Not that Daniel and I are contesting that conclusion as it relates to ourselves, but we just kind of feel like asking the interviewer to rate the subject on a scale of 1-5, the method described in the survey, just isn't very scientific.
We haven't read the entire report yet, but we're both pretty skeptical of scientific surveys whose conclusions are remarkably similar to stereotypes that predate the Confederacy, like "If we had to pick an explanation that best fits the facts, it would be the old sociology model of mixed-race individuals as the “marginal man”: not part of either racial group and therefore torn by inner conflict," and "Mixed race adolescents – not having a natural peer group – need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted." Get it? Your "natural peer group" includes only those people who look like you.
It's true. We often get terribly anxious about mundane decisions that are infused with existential racial meaning, like whether we're going to have fried chicken or gefiltefish for lunch.
-- A. Serwer and Daniel Strauss
