This chart from the March Wall Street Journal/NORC poll was destined to go viral. It shows that the values we think of as defining America—patriotism, having children, religion, community, involvement—are falling off a cliff. And the only thing that people now value more? Money. The decline in old-fashioned values has accelerated over the last few years. In 2019, 61 percent said patriotism was very important to them. Today, that number is 38 percent. Also, just four years ago, 62 percent said the same of community involvement. Now, that number is less than half that: 27 percent.
These findings fit into a declinist narrative we are already predisposed to believe. And that’s what makes this chart so powerful and compelling. It’s exceptionally easy to draw sweeping conclusions from it. For example:
And this observer may be right about a lot of this, in a broad directional sense. But the data itself is utterly silent on his explanations for why the sudden drop: the survey didn’t ask questions about loneliness or teen mental health, so any connection to these social ills is purely speculative.
My initial reaction to these numbers was different than most. If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check.
Take a look at the zig-zaggy pattern on the community involvement question, for instance. That’s the only pro-social item on here that went up in the previous 21 years before the 2019 survey, but it’s declined by more than half in just four years without any clear inciting event explaining why. One could maybe speculate that people locked inside during the pandemic did not go out and do volunteer work, but a drop of 35 points in four years is implausible on its face.
The point here is not that the Wall Street Journal and NORC released bad data. The Journal is one of the more thoughtful media sponsors of polling and NORC is the premier survey data-collection organization in the country. Rather, the dramatically different results we see from 2019 and 2023 are because the data was collected differently. The March 2023 survey was collected via NORC’s Amerispeak, an extremely high-quality online panel. In the fine print below the chart, we can see that data from previous waves was collected via telephone survey.
Why should this matter? After all, panelists on NORC’s Amerispeak panel are recruited probabilistically, using the same random sampling methods as a telephone survey. It’s more expensive, but when when you want online data that looks as close as possible to the old gold-standard telephone survey data, you use NORC’s Amerispeak.
But survey mode still matters. Surveying the exact same types of respondents online and over the phone will yield different results. And it matters most for exactly the kinds of values questions that the Journal asked in its survey.
The basic idea is this: if I’m speaking to another human being over the phone, I am much more likely to answer in ways that make me look like an upstanding citizen, one who is patriotic and values community involvement. My answers to the same questions online will probably be more honest, since the format is impersonal and anonymous. So, the 2023 survey probably does a better job at revealing the true state of patriotism, religiosity, community involvement, and so forth. The problem is that the data from previous waves were inflated by social desirability bias—and can’t be trended with the current data to generate a neat-and-tidy viral chart like this.
Note that there’s no evidence that social desirability bias affects how people respond to political polling questions. People have for years tried to run down the “Shy Trump” theory of why the polls missed in 2016 and 2020. This theory holds that voters were afraid to admit they were voting for an uncouth figure like Trump and so they lied and said they were voting for Biden/Clinton or were undecided. Numerous research teams have tried to confirm the “Shy Trump” effect to no avail. We’re still not sure, but the problem was more likely one of Trump voters not trusting the polls and not taking surveys to begin with.
Still, the Journal’s chart says reveals something important about how information-age consumers are wired to process data. Surprising numbers and big shifts garner outsized attention—when best practice is simply to average the polls and be skeptical of outliers. That’s never more true then when these big shifts appear to confirm pre-existing media narratives.
Reality is almost always a lot more boring. We know that patriotism and religion have been on the decline for quite some time, but the rate of decline did not quintuple in the last four years—a fact that the Journal’s chart obscures by treating the latest four year increment the same as the previous 21-year one on the x-axis. For example, here’s what the trend from Gallup on pride in being an American looks like, with the 2019 level highlighted for comparison.
Pride in the country is certainly quite a bit lower than it was in 2004—just three years after the 9/11 attacks. But today’s rate of 65 percent saying they are extremely or very proud is not dramatically lower than it was in 2019, when it was 70 percent. This subtle shift did not generate waves of attention when it first came out in 2022—nothing like the 23-point drop in patriotism reported by the Journal yesterday. And there’s a clear reason for the strikingly different results. While the Journal changed its methods between its last two polls, Gallup has measured these things the same way of the years—through old-school telephone interviewing.
The researchers analyzed 11 dynastic politicians who held office during that time.
Ed Burke, the longtime 14th Ward alderman, loomed large in the study. So did other institutions, like Bernard Stone, who represented the 50th Ward for four decades. All but one of those dynastic aldermen, Marty Quinn of the 13th, have since been replaced, whether by the ballot, or by a pine or jury box. In many cases, the years- or even decades-long grip of dynastic aldermen ceded to Chicago’s burgeoning progressive movement, with storied families like Deb Mell’s in the 33rd Ward transferring to firebrand Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez.
In the course of redistricting, dynastic politicians displaced blocks that already had worse crime outcomes. Those areas also tended to be poorer and have more Black and Hispanic residents than the blocks the alders annexed during redistricting. By doing so, the alders improved city services on their new blocks and concentrated their advantage in relatively well-off areas while withholding those same benefits from other residents, researchers wrote.
However, those declines in crime rates were not sustained, said Robert Vargas, a social science professor at the University of Chicago and one of the paper’s authors. Even as crime declined in a block absorbed by a dynastic ward, that effect dissipated after a year. The same trend applied to the blocks that were redistricted out of a dynastic ward: The crime increase was a blip.
Most of Chicago’s ward dynasties have died out, but the tradition of alders using powerful committee chairmanships to benefit their wards endures. Of the 11 alders analyzed in the study, six chaired committees. While the funds for those committees should have gone to committee work, the dynastic politicians often spent them on ward services.
“Dynastic aldermen were disproportionately in these committee positions that afforded extra staffing, and it's extra staffing that enables them to serve their constituents more,” Vargas said.
He cautions that the takeaway from his study is not that dynastic wards are better for the city as a whole.
“If we're serious about reducing crime, we really need to pay attention to where the resources for crime reduction are going,” he said. “What the study does point out is that some segments of the city, these political families are one example and there could be many others, seem to be getting more than their fair share of crime-reduction resources.”
If the city finds a solution to its persistent crime issues, it’s not clear that those resources will go to the areas that need it most, he added.
“This paper offers a cautionary tale that we can't assume that whatever this intervention is, it's going to be allocated equally,” Vargas said. “There's so much work being done to try and reduce crime but once you start getting into the business of actually taking this public and finding a way to allocate the funds, that's when it begins to integrate with the political structure. Then things can get messy and you end up reproducing the same problem because the high-crime areas are the ones that tend to be less politically connected.”
Without more data on officer allocation, it’s difficult for researchers like Vargas to determine whether resources tackling the underlying issues of crime are allocated to a ward because of an alderman’s committee chairmanship or because that alderman was able to persuade police district commanders to direct more officers to their ward. A new ordinance sponsored by Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, requiring a staffing analysis of the Chicago Police Department could help shed light on where officers are deployed, Vargas said.
The city’s office of inspector general already operates a public safety dashboard showing staffing levels at police districts. The new analysis would take into account the frequency, location and types of calls for service as well as department-wide staffing levels and 911 times, Martin said.
“The idea being that you have these inputs: What are the most significant types of crime? Where and when are they committed? How would we use our existing staffing resources to better respond and investigate those crimes in the hopes that we're holding individuals accountable,” he said. “In doing so, that would help reduce the frequency with which violent crime is committed.”
Some Chicagoans frustrated with a post-COVID crime wave aren’t satisfied with the work their elected representatives are doing to combat violence. In lieu of government intervention, they’re turning to privatized solutions, such as hiring security firms to patrol their blocks. Other nonprofits like Arne Duncan’s CRED have made strides reducing crime in the city, but relying on private organizations to handle public safety poses transparency issues, Vargas argues.
“That gives them the benefit of being able to work outside of these political structures,” he said. “It comes at a cost as well, though. I can go in and look at crime data, at some of these policing and ward dynamics where resources are being allocated. When crime-reduction efforts become privatized, it becomes even harder to get data to hold these organizations accountable. . . .there's no silver-bullet solution here.”
While “size does not matter” is a universally preached dictum among the politically correct, everyday experience tells us that this can’t be the whole story—under many conditions, it clearly does. Consider the size of Woody Allen’s second favorite organ, the brain. Adjectives such as “highbrow” and “lowbrow” have their origin in the belief, much expounded by 19th-century phrenologists, of a close correspondence between a high forehead—that is, a big brain—and intelligence. Is this true? Does a bigger brain make you necessarily smarter or wiser? And is there any simple connection between the size of a nervous system, however measured, and the mental powers of the owner of this nervous system? While the answer to the first question is a conditional “yes, somewhat,” the lack of any accepted answer to the second query reveals our ignorance of how intelligent behavior comes about.
The human brain continues to grow until it reaches its peak size in the third to fourth decade of life. An MRI study of 46 adults of mainly European descent found that the average male had a brain volume of 1,274 cubic centimeters (cm3) and that the average female brain measured 1,131 cm3. Given that a quart of milk equals 946 cm3, you could pour a bit more than that into a skull without any of it spilling out. Of course, there is considerable variability in brain volume, ranging from 1,053 to 1,499 cm3 in men and between 975 and 1,398 cm3 in women. As the density of brain matter is just a little bit above that of water plus some salts, the average male brain weighs about 1,325 grams, close to the proverbial three pounds often cited in U.S. texts.
Removing brains after their owners died revealed that Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s brain broke the two-kilogram barrier, coming in at 2,021 grams, whereas writer Anatole France’s brain could barely bring half of that weight to the scale at 1,017 grams. (Note that postmortem measures are not directly comparable to data obtained from living brains.) In other words, gross brain size varies considerably across healthy adults.
What about smarts? We all know from our day-to-day interactions that some people just don’t get it and take a long time to understand a new concept; others have great mental powers, although it is impolite to dwell on such differences too much. Think of Bertie Wooster, an idle but clueless rich man, and Jeeves, his genius valet, in a series of novels by P. G. Wodehouse and their successful British adaptation to the small screen.
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Individuals differ in their ability to understand new ideas, to adapt to new environments, to learn from experience, to think abstractly, to plan and to reason. Psychologists have sought to capture these differences in mental capacities via a number of closely related concepts such as general intelligence (g, or general cognitive ability) and fluid and crystalline intelligence. These differences in people’s ability to figure things out on the spot and to retain and apply insights that they learned in the past to current circumstances are assessed by psychometric intelligence tests. These observations are reliable, in that different tests strongly correlate with one another. They are also stable across decades. That is, measures such as the intelligence quotient (IQ) can be repeatedly and reliably obtained from the same subjects nearly 70 years later.
Differences in general intelligence, assessed in this way, correlate with success in life, with social mobility and job performance, with health and with life span. In a study of one million Swedish men, an increase in IQ by one standard deviation, a measure of variability, was associated with an amazing 32 percent reduction in mortality. Smarter people do better in life. Whereas a high IQ may not predispose people to be happy or to understand the finer points of dating, the highly intelligent are more likely to be found among hedge fund managers than among supermarket checkout clerks.
What about any numerical relation between brain size and intelligence? Such correlations were difficult to establish in the past when only pathologists had access to skulls and their content. With structural MRI imaging of brain anatomy, such measurements are now routine. In healthy volunteers, total brain volume weakly correlates with intelligence, with a correlation value between 0.3 and 0.4 out of a possible 1.0. In other words, brain size accounts for between 9 and 16 percent of the overall variability in general intelligence. Functional scans, used to look for brain areas linked to particular mental activities, reveal that the parietal, temporal and frontal regions of the cortex, along with the thickness of these regions, correlate with intelligence but, again, only modestly so. Thus, on average, a bigger brain is associated with somewhat higher intelligence. Whether a big brain causes high intelligence or, more likely, whether both are caused by other factors remains unknown.
Recent experiments take into account the particular connections among neurons in certain regions of an individual’s brain, much like a neural fingerprint. They do better at predicting fluid intelligence (the capacity to solve problems in novel situations, to find and match patterns, to reason independently of specific domains of knowledge), explaining about 25 percent of the variance in this measure from one person to the next.
Our ignorance when it comes to how intelligence arises from the brain is accentuated by several further observations. As alluded to earlier, the adult male’s brain is 150 grams heavier than the female’s organ. In the neocortex, the part of the forebrain responsible for perception, memory, language and reasoning, this disparity translates to 23 billion neurons for men versus 19 billion for women. As no difference exists in the average IQ between the two genders, why is there a difference in the basic number of switching elements?
It is also well established that the cranial capacity of Homo neanderthalensis, the proverbial caveman, was 150 to 200 cm3 bigger than that of modern humans. Yet despite their larger brain, Neandertals became extinct between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens shared their European environment. What’s the point of having big brains if your small-brained cousins outcompete you?
Our lack of understanding of the multiplicity of causes that contribute to intelligence becomes even more apparent when we look outside the genus Homo. We observe that many animals are capable of sophisticated behaviors, including sensory discrimination, learning, decision-making, planning and highly adaptive social behaviors.
Consider honeybees. They can recognize faces, communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory. And a scent blown into a hive can trigger a return to the site where the bees previously encountered this odor, a type of associative memory that guides them back and that was made famous by Marcel Proust in his Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu). The insect does all of this with fewer than one million neurons that weigh around one thousandth of a gram, less than one millionth the size of the human brain. Yet are we really a million times smarter? Certainly not if I look at how well we govern ourselves.
The prevailing rule of thumb holds that the bigger the animal, the bigger its brain. After all, a bigger creature has more skin that has to be innervated and more muscles to control and requires a larger brain to service its body. Thus, it makes sense to control for overall size when studying brain magnitude. By this measure, humans have a relative brain-to-body mass of about 2 percent. What about the big mammals—elephants, dolphins and whales? Their brains far outweigh those of puny humans, up to 10 kilograms for some whales. Given their body mass, ranging from 7,000 kg (for male African elephants) up to 180,000 kg (for blue whales), their brain-to-body ratio is under a tenth of a percent. Human brains are far bigger relative to people’s sizes than those of these creatures. Smugness is not in store, though. We are outclassed by shrews, molelike mammals, whose brain takes up about 10 percent of their entire body mass. Even some birds beat us on this measure. Hmm.
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One small consolation is an invention of neuroanatomists called the encephalization quotient (EQ). It is the ratio of the mass of the brain of the species under investigation relative to a standard brain belonging to the same taxonomic group. Thus, if we consider all mammals and compare them against the cat as a reference animal (which therefore has an EQ of 1), people come out on top with an EQ of 7.5. Stated differently, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do. Apes and monkeys come in at or below five, as do dolphins and other cetaceans. We finally made it to the top, validating our ineradicable belief in humanity’s exceptionalism.
Yet it is not quite clear what all this means in terms of the cellular constituents of brains. Neuroscientists always assumed that humans have more nerve cells where it counts, in the neocortex, than any other species on the planet, no matter the size of their brain.
A 2014 study of 10 long-finned pilot whales from the Faeroe Islands plays havoc with this hypothesis. Caught as part of a local hunt in the cold waters of the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, these graceful mammals—also known as blackfish—are actually dolphins. The number of nerve cells making up their highly convolved neocortex was estimated in a few sample slices and then extrapolated to the entire structure. The total came to an astonishing 37.2 billion neurons. Astonishing because this implies that the long-finned pilot whale has about twice as many neocortical neurons as humans do!
If what matters for cognitive performance is the number of neocortical neurons, these dolphins should be smarter than all other extant creatures, including us. Whereas the highly playful and social dolphins exhibit a variety of skills, including the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, they do not possess language or any readily discernible powers of abstraction that stand out from those of other nonhuman animals. So what gives? Is the complexity of the nerve cells themselves substantially less than cells found in people, or is the way these neurons communicate or learn less sophisticated? We don’t know.
People forever ask for the single thing that distinguishes humans from all other animals, on the supposition that this one magical property would explain our evolutionary success—the reason we can build vast cities, put people on the moon, write Anna Karenina and compose Eroica. For a while it was assumed that the secret ingredient in the human brain could be a particular type of neuron, so-called spindle or von Economo neurons, named for Baron Constantin von Economo (1876–1931).
But we now know that not only great apes but also whales, dolphins and elephants have these neurons in their frontal cortex. So it is not brain size, relative brain size or absolute number of neurons that distinguishes us. Perhaps our wiring has become more streamlined, our metabolism more efficient, our synapses more sophisticated.
As Charles Darwin surmised, it is very likely a combination of a great many different factors that jointly, over the gradual course of evolution, made us distinct from other species. We are unique, but so is every other species, each in its own way.
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