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[ODP] Criminality among Norwegian immigrant populations
Admin
Abstract
A previous study found that criminality among immigrant groups in Denmark was highly predictable by their countries of origin's Islam belief, IQ, GDP and height. This study replicates the study for Norway with similar results.

PDF (layout), LATEX (source), SPSS (dataset) and LibreOffice (dataset and calculations) files attached.
As before, I think you should use as predictors the national K numbers in Meisenberg & Woodley, 2013. Other than that, this is a good study.
Admin
As before, I think you should use as predictors the national K numbers in Meisenberg & Woodley, 2013. Other than that, this is a good study.


I looked into that. First, as far as I can tell, they only cite regional/race group values, not national values. I would need to calculate them myself for each country. Second, I don't like r-K theory and have not read the theoretical underpinnings of it (i.e. Rushton's books), so I'm a bit wary to apply it. For these reasons I did not use it here or in the previous study.
OK. Then I approve the paper.
This is a sound replication of the previous study. I approve its publication.


Abstract
A previous study found that criminality among immigrant groups in Denmark was highly predictable by their countries of origin's Islam belief, IQ, GDP and height. This study replicates the study for Norway with similar results.

PDF (layout), LATEX (source), SPSS (dataset) and LibreOffice (dataset and calculations) files attached.
AbstractA previous study found that criminality among immigrant groups in Denmark was highly predictable by their countries of origin's Islam belief, IQ, GDP and height. This study replicates the study for Norway with similar results.



You wrote: "Recently I analyzed crime and fertility among immigrant groups in Denmark by their country of origin[1]. I found that they were highly predictable using information about their countries of origin using only 3 predictors..."

This is incoherent. Try:

"Recently, I decomposed the crime and fertility rates of Danish immigrants by country of origin[1]. I found that these rates could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy by three nation of origin variables: Islamic belief, average height and either national IQ or GDP. Other predictors like country of origin murder rates were not good predictors. Here I extend this analysis using two datasets from Norway. The first data set is from the social statistics agency (Statistisk Sentralbyr a). The second is from a 2011 report, "Criminality and Punishment Among Immigrants and the Rest of the Population (Kriminalitet og strablant innvandrere og vrig befolkning)" [2], which was released by the social statistics agency. "

You wrote: "Initial results showed that data for Mongolia was an extreme outlier and it was therefore deleted. Most likely due to data error."

Data error or sampling error?

You wrote: "There are a number of reasons to believe the dataset to have some systematic error that reduces all the correlations with predictors."

Could you explain why this is surprising? What, for example, was the NIQ-National crime rate correlations. And why aren't you using national crime rates as a predictor?

You wrote: "Third, calculating the correlations between the predictors (IQ, GDP, Islam) and crime rates for the individual years shows that all 11 correlations are negative for r (IQ x crime), all 11 are negative for r (GDP x crime) and 10 of 11 are positive for r (Islam x crime). These results are very unlikely if crime rates were not predictable, but expected if correlations are systematically reduced."

You could just compute the cross year joint probability.

You wrote: "Fourth, the extreme differences between immigrant groups are not believable. The most criminal group is Georgia with a rate of 79 charges per 100 persons (!).

Ok, are you weighting these groups by e.g., sample size or SQRT of population size?

You said: " I contacted the author of the report to hear if there were more information available, especially for a larger country sample set. He told me that this was not the case and that one needs to request speci_c data from the statistics agency to acquire the data. If it is like in Denmark, this can be quite costly."

Get rid of this nonsense.

You said: " Next up..."

Rewrite.
This is a good paper, but I would like to see the author clarify one point. Just what relationship is being postulated between criminality and belief in Islam? Is the author suggesting a direct relationship? In other words, belief in Islam, even among converts, leads to increased criminality. Or is the relationship more distal? In other words, most Muslims lived until recently in pastoral societies with weak State formation. Every adult male was expected to use violence pro-actively to defend himself and his family from real or perceived threats. Gene-culture co-evolution thus favoured lower thresholds for expression of anger and greater pleasure from ideation of violence.

This point is important because there is a strong tendency, particularly among "anti-jihadists" to frame this question in ideological terms. From this standpoint, the solution is therefore not to restrict Muslim immigration but rather to secularize Muslim immigrants and reduce the influence of Islam on their behaviour.

I have seen no studies on the relative criminality of practising Muslims and nonpractising Muslims, but the perception, particularly in France, is that criminality is much higher among assimilated secularized Muslims of the 2nd and 2rd generations.

It is important, here, to distinguish between "assimilation" and "acculturation." Most immigrants assimilate when they come to the West, but very few acculturate, if only because Western societies have largely become acultural. Assimilation thus becomes a process of casting off the traditions that used to constrain one's behaviour and learning to live in a much freer social environment.

This is why, in the United States, the crime rate is much higher among the 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrant communities. First-generation immigrants actually tend to have crime rates lower than the American average (although this partly reflects the ease with which they can flee the country to avoid prosecution). Americanization simply means the liquidation of traditions and belief systems , like Islam, that formerly prevented disruptive and/or antisocial behaviour.
This is a good paper, but I would like to see the author clarify one point. Just what relationship is being postulated between criminality and belief in Islam?


I suppose that to answer this question, one would have to gain access to criminality data for first, second and third generations immigrants, but it may be very difficult.
Or is the relationship more distal? In other words, most Muslims lived until recently in pastoral societies with weak State formation.


Regrading Peter's point, Gerhard Meisenberg has historic pastoral rates by nation. He used them in the paper below. If you ask, I am sure that he will send them to you. This variable wasn't a good predictor of super-K, so it might not be a good one of crime rates.

Meisenberg, G., & Woodley, M. A. (2013). Global behavioral variation: A test of differential-< i> K</i>. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(3), 273-278.
Admin
Peter and Duxide,

This is a good paper, but I would like to see the author clarify one point. Just what relationship is being postulated between criminality and belief in Islam? Is the author suggesting a direct relationship? In other words, belief in Islam, even among converts, leads to increased criminality. Or is the relationship more distal? In other words, most Muslims lived until recently in pastoral societies with weak State formation. Every adult male was expected to use violence pro-actively to defend himself and his family from real or perceived threats. Gene-culture co-evolution thus favoured lower thresholds for expression of anger and greater pleasure from ideation of violence.


In the paper I postulate no particular causal connection. I want to save discussions of causality to another paper.

I have some thoughts, of course. I think some kind of causal connection is plausible. The correlations are very high, also for the Danish data and not did become small even after using partial correlations with IQ, GDP, height as controlled. It is possible, of course, that the correlation is due to some confound, but we just haven't found it. Hopefully, others will run the data too with other predictor variables. There are a lot one could try.

I'm not particularly well learned on Islam, but supposedly Islam or just imams often preach that one should not respect the local authorities and instead follow only Islamic law (Sharia). This would make the causal model something like this:

[align=center]Model: Islam belief causes hostility or disrespect towards local authorities, and this in turn causes crime.[/align]

One can find hidden camera recordings of typical (?) imam preachings from the UK and they are quite disturbing. I collected a few I found here:

Here are the three I have in mind:
http://vimeo.com/19598947
http://vimeo.com/85362804
http://vimeo.com/85376088

I have seen no studies on the relative criminality of practising Muslims and nonpractising Muslims, but the perception, particularly in France, is that criminality is much higher among assimilated secularized Muslims of the 2nd and 2rd generations.


Me neither, but good idea. In Denmark the later generations are much more criminal than the first. One can see this in the annual "Immigrants in Denmark" reports.

Here is the most recent one (for 2013 data):
http://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/Publikationer/VisPub.aspx?cid=17961



This figure from the report (p. 99 in PDF) shows the crime rates for later immigrants by generation (first and later) and by macro-origin (western vs. non-western). As one can see the crime rates for western immigrants are lower than the Danish for first generation and about equal in the later generations. Similarly, the crime rate for first gen. non-westerns is lower than for that later gen. non-westerns.

In Denmark, one could redo the analyses with separate first gen. and later gen. numbers, but I didn't do so. This might attenuate the correlations between predictors and crime because the relative proportion of the first and later gen. changes the criminality rate. So one should do that analysis. The data are here: http://www.statistikbanken.dk/statbank5a/default.asp?w=1920

For Norway, no such data is available as far as I know so this analysis cannot be performed.

For Denmark, numbers are not yet available for 3. gen because they are still too young (discussed in the report, Chapter 6). Denmark did not start the mass immigration before the 1982 (IIRC), so they have only had that much time to breed. The data that are available in the report show that 3. gen. still do not perform as well as those of Danish origin in the educational system (Figure 6.7).
Admin
You wrote: "Recently I analyzed crime and fertility among immigrant groups in Denmark by their country of origin[1]. I found that they were highly predictable using information about their countries of origin using only 3 predictors..."

This is incoherent. Try:

"Recently, I decomposed the crime and fertility rates of Danish immigrants by country of origin[1]. I found that these rates could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy by three nation of origin variables: Islamic belief, average height and either national IQ or GDP. Other predictors like country of origin murder rates were not good predictors. Here I extend this analysis using two datasets from Norway. The first data set is from the social statistics agency (Statistisk Sentralbyr a). The second is from a 2011 report, "Criminality and Punishment Among Immigrants and the Rest of the Population (Kriminalitet og strablant innvandrere og vrig befolkning)" [2], which was released by the social statistics agency. "


I have reworded this.

You wrote: "Initial results showed that data for Mongolia was an extreme outlier and it was therefore deleted. Most likely due to data error."

Data error or sampling error?


Data error. If you look in the excel datafile, you can see that there is only crime data for years 2002 and 2003 for Mongolia. 156 and 109 charges. The population of Mongolians in these two years are 10 and 15, giving a charge per capita of 15.6 and 7.3! (cells M54 and N54 before removal). The second highest country had a charge per capita of .79 (Georgia) which as noted is already about 71 times that of the lowest country with .01 (Thailand).

The stats agency only reports crime rates for the countries with larger populations, so sampling error should not be so large.

You wrote: "There are a number of reasons to believe the dataset to have some systematic error that reduces all the correlations with predictors."

Could you explain why this is surprising? What, for example, was the NIQ-National crime rate correlations. And why aren't you using national crime rates as a predictor?


I don't think I wrote it was surprising. However, statistics from Scandinavia are generally reliable, so finding one that is not is surprising.

I'm not familiar with any cross-country comparable crime statistic. What is a crime and what is not varies from country to country and so does the justice systems etc. I chose to use murder rate because it is very easy to measure and not very dependent on specific cultural practices or justice systems and because it was available.

You wrote: "Third, calculating the correlations between the predictors (IQ, GDP, Islam) and crime rates for the individual years shows that all 11 correlations are negative for r (IQ x crime), all 11 are negative for r (GDP x crime) and 10 of 11 are positive for r (Islam x crime). These results are very unlikely if crime rates were not predictable, but expected if correlations are systematically reduced."

You could just compute the cross year joint probability.


Can you explain?

You wrote: "Fourth, the extreme differences between immigrant groups are not believable. The most criminal group is Georgia with a rate of 79 charges per 100 persons (!).

Ok, are you weighting these groups by e.g., sample size or SQRT of population size?


I have not weighed any group comparisons by SQRT of sample size. All rates are of course per capita.

You said: " I contacted the author of the report to hear if there were more information available, especially for a larger country sample set. He told me that this was not the case and that one needs to request speci_c data from the statistics agency to acquire the data. If it is like in Denmark, this can be quite costly."

Get rid of this nonsense.


Can you explain why? I think it is relevant.

You said: " Next up..."

Rewrite.


What is wrong with the current formulation?

----

I have made the above changes. I will have a native friend of mine edit the result before posting it here.

ETA: Attached the new version. It also features an updated style to confirm with Google standards.
"I think some kind of causal connection is plausible. The correlations are very high, also for the Danish data and not did become small even after using partial correlations with IQ, GDP, height as controlled. It is possible, of course, that the correlation is due to some confound, but we just haven't found it."

I believe we agree that there is a causal connection, but we differ on the nature of the connection. Is it direct or indirect? By using terms like "Islam belief", "prevalence of Islam" or simply "Islam", you create the impression that the causal connection is direct, i.e., if you control for genetic and cultural factors, belief in Islam will be associated with a greater predisposition to criminality.

This causal connection has not been demonstrated. In fact, non-practising Muslims seem to be more crime-prone than practising Muslims. In your present study, no distinction is made between the two groups. All immigrants from Muslim countries are coded as having "Islam belief".

Many Americans will similarly argue that Black on White violence is ideologically motivated, i.e., it's due to "anti-White racism." A more parsimonious explanation is that such violence is largely a spillover from the high rate of violence within the African American community. Yes, there are many cases where young Black men deliberately target Whites, but this is not so much anti-White racism as the universal tendency to seek out "soft targets." In other words, "Whites don't fight back." In general, people in European societies are not accustomed to fighting back on their own, preferring instead to put their trust in State institutions for protection. This is their Achilles heel, and many people out there are gleefully exploiting it.

This is admittedly a complex debate with many pros and cons. I don't expect you to cover it in a short paper. But please don't assume what you wish to prove. For this reason, I recommend that you use a more neutral term like "Muslim origin" instead of "Islam belief".
Admin
"I think some kind of causal connection is plausible. The correlations are very high, also for the Danish data and not did become small even after using partial correlations with IQ, GDP, height as controlled. It is possible, of course, that the correlation is due to some confound, but we just haven't found it."

I believe we agree that there is a causal connection, but we differ on the nature of the connection. Is it direct or indirect? By using terms like "Islam belief", "prevalence of Islam" or simply "Islam", you create the impression that the causal connection is direct, i.e., if you control for genetic and cultural factors, belief in Islam will be associated with a greater predisposition to criminality.


I'd rather not want to propose any causal connection in the paper at all. I only mentioned my thoughts here since you asked.

This causal connection has not been demonstrated. In fact, non-practising Muslims seem to be more crime-prone than practising Muslims. In your present study, no distinction is made between the two groups. All immigrants from Muslim countries are coded as having "Islam belief".


There is no distinction in the data. There is only the Islam rate / Muslim per capita in the country of origin. One can think of this as a proxy for Muslim per capita in Denmark. It depends on whether there is a selective migration effect for Islam belief though.

Many Americans will similarly argue that Black on White violence is ideologically motivated, i.e., it's due to "anti-White racism." A more parsimonious explanation is that such violence is largely a spillover from the high rate of violence within the African American community. Yes, there are many cases where young Black men deliberately target Whites, but this is not so much anti-White racism as the universal tendency to seek out "soft targets." In other words, "Whites don't fight back." In general, people in European societies are not accustomed to fighting back on their own, preferring instead to put their trust in State institutions for protection. This is their Achilles heel, and many people out there are gleefully exploiting it.


These belief is not very common in Denmark. Here racism is almost always thought as native racism against immigrants.

This is admittedly a complex debate with many pros and cons. I don't expect you to cover it in a short paper. But please don't assume what you wish to prove. For this reason, I recommend that you use a more neutral term like "Muslim origin" instead of "Islam belief".


The variables are about the country of origin, so "Islam belief" seems right. The whole idea is not to presume any causal relationships and just look at how well one can predict crime rates from variables about the countries of origin. After one has collected a lot of descriptive data like this, then one can begin modelling causality.

How about I add a paragraph noting that the author draws no particular causal conclusion from the paper and that terms are meant as descriptors only.
Admin
Per reviewer request, I have calculated the weighted correlations. Results are attached along with the updated datasets.

As one can see weighting generally increased correlations. The N's reported by SPSS in the weighted correlations are wrong. The N is still only max. 21. Interestingly, one can see that crime rate in Denmark correlates with being in work in Norway.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret these weighted correlations. As far as I know, it is to reduce the effect of sampling error. But the effect seems too strong when one can note that all the immigrant groups had N>1000, which means that sampling error cannot be that high.

Thoughts?
Admin
The weighted results from dataset1 (the damaged one).
The weighted results from dataset1 (the damaged one).


I'll ask a statistician friend about the weighting issue. In the meantime, I noticed that your crime variables were highly positively skewed. (Sorry!) Given this, you have to either:

( a) Transform your data e.g., log transform as shown in the example
( b) Use non parametric statistics
( c) Use robust statistics

Try (a). See example.
Admin
The weighted results from dataset1 (the damaged one).


I'll ask a statistician friend about the weighting issue. In the meantime, I noticed that your crime variables were highly positively skewed. (Sorry!) Given this, you have to either:

( a) Transform your data e.g., log transform as shown in the example
( b) Use non parametric statistics
( c) Use robust statistics

Try (a). See example.


I already noticed this and tried log transforming the crime variable in dataset1. It does increase the correlations from lowish (.2-.26) to low-mediumish (.3 to .38). However, due to the reasons mentioned in the paper I think the data are not believable to begin with. Log-transforming them IMO is beginning down the road of torturing data until they agree with you. The four Danish datasets and the other Norwegian one did not need log transformations to give medium to high correlations with the predictors, so it seems somewhat ad hoc to do it for this dataset. I don't want to get accused of 'cooking the book'.
"How about I add a paragraph noting that the author draws no particular causal conclusion from the paper and that terms are meant as descriptors only."

It would be sufficient to replace the terms "Islam", "prevalence of Islam" and "Islam belief" with the term "Muslim origin". It is possible to talk about non-practising Muslims. It is impossible to talk about non-practising Islam.
I already noticed this and tried log transforming the crime variable in dataset1. It does increase the correlations from lowish (.2-.26) to low-mediumish (.3 to .38). However, due to the reasons mentioned in the paper I think the data are not believable to begin with. Log-transforming them IMO is beginning down the road of torturing data until they agree with you. The four Danish datasets and the other Norwegian one did not need log transformations to give medium to high correlations with the predictors, so it seems somewhat ad hoc to do it for this dataset.


It's not ad hoc to transform data when it violates the assumptions of the tests you wish to conduct. Your crime variables are very far from bivariately normally distributed. This makes problematic your use of parametric tests. I'm not saying that you should transform the data so that the results agree with you, but that you should either transform the data or something so that you can justifiably use the statistics you wish to.

"I don't want to get accused of 'cooking the book.'"

So you would rather rightfully get accused of employing bad statistics?

Can you upload the original Norway crime report so that I can inspect it?