Sorting within an ethnic groups can produce distinct regional differences. Founder effects are powerful, as is the converse effect, boiling off.
This means that regional differences across countries like the United States reflect genetic differences between people. Even of those who accept that genes impact behavior, many like to blame these local variations on local “culture” (as if culture was some otherworldly force itself without cause). But our discoveries render that view untenable. These include many newer behavioral genetic studies using nationally representative U.S. samples. These studies find no shared environment influence, which would turn up if local cultural effects existed (see the following: on victimization, Boutwell et al 2013; on domestic violence, Barnes et al 2012; on criminality in adoptees, Beaver et al 2015a; on football participation and violence, Beaver et al 2013; on enlisting in the military, Beaver et al 2015b; on peers and academic performance, Barnes et al 2014; on peers and delinquency, Boisvert et al 2013; on handgun ownership, Barnes, Boutwell, and Beaver, 2014). In addition, there are large extended twin studies looking at politics, religiosity, and marriage that find nothing attributable to local environment (Hatemi et al 2010; Coventry & Keller, 2005; and Zietsch et al 2011, respectively). (These are in addition to the many population-wide Scandinavian studies that generally find an absence of neighborhood effects – future post)…
Different regions of the United States perform differently on various social indicators. A great many of these indicators were featured in my post More Maps of the American Nations (as well as in the earlier post Maps of the American Nations). The pattern we see above (and many other patterns) – while clearly partially the result of (continental) racial variation, isn’t solely due to such, since we see variation within the White population as well, as can be seen with White poverty rates…
With a reliable measure of the ancestral make-up of each county, analyzing each county’s characteristics and comparing these characteristics with those of the ancestral nations was a fairly straightforward endeavor:
We see that (with a few exceptions), the performance of the different ancestry groups conforms closely to what we’d expect (given the average IQ of the source country, with selective migration considered). They were able to correlate ethnic ancestry in each county with both characteristics in the source countries and with GDP per capita in each county:
All these facts should makes clear how key demography is to societal outcomes. The people make the society. If you want a better society, you must (in one way or another) get better people. This has obvious consequences for immigration and for many other matters as well
