Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to characterize the relationship between quality of life and the percentage of Jewish persons in the states of the United States. The percentage of Jewish persons in the United States was positively correlated with number of prestigious universities, number of prestigious law schools, number of prestigious business schools, per capita income, number of physicians, number of top-rated newspapers, and number of orchestras. It was suggested that percentage of Jews is an Index of Opportunity, an index that has not been previously reported in the psychology or economics literature. Discrimination against Jews may be based on jealousy of their intelligence and success.
The purpose of the present study was to characterize the relationship of percentage Jews in the 50 U.S. states and specific intellectual and economic opportunities available in those states. This research is structured around the Lynn (2011) book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement. This book provides a thorough and comprehensive overview of the amazing achievements of Ashkenazi Jews around the world. The present study focuses on the United States because the number of states is sufficient for statistical analyses, there is relative homogeneity with respect to the main language and political and economic structure, and 39.3% of the Jews of the world live in the U.S., second only to Israel with 42.5% (Jewish Virtual Library, 2010).
Lynn (2011) uses the term “achievement quotient” to quantify Jewish achievement. As an example, an achievement quotient of 3 means that, in proportion to the population, they are three times more likely to have achieved. The following achievement quotients apply to Jews in the United States and were taken from Lynn:
1. Jews in the professions and academia. There is a large overrepresentation of Jews in the professions, with an achievement quotient of 5.8 for psychiatrists, 4.0 for dentists, 3.8 for mathematicians, 3.7 for doctors, 3.4 for writers, 3.3 for lawyers, and 1.7 for architects. There is a disproportionate number of Jews on elite university faculties with an achievement quotient of 13.3 for law, 12.6 for sociology, 10.4 for economics, 9.6 for physics, 8.9 for political science, 8.1 for history, 7.4 for philosophy, and 7.4 for mathematics.
2. Nobel Prize winners. Of the 200 American Nobel Prize winners, 62 (31%) were Jewish. Since Jews constitute about 2% of the American population, they have an achievement quotient of 10. Lynn was very conservative in not including Jews who were not born in the United States, such as Einstein. Lynn noted that 33% of the Nobel Prize winners in the second half of the twentieth century were Jewish. He said that many Jews arrived in the U.S. during the years 1881 to 1924 and had to earn their livings by skilled manual labor such as tailoring. It took awhile for the Jews to establish themselves and afford good educations for their children.
3. Mathematics. The Jewish achievement quotient is 10 for recipients of the annual William Lowell Putnam Competition of the American Mathematical Society. They have an achievement quotient of 16 for recipients of the Fields Medal or Wolf Prize.
4. Bridge. The Jewish achievement quotient is 16 for top-rated American bridge players.
5. Music. The Jewish achievement quotient is 7.2 for musical instrumentalists, 12.8 for conductors, 10.0 for virtuosi, 6.7 for composers, and 10.0 for amusement.
6. Pulitzer Prizes. Lynn reported that Jews have won 52% of the prizes for non-fiction, 15% for fiction, 20% for poetry, and 34% for drama. If we assume 2% of Americans are Jewish, the respective achievement quotients are 26.0, 7.5, 10.0, and 17.0.
7. Media. The American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) were founded and run by Jews. In 1990 Jews were CEO's in the top-10 entertainment companies. Lynn wrote, “The newspapers, too, have become largely owned by Jews.” The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and U. S. News and World Report are largely owned and run by Jews.
8. Overrepresentation of students in Ivy League universities. In 1919 the percentage of Jewish students was 20% for Harvard, 13% for Yale, 20% for Brown, 25% for Pennsylvania, and 40% for Columbia. At that time the Ivy League universities began to use various transparent ways to keep their Jewish enrollment down, such as on the basis of last names or by various intangible qualities such as ‘manliness,’ ‘uprightness,’ ‘cleanliness,’ and ‘native refinement.’ In 1957, 23% of Ivy League university students were Jewish.
It should be no surprise that Lynn (2011) regarded high intelligence as a major reason for Jewish achievement. High Jewish achievement is present in a number of different areas. High general intelligence is needed for success in these various domains.
Method
All of the data were obtained from archival sources. The percentage of Jews was obtained from the Jewish Virtual Library (2010). The 25 top-ranked law schools were obtained from top-law-schools.com (2012). The 25 best medical schools were obtained from U.S. News & World Report (2011a). The 25 top-ranked primary care medical schools were obtained from U.S. News & World Report (2011b). The 50 top-rated American universities were obtained from SAT Scores.us (2011). The 100 top-rated universities of the world were provided by ULinks.com (2011). Per capita income was obtained from the U.S. Census (2012). The percentages of persons in poverty were given by the U.S. Census (2009). The number of physicians per 100,000 population was provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (2011). The number of nurses per 100,000 was obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010). The top-rated 30 business schools were obtained from Business Week: Guide to the Best Business Schools (2003). Life expectancy was obtained from Wikipedia (2009). The top 25 newspapers in the country were provided by Infoplease (2011). The top 50 newspapers were provided by Infoplease (2011). The number of orchestras was provided by Wikipedia (2012).
Results
It was decided to correlate percentage Jewish population using both absolute numbers and numbers per 100,000 persons. They have a closely related but somewhat different meaning. If a very large and a very small state have the same per-population numbers, it means that the residents would have equal access on that variable, e.g., number of doctors. However, the larger state will have greater selectivity, e.g., different sorts of specialists and sub-specialists.
Table 1 contains the percentage Jewish and the financial, health, and orchestra variables for each state. Table 2 contains the number of criteria met for each of the states in each of the educational and newspaper categories. Table 3 contains the Spearman and Pearson correlations controlled and not controlled for population of state. It is apparent that the percentage of Jewish persons living in a state was significantly associated with more prestigious learning institutions, greater wealth, more doctors per 100,000, and high-quality newspapers. Noteworthy for low correlations were life expectancy, prestigious medical schools, and nurses per 100,000.
Percentage Jewish Population and Financial, Health, and Orchestra Variables For Each of the 50 States
Number of Criteria Met For Each Criterion-oriented Variable For Each State
Correlations Between % Jewish and Opportunity Variables
Discussion
It is a worthy hypothesis that Jews in the United States contribute to the overall quality of life. Johnson (1987) and Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending (2006) reviewed centuries of Jews being regarded as useful persons among the varied ethnicities and religions of Europe. As an example, Johnson wrote that Jewish persons played a leading role in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560's onward, because of their business and technical skills. These reports, however, are based on historical accounts rather than quantification or well-controlled research. The possibility that Jews gravitate to locations in which they can self-actualize and be successful also is a worthy hypothesis for further research. Neither hypothesis can be supported or refuted on the basis of this correlational study in isolation without including a broad constellation of information. We view our most important conceptual contribution to be that the percentage of Jews in a state is an Index of Opportunity. States with a higher percentage of Jews have better educational institutions, more physicians, and more top-rated newspapers.
The low correlations between percentage Jewish and life expectancy were not expected. In retrospect, this may be a function of the low percentage of both Jews and Blacks in the upper Midwest, Plains, and Rocky Mountain states. Table 1 of Templer and Rushton (2011) shows that Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming all have a life expectancy over 78.0 yr. and a population median of 0.70% Black. In the U.S., Blacks have lower life expectancy even when controlling for socio-economic status (Rushton, 1995). A possible reason for non-significant correlations between Jewish population percentage and prestigious medical schools is that pre-medical students with very high grades and M-CAT scores are more interested in an institution's quality than its locality. Such low and non-significant correlations, however, do not change the big picture that percentage Jewish tends to be associated with greater opportunity.
Jews live not only in the U.S. states with greater opportunity but in countries with greater opportunity (DellaPergola, 2010). In fact, 98.1% of the world's Jews live in 18 countries. These countries, in descending order, following Israel and the United States, are France, Canada, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Argentina, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Ukraine, South Africa, Hungary, Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Chile. Most of these countries have high per capita income, high mean IQ's, good universities, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and democratic governments.
The authors maintain that percentage Jewish-based Index of Opportunity could be added to other quality-of-life indices that economists and other social scientists study. Those variables are described in detail in Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) and include Index of Democratization, adult literacy rate, Human Development Index (HDI), Gender-Related Human Development Index (GDI), Economic Growth Rate (EGR), Gini Index of Inequality (GINI), Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR), Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), Corruption Perception Index (CPI), Economic Freedom Ratings (EFR), Index of Economic Freedom (IEF), and Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI). It would appear that percentage Jewish population is related to most of these variables, with greater percentages associated with more desirable characteristics.
As the current author previously said:
Just as Karl Marx posited a social class struggle, I posit an intelligence class struggle. Many intellectually dull persons and intellectually average persons are jealous of bright people. And they are angry because they are dull. It is apparent from elementary school who has and who does not have the ability to reach a high-prestige or high-income occupation. Below-average children become friends of the other below-average children, and they direct their anger toward above-average children, toward their teachers, and toward society. A child with an IQ of 130 on average is unlikely to break school windows, talk back to the teacher, or assault other children (Templer, 2004, p. 118).
The authors maintain that some of the discrimination against Jews is driven by jealousy of their high intelligence and the accomplishments that this high intelligence permits. The authors are not the first persons who have asserted such a generalization. Gilder (2009) said, “Whether driven by culture or genes, or like most behavior, an inextricable mix, the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrated. The source of anti-Semitism is Jewish superiority and excellence” (p. 32). Gilder went on to quote Maxim Gorky, an eminent Russian writer, “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.”
Prager and Telushkin (2003) maintained that anti-Semitism is caused by jealousy of the higher quality of Jewish life. They said that Jews are better educated, more charitable toward one another, have a low rate of crime, lower alcoholism rate, lower homicide rate, lower accidental death rate, and have children with a lower rate of delinquency and truancy.
In Germany prior to Hitler, Jews tended to be very successful in business and the professions. Hitler maintained that Jews were “parasitic” and had an aversion to physical labor (Goldhagen, 1996). He apparently did not want to be confronted with the fact that non-Jewish doctors and dentists and persons with Ph.D.'s also did not do physical labor. It is possible that over the centuries there has been a vicious circle in which the superior intelligence of Jews caused them to be persecuted, and the persecution has led to even greater intelligence and success. Perhaps in the massacres and pogroms and genocide there has been a tendency for the most resourceful to survive and pass on their good genes and create environments for their offspring. There has been a vast amount written about the stress on education in Jewish families. Even in one-parent families caused by divorce, education is valued very highly (Friedman, 1998).