Why Are There So Many Lawyers?

Listed under Heartiste: 2008.Theme

From the original article on February 13, 2008. Author: Chateau Heartiste.

In the last post discussing the Japanese embrace of all things A.I., one of the commenters mentioned that Japan’s ratio of engineers to lawyers is 10 to 1, while the U.S.’s ratio is the reverse: 1 to 10. Because I have a special contempt for most lawyer chicks which impels me to fuck them hard, deep and violently until their gratingly argumentative masculinized tough girl exterior lies in a wet spot of pent-up orgasmic release on my bedsheets, I was curious why this is so.

My first guess is similar to what commenter ‘agnostic’ wrote about the Japanese possessing an IQ profile that favors visual-spatial reasoning over verbal fluency. If this is true, we should expect to see disproportionately more Asian-American engineers than lawyers, including second and third generation Asian-Americans, compared to the rest of the U.S. population. Lawyers, for reasons unbeknownst to me and at odds with the objective evidence concerning their contribution to society and the rigor of their curriculum, have higher status in the U.S. than do engineers, so if the highly pragmatic Asians are choosing engineering over law in spite of all the social pressure to do the opposite then that would suggest an ingrained mental proclivity for the hard maths.

Another possibility may be that homogeneous societies, like Japan’s, don’t need as many lawyers because the trust factor is stronger. When everyone looks like everyone else strangers are more apt to trust one another and work cooperatively, negating the need for lawyers. Corruption is lower so the courts are less involved in business transactions. A Harvard study has even shown that more diversity reduces civic-mindedness.

Is the U.S., the premiere multicultural experiment on the world stage, overburdened with lawyers because of its diversity? Is trust so low that recruiting an army of lawyers is the only way anything can get done here anymore?

To answer this, I’ve put together a chart comparing the number of lawyers per capita to the level of diversity for each state in the U.S. The second column is the Diversity Index for the year 2000 and it is based on a Census algorithm. The higher the Diversity Index number of the state, the more likely you are to run into someone from another race or ethnicity there. The lower it is, the more the entire state will look like an extended family backyard BBQ. The third column is number of lawyers in each state per 10,000 residents as of 2001.

I’ve separated DC from the main list as an outlier. 277 lawyers per 10,000 residents! In distant second place is New York at 20 lawyers per 10,000 residents. Now I know why I can’t get away from dating lawyers in this town. They’re everywhere. The overwhelming lawyer presence goes a long way toward explaining why DC is the toughest city to game chicks. No wonder there are cat adoption shelters on every corner.

The coefficient of correlation between the diversity index and the number of lawyers for all states is 0.38, which is a moderately positive correlation. So my theory that diversity breeds lawyers has some merit.

Next: I will discover a correlation between a woman’s career success and how often she bitches about guys.

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