Only Half of Last Year's Law School Grads Are Full-Time Lawyers

Fewer than half of last year's law school graduates are employed full-time in law jobs. That is the estimate of law professor Paul Campos in The New Republic.

Campos made this calculation because law schools have been routinely lying about their graduates' employment rate. Almost all of them claimed 90% or higher were working in law jobs within a year. Lately they have been under pressure to produce more credible numbers, and have been revising their claims downwards. Still, Campos contends, they are fibbing quite a bit.

Truth is good. True numbers are better than false. Campos' main point is sound.

Still, a 50% legal employment rate might not be as bad as it sounds. There are quite a few things that law school graduates might fruitfully be doing right after law school. And many of those not employed in law right now will likely find their way into the profession as economic conditions improve.

One alternative that I am particularly interested in is how many are having children. I can't answer that question, and neither can Campos. Still, most law students are women, and most of them wait a bit after college before going to law school. So it is reasonable to expect that a significant fraction of those graduating from law school are in their prime fertility years - their late twenties or early thirties. Most probably put off having children while they were in school. So some of those who do not find full-time legal jobs right out of law school may be taking a temporary fertility break.

China's Government Suppresses Christians on Easter

I am grateful to be able to walk to Easter services with my family with the full support of my community and government.

In China the government suppresses the growing millions of Christians, especially those not in the officially recognized churches. Today a Beijing house church that had not been allowed to rent a sufficient worship space planned to hold Easter services outdoors. The Chinese police had already placed all the church leaders under house arrest. This morning they arrested members as they tried to gather at a public square for an Easter worship service.

Someday there will be freedom in China. Then, I believe, their will be a massive, home-grown evangelistic explosion there.

Machiavellians Believe in Conspiracies Because That is What They Would Do

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? Because they would join conspiracies themselves.

British psychologists Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton found that people with a machiavellian attitude toward deceiving and manipulating other people were more likely to believe in conspiracies to manipulate and deceive.

This makes me wonder what kind of people believe, as I do, that there are many "conspiracies" to help others and build up the world. Though I don't think of these as conspiracies so much as cooperation.

The Moral Majority is Gone from Young Memory

As background to today's discussion of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort, I was teaching the early history of the culture war. The students knew about many of the cultural changes of the Sixties. They knew that there was a conservative backlash. One ventured "Religious Right" as the name of the conservative mobilization.

But none of them had heard of the Moral Majority or Jerry Falwell.

When I was in college in the late '70s and early '80s, the Moral Majority was as familiar as the Tea Party is today.

Contented People Are More Likely to Vote

Baylor political scientist Patrick Flavin thought contented people would be less likely to vote, and discontented people more. Just the opposite turns out to be true.

This makes sense to me. Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort that voting is mostly a way of expressing solidarity with community values. People in the majority party or ideology are more likely to turn out to vote regularly, while the minority party or ideology is much harder to mobilize in any given constituency.

Serenity Parenting Leads to Pro-Natalism

I just read a very Gruntled Center argument. Bryan Caplan, based on twin studies and his own parenting, came to this conclusion: parenting matters less to how kids turn out than most anxious "concerted cultivation" parents think. So lighten up and enjoy your kids. He calls this "Serenity Parenting."

The corollary is more interesting: if you don't really need to run yourself ragged raising each kid, you can have more of them.

I am looking forward to reading (and blogging) his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

Social Media Builds Social Ties

The Gruntled Center is naturally interested in a blog called Gruntled Employees. Jay Shepherd writes about employment law that makes for happy employees. He had an interesting post lately, "Vote 'Yes' on Social-Media Law." He urges companies to accept social media as a fact of life, and encourage employees to use them well, rather than try to prohibit social media on the job.

One of Shepherd's arguments for a "Yes" rather than a "No" policy is "Yes, these employees can act as effective brand ambassadors for their companies, and they should be encouraged to do so."

I am not precisely an employee of Centre College, and I am not at all an employee of the Hub Coffee House. Nor do I think of the work and life of either institution as merely a brand. But I am very interested in the life and prosperity of both communities.

A real example of what Shepherd is talking about occurred while I was reading Gruntled Employees. This exchange happened on Facebook:

Samantha ___ Misses Centre College. Who's with me?

(Within minutes, 12 alums liked this status.)

I wrote (I like your sentiment in missing Centre. I am still here, sitting in the Hub. Now I am thinking about y'all.)

Ted ___ Now I miss the Hub!



By such exchanges social media help build up the ties of social life. And, incidentally, help the "brand" if it, too, builds up the ties of social life.

Virginia Commemorates Both Sides of the Civil War

Robert McDonnell, the governor of Virginia whose policies I often disagree with, has issued a solid and well-balanced declaration of April as "Civil War History in Virginia Month." I particularly appreciate this point:

The largest wartime population of African-American slaves was in Virginia, yet through their own acts of courage and resilience, as well as the actions of the United States army and federal government, they bequeathed to themselves and posterity a legacy of freedom.

Acknowledging both sides of Civil War history in Virginia is, I think, superior to the Gov. McDonnell's earlier proclamation of April as "Confederate History Month."

Yes, Sex Discrimination Did Happen and Still Does

Mrs. G. thought my last two posts were insensitive to the actual discrimination experienced by women we know, especially in our mothers' and grandmothers' generation. So, just to be clear, I of course know that sex discrimination was not just rampant more than a generation ago, it was official policy. And I know that sex discrimination still goes on. There are women right now who are paid less because they are women.

BUT we have had a sea change since the 1970s in how we think of men, women, and work. The aim of both kinds of feminism has been to open all choices to women. In this endeavor we have been hugely successful. Not completely successful, but hugely successful.

And the main point of controversy between egalitarian feminism and difference feminism is whether, given a choice, men and women would choose each option at the same rate or not. I believe the unfolding facts increasingly support the difference feminist view. The goal of having all choices equally open to men and women remains, and remains vital. But equal opportunity will not, I am convinced, produce equal outcomes.

The Wage Gap is Due to Life Choices - The Attempted Rebuttal

Yesterday I argued that the wage gap between men and women is mostly due to the different life choices that men and women, as a group, tend to make. The American Association of University Women regularly argues that the wage gap is due to discrimination and a "glass ceiling." Their most recent report is here.

The AAUW report begins with the familiar claim that women earn 77 cents to a man's dollar - a 23% wage gap. Later in the report, though, they admit that

After accounting for college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children, a 5 percent difference in the earnings of male and female college graduates one year after graduation was still unexplained.

Many factors could go into this 5 percent gap, including discrimination. However, other research has found that woman are more reluctant to negotiate their wages, and men are more likely to ask for more than they were offered.

The AAUW report goes on to cite another study that shows the wage gap growing for college-educated women and men in the decade after college. They write

A similar analysis of full-time workers 10 years after college graduation found a 12 percent unexplained difference in earnings.

However, that "similar analysis" leaves out the crucial difference between men and women in their 20s - women are likely to leave or cut back on work when they have children, while men are likely to work more when they have children.

As Susan Pinker argued in The Sexual Paradox, the more choice women have, the more they differ from men. American college-educated women in the 21st century are among the freest to choose of any group of women in the history of the world.

The Wage Gap is Due to Life Choices, 2011

It is time for our annual discussion of why men earn more than women in the "Family Life" class. This year two enterprising students shared with the class two opposing current reports on this subject. I will blog one today and the other tomorrow.

Carrie Lukas, of the Independent Women's Forum, argues that there is no male-female wage gap. Sure, the median woman's wage is about three-quarters of the median man's wage, and has been for some time. However, when you make an apples-to-apples comparison, controlling for how much men and women work, their education, experience, job sector, industry, and firm, almost all of the pay gap disappears. In fact, for jobs that require more education in our knowledge-oriented economy, women start out doing better than men.

The core of the wage gap is that women are much more likely to choose to trade pay for family time. The gap begins in the prime childbirth and child-rearing years.

The second main cause of the wage gap, and one that egalitarian feminists and difference feminists most fight over, is that women are much less likely to take jobs that require the most time, intensive effort, and responsibility - which also tend to pay more. This gap continues after the kids are grown.

Men trade success for more money and power. Women trade success for more time and to focus on just the kind of work they like. These choices tend to improve women's lives. All it costs them is money.

Even Among Very Happy Parents, Marriage Matters to Kids

Child Trends has an interesting new report comparing how well the parents get along with how well the kids are doing.

"Social competence," measures whether kids are respectful of teachers and neighbors, get along well with others, understand other people's feelings, and try to resolve conflicts with others. If the child's parents are very happy, the kids are more socially competent.

The most interesting finding to me, though, is that even in this best-off group - very happy parents, socially competent kids - the kids with married natural parents are still better off.

The social competence rate is about the same for very happy married step-parents (60%), cohabiting biological or adoptive parents (58%), and cohabiting step parents (57%).

For married biological or adoptive parents, though, the proportion of socially competent kids is significantly higher: 70%

46% of Mississippi Republicans Think Interracial Marriage Should be Illegal

Public Policy Polling surveyed Mississippi Republicans about their preference for the GOP presidential nominee next year. In the middle of that survey they found this shocker:

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.

Among the potential nominees, people who thought interracial marriage should be allowed most favored Mitt Romney, while those Republicans who thought interracial marriage should be prohibited favored Sarah Palin the most.

College Trip to a University

I am taking my son on a college-exploring trip. Our family is strongly oriented to small colleges. My son is the third child, so I have always expected that he would diverge more from his parents than the first or second child did. One form of that divergence might be that he would want to try a university for his undergraduate education.

Universities offer amazing resources for students who know just what they want to to do. Child #3, who wants to be Under-Secretary of State for East Asians Affairs, may be that student.

So, we might have to suck it up if he wants to go to Vanderbilt. It's pretty rough.

Mappiness

I nifty British experiment has begun to map happiness using iPhones. Mappiness pings iPhone users who have signed up for the project several times a day to ask them how happy they feel and what they are doing. The phone will also tell the researchers where the respondents are, and the time of day. The research project can them map which places are happiest, and what sort of features those places have. The app also keeps track of the users responses over time, creating personal happiness graphs for each person.

Christian Practice, Not Nominal Faith, Prevents Divorce

The widely-reported statistic that Christians are as likely to divorce as other people is not quite true.

Brad Wilcox, of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, reports that people who attend religious services are 35% less likely to divorce than people who do not attend religious services.

Even more intriguing, though, is his report that people who report conservative Protestant beliefs, but who do not actually attend church, are 20% more likely to divorce than secular people are.

The Ballad of Mary Magdelene

This song, by Cry, Cry, Cry, has this wonderful line:

Long ago I had my work
When I was in prime
But I gave it up and all for love
It was his career or mine

Blue Kentucky

Last Sunday I wrote about basketball as the civil religion of Kentucky.

This week, the feeling is even stronger. The University of Kentucky men's basketball team plays a Final Four game tonight. Today, our town was blue and white. In the grocery store, the bank, the coffee shop, on the street - by my count every third person was wearing blue and white and/or the word "Kentucky."

The commonwealth will slow down at 8:40. This is a binding fact among people of all classes. Civil religion's high festival is upon us.

College Couples Parting With a Handshake

I have been re-reading the wonderful anthology of marriage and courtship texts, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, collected by Amy and Leon Kass. In the selection from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is this gripping complaint:

When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their college years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life, I am struck dumb.

Bloom fears that they suffer from true apatheia, from numb, passionless souls. I think the cause is not quite as bad as that. I think many college students have absorbed an ideology that they should not settle in to adult life until they are old - say, 30. College couples have all the normal human desire to find their mate and get on with life, which in any other culture and time they would just go ahead and do. They have an idea, though, that they should go experience things before they find their spouse.

The married couples who come to my "Family Life" class are subversively suggesting, by their very lives, the alternative idea that experiencing things with your spouse makes for a great adventure.

Kids Increase Married Parents' Happiness

Some studies had found that having children did not clearly increase parents' happiness, while others found that it did. Luis Angeles has cleared up the mystery, I think: Kids increase the happiness of married parents, but decrease it for single parents and cohabiting couples.

Moreover, Angeles found that married parents' happiness increased with each child up to three kids, which he thinks is the amount of kids most married couples want to have. Married mothers were made happier by having children than married fathers were - with three kids, mothers were made about twice as happy as fathers.

[ Luis Angeles, “Children and Life Satisfaction”, Journal of Happiness Studies, 2009]

11% Extremely Satisfied With Their Lives

I was sent a tidbit from a new Gallup poll. When asked, on a five-point scale, to rate how satisfied they are with their lives, most people (58%) said they were satisfied. Eleven percent chose the strongest ranking, saying they were extremely satisfied with their lives.

Basketball as Religion

Today is one of the great movable feasts of Kentucky's civil religion - the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The feast happens for a month each year, and Kentucky gets to participate almost every year through several avatars, most especially the University of Kentucky. This year has been a heightened collective effervescence. The team beat the top-ranked team in a very close game the other night. 90% of my friends' Facebook posts for the next ten hours were about the game.

Tonight the UK teams faces off against a traditional rival power, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Which means that the Bluegrass will simply stop functioning from 5 to about 7 tonight. I bet half the households in the middle of the state, and probably a quarter of the rest, will watch or listen to the game. Facebook will be full of running commentary. Tomorrow's conversation in all venues, high and low, male and female, of every color and nominal creed, will at least touch on the game, whatever the outcome.

Which is fine. Civil religion unites. The content does not have to be the most elevated, as long as it is shared. Indeed, there is only a minority taste for the most elevated content (or the least elevated, for that matter). Civil religion faith and practice pretty much have to be middle-brow and middle-morals. But if everyone is willing to care, and share their caring, then civil society is renewed. Which is a good thing.

Humorous Daddy Blog

There are many mommy blogs. My favorite is Let's Panic About Babies!

This is a humorous daddy blog, Message With a Bottle.

Interracial Marriage is No Longer Controversial

Pew Research Center has a fine new study of attitudes toward the family changes going on in our society. They ask about attitudes toward seven family changes, such as single parenthood and gay marriage. About 1/3 accept all the changes as indifferent or good for society. About 1/3 reject almost all of them as bad for society. About 1/3 are skeptical but not rejecting.

Except one: rising rates of interracial marriage. In each of the three groups, 6 in 10 think interracial marriage makes no difference to society.

The three groups do differ significantly in whether they think interracial marriage is good for society or not. Among the Accepters and Skeptics, about 3 in 10 think it good (31% and 27%). Among the Rejecters, only half that number (15%) do.

Still, interracial marriage was a flash-point issue within living memory. Now, most people across the whole spectrum think it is not a big deal.

This is progress.

Adultery Website Pretends There is a Woman Behind It

Ashley Madison is a website that brings adulterers together. The website is very feminine in graphic style and tone.

But there is no person named Ashley Madison. It was created by Noel Biderman, a married father of two small children. His wife, after a long sigh, says the anti-marriage line that Biderman uses professionally, is not at all like him. The business is just a business.

Biderman was a sports agent, juggling the wives and mistresses of professional basketball players, when he had the idea for making money from arranging adultery. He reasoned that men would turn up for any sex site. The key was to get women to sign up - married women, not just the prostitutes who also flock to all sex sites.

Here Biderman had what I think is the critical business insight of Ashley Madison, named for the two most popular girl's names of 2002, the year he started:

"For them to go and have anonymous affairs, I was almost gonna have to create that paradigm," Biderman says. "And to do that I felt that women were going to have to feel that there was...I don't want to say a woman behind it, but definitely that they were the focal point."

The Hard Work of Combining Lab Science and Young Motherhood

A friend, Jessica Lang Kosa, has an excellent piece on how motherhood changed the direction of her work from lab science to lactation consultant. Her larger point is that this change was not a rejection of her mother's feminism, but a new direction of her own feminism from working away from her children to work with other mothers about children.

The crucial moment of unexpected redirection she describes thus:

When I first got pregnant at 28, I was a postdoctoral scientist working in genetic toxicology at MIT. I researched daycare centers and breast pumps, and assured my mentor I’d be back in 12 weeks.

Then I had a baby.

This is a familiar story that the Gruntleds and many other feminists have discovered. The path that we and the Kosas and others have followed balances family and work more than our pre-baby understanding had prepared us for.

I do wonder, though, if there is any good way to combine young motherhood and lab science - genetic toxicology, for example. It seems to me that a biology lab is about the least friendly environment for babies and small children possible. Moms doing this kind of work really have to separate work and family very thoroughly and physically. I know women who are lab scientists, and I know many science-trained mothers, but I know few women who have been able to combine intensive lab science with young motherhood.

I would welcome some good stories of "how I did it."

"Cockpit Parents" - A Step Beyond Helicopter Parents

Christine Hassler at The Huffington Post has come up with a useful new pop sociology term. Where "helicopter parents" hover over their children, "cockpit parents" run their children's lives for them.

We all have the vices of our virtues. If one of the virtues of your family is that parents and children are close, and adult children respect their parents' wisdom, you (we) are also likely to have the vice of trying to support and advise too much. Hassler offers some helpful advice to parents about how to step back from running their children's lives. Complementary advice to those grown children would be to turn down your parents' direction, even when it would, in the short run, be helpful and easy.

Delayed Marriage Causes Middle East Risings for Democracy (Partly)

Delayed marriage is a significant cause of the unrest in Middle Eastern dictatorships.

Arab societies strongly control sex outside of marriage.
Young people can't get married without a job.
Jobs are mostly controlled by the government.
The governments are corrupt and nepotism is rampant.

This produces a rising tide of educated, unemployed young people, especially young men, who can not get married - and blame the government.

Police State Libertarians

This is the first of what I am afraid will be a many, many part series.

The strongest proponents of liberty and Christianity for themselves support the most draconian controls and merciless coldness toward others they regard as dangers.

Today's case in point: a proposal by Minnesota Republicans that welfare recipients not be allowed to withdraw cash. Anyone receiving public assistance would have to conduct all their business transactions through a state-issued debit card, so the state could monitor and control their purchases.

The crucial provision of the original proposal read:

Electronic
1.11benefit transfer (EBT) debit cardholders in the general assistance program and the
1.12Minnesota supplemental aid program under chapter 256D and programs under chapter
1.13256J are prohibited from withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine or receiving
1.14cash from vendors with the EBT debit card. The EBT debit card may only be used as a
1.15debit card.




In a tiny step toward allowing some freedom to poor people, the revised bill allows welfare recipients to withdraw $20 in cash.

Facebook Fans Old Flames

The headline is "Facebook cited in 20% of divorces." The story inside, though, is that people reconnect through Facebook with old flames. I think the underlying story is that when we have intimate relations with others it leaves a connection.

In my previous posts on Premarital Sex in America I noted that the authors found that what was bad about a series of intimate relations that do not lead to marriage is not the sex, but the breaking of the ties, over and over.

I take from this that love, and even lesser intimacy, is not without cost, and should not be entered into lightly. Or, in the case of Facebook romances, re-entered into.

Tweeting Sorts By Happiness

Johan Bollen and colleagues at Indiana University have found that happier people tend to exchange tweets with other happy people, and unhappy people tend to tweet with other unhappy people.

They were just analyzing the content of the tweets, without any background data on the people sending them.

It does make sense to me. I don't tweet much, but I do blog and use Facebook. I know I am much more likely to respond to happy, or at least not unhappy, messages. I have also seen exchanges among blog commenters in which unhappy people respond to one another in long chains. These are aptly called "troll wars." I stay out of them.

Conscientiousness Leads to Long Life; Divorce Kills, Even in the Second Generation

The Terman study followed smart kids from 1921 until the last of the subjects died. A new book, The Longevity Project, mines this data for clues about what makes for a long life, and what doesn't.

The main point: conscientious persistence in long-term projects with others is the single best predictor of long life.

And the main killer?

Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain, the authors say, among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.

Millenials Don't Really Care Less About Marriage, They Just Marry Later

The Pew Research Center has a nifty study of marriage attitudes by generation. To start with, let's compare the marriage facts. Below are the proportion of each of the four most recent generations who were married when they were 18 - 29:

Millennials: 22%
Gen X: 30%
Boomers: 40%
Silents: 50%+

On the attitude side, only 30% of Millennials think making a good marriage is one of the most important things in life. At the same age, 35% of Gen Xers thought that way. (The Pew study doesn't have comparable attitude data for Boomers and Silents.)

Some have read this to mean that Millennials are starting to give up on marriage.
I read this differently.

The average age of marriage has been rising. The average age of first marriage now is 27.5 years for men, and 24.6 years for women. In the mid-'90s, when the Gen Xers were at a similar point in their generational career, the average age of first marriage was two years lower for men and for women.

It seems reasonable to me that married people rate the importance of making a good marriage higher than never-married people do. When we compare the marriage attitudes of 18 - 29 year old Millennials with Gen Xers at the same age, we are comparing a mostly unmarried group with a halfway-married-already group.

I expect that when half the Millenials are married, we will see a comparable rise in their estimate of how important it is to make a good marriage.

My Life Story

Tonight I get to speak in my favorite Centre convocation of the year: "Life Stories." The student leadership group ODK asks three professors each year to tell their life stories, in about 20 minutes apiece.

My daughters helped me put together the slides for my portion of the convocation. As I looked at the good pictures I have, I realized that they are more about family than work. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed an important clue and opportunity.

I am going to tell my life story to students as a back-and-forth balancing of career and family. I have been teaching this subject in the "Family Life" class this week. This is a topic of intense interest to students, especially to women. Much of the scholarship about family life is driven by women trying to balance their careers and their own families. I have heard many women speak on this topic, and the women who study work/life balance almost always use examples from their own lives.

I realized today, though, that I have never heard a public lecture on work/life balance, with research and personal examples, from a man.

So that will be my theme tonight. Having it all. Seeking the happy balance of career and family. Which matters to me as a man just as much as it does to most women. Sociology gives me a vocabulary to talk about it that most men don't have. And ODK has given me a platform.

Ehrenreich's Incoherent Worldview

At the end of Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich reveals her own worldview, in opposition to the positive thinking that the book criticizes.

“What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, with our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

This strikes me as a curious and unstable mix. She has a dogmatic certainty both that there is order in the world and that is not made by a being that cares about us. I can see how one might believe in a God who created both cause and effect and who regards human feelings, as most people on earth do, myself included. I can see how one could at least try, in the name of intellectual consistency, to believe that there is no God and no order, that these are both illusions we invent to comfort ourselves - though I don't know anyone who can actually stick to this hopeless view. But to insist, as Ehrenreich does, that there is both cause and effect in the world and that it has no human-regarding creator seems to me at least a very eccentric view.

Beards Help

Women "find men with full beards more ... mature."

There are other words in this story, but these are clearly the most important. :-)

The Dark Side of Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich makes a good point in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. The dark side of positive thinking is the belief that if bad things happen to you it is your fault because you had a bad attitude. She details the ways in which the purveyors of positive thinking urge their followers to banish all negative thoughts because they drew bad actions. It is a short step to conclude that if bad actions occur to someone, they must have attracted them by their bad thinking.

Ehrenreich suggests, though does not actually document, that some corporations that are very enamored of positive thinking actually fire people for having negative thoughts.

Positive thinking today focuses mostly on getting money. This is true even in "health and wealth gospel" churches, where the emphasis these days is more on the wealth than the health. This is different from the nineteenth century, when mind cure and New Thought focused more on health. The dark side of today's positive thinking, therefore, leads to the idea that if people are poor, it is their own fault. Positive thinking rejects structural explanations for poverty - global recessions, corporate outsourcing, massive layoffs, etc. - and emphasizes only individual attitudes.

This explains to me why many otherwise Christian people that I meet object to programs that help poor people. They don't usually offer economic arguments about "bad incentives" and "moral hazard." They don't offer old-fashioned Protestant work ethic arguments about "laziness" or "fecklessness" (I told you it was old-fashioned). Instead, they think that poor people have chosen to have a negative attitude, which is why they are poor. If they stay poor long enough, I think this argument goes, they will see that they need to change their attitude, to just think positively.

Academic Culture is Not Driven by the Magic of Positive Thinking

As a proponent of cheerfulness and contentment, I felt obligated to read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. She has not persuaded me to turn into a fusspot, but I will give her credit for being about 40% right.

Ehrenreich sees "positive thinking" as a kind of popular magic. At its loonier end, it claims that by simply visualizing what you want, you can make it come to you through the "law of attraction."

She finds the roots of today's positive thinking in the New Thought of the 19th century, which gave us Christian Science, the Unity Church, and the many kinds of mind cure. In the 20th century the focus shifted from envisioning health to envisioning wealth, as the hard-working Horatio Alger boys turned into the Power of Positive Thinking Dale Carnegie followers.

Ehrenreich shows that milder versions of positive thinking are endemic to corporations, megachurches, and, especially, to entrepreneurs. Which made we wonder about positive thinking in academic life. I can't think of any professors who are big consumers of motivational books, videos, or live seminars. To say the phrase "I visualize my article published in the leading journal in my field" seems weird. I can't see one academic bucking another up with "If you picture yourself as a full professor, it will come to you; name it and claim it." That just isn't how we think. Academic life is based a strong expectation that results come from work. Sure, there are many irrational factors in an academic institution, especially the large ones. But I rarely hear professors attribute their successes or failures to their ability to adjust their attitude right, which will attract success.

Academics really do believe in critical thinking, sometimes to excess. But the first great fruit of critical thinking is that we don't simply accept the magic of positive thinking.

Protestants Face Fear With Action, Then and Now

In Be Very Afraid, Robert Wuthnow offers this interesting comparison between how the first Protestants reacted to the fearful anxieties of their day, with how modern Americans react to the fearful anxieties of ours:

“The radical danger that people now fear is no longer that of roasting eternally in hell … It is the threat of life being cut off prematurely and on a massive scale that brings social chaos and perhaps destroys the planet or makes it unlivable for generations. … Yet the dominant response is action, just as it was for the Puritans. Action is driven by uncertainty. The possibility of danger is a motivating force. Taking action is a way of assuring ourselves that we are doing something – doing what we can, hoping that the search for knowledge will be rewarded.”

In each case, Wuthow, with Weber, argues against the popular idea that people deny and suppress their fears. Rather, the bias of Protestants, and the Protestant-shaped culture of America, is a bias toward action.

Alvin Wong - Happiest Man in America

Gallup has a nifty survey about happiness. They made a list of characteristics that correlate with happiness. The New York Times put these characteristics together and set out to find a person who embodied them. A married father, Chinese-American, observant Jew, successful in business - in Hawaii.

They found him, through a Honolulu synagogue: Alvin Wong.

What stands out to me in this list are the several factors that strengthen meaningful purpose in life. The core element, I think, is being a married father. Chinese Americans, and observant Jews, are both subcultures that strongly support married fatherhood. The successful business flows from sticking to the purpose of supporting your family with work, the more meaningful the better.

Hawaii is just a bonus.

Virgins Up, Sluts Down

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released their periodic National Health Statistics Report on sexual behavior. The news that has been making headlines is that virginity is up. Among women 15 - 44, the percent of virgins rose from 8.6% in 2002 to 11.3% in 2008.

I was also struck by the fact that the proportion of very promiscuous women, with 15 or more lifetime sex partners, went down over the same period, from 9.2% to 8.3%.

The proportions of women with one or two lifetime sex partners were unchanged. Together they make up a third of all women.

Something similar happened among men. The virgin proportion rose from 9.6% to 11.4%, while the very promiscuous proportion dropped from 23.2% to 21.4%.

Comparative Advantage Probably Yields a Traditional Division of Household Labor

The authors of Spousenomics say that couples are happiest if they divide chores by comparative advantage - that is, if you do what you are somewhat better at. There does have to be some rough balance of the total labor that each does for the family, too.

I am confident that if couples followed this rule, the division of household labor would skew toward a traditional gender division of tasks. Any given couple might divide tasks up in any way at all, and some couples would be very untraditional, indeed.

Nonetheless, the traditional division of labor got to be traditional for a reason. It reflects the skew in the population as a whole of the comparative advantage of the sexes. So be it.

Legislative Walkouts Are Not Good Democracy

I support the right of government workers to unionize. I think they are as likely to be exploited by their employers as private workers are. I think the attempt of Republican governors to break the public unions is wrong.

I also think legislators should stay in the legislature and fight political fights there. That is the democratic way. The right way to stall a vote to buy time to change public opinion is through the filibuster. "Filibuster by flight" is wrong.

If you lose the vote, then you lose. You reorganize and come back to fight the next election. You make your opponents' wrong-headed policies the main issue of the next election.

All the legislatures should get back to work. We'll take our lumps this time. The other side will reap the whirlwind next time.

Social Animal 5: The Main Point

The main point of David Brooks' The Social Animal is that our emotions and connections with others are the core of our being; the conscious, reasoning parts of our beings are better understood as servants of that core than masters.

Moral reasoning does not lead to moral behavior. Instead, we are more guided by intuition than reason. Our intuitions have supremacy but not dictatorship. We can encourage good moral habits, and sometimes we can consciously direct our actions even despite our moral responses, though it takes much work.

To be more moral, our best help is to interact more, to be more social, not to reason more. Our social interactions lead us to become part of institutions, which we did not build. When we inherit institutions, we feel like debtors to them and want to be stewards of our inheritance.

I will give Brooks the last word:

“The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.”

Social Animal 4: Limerence

The most useful word I learned from David Brooks' The Social Animal is "limerance" - intensive love toward another with a strong desire for reciprocation. What we most desire is connecting with what we love. This is even more rewarding than completing the connection. The mind is geared more toward predicting rewards than the rewards themselves.

“So a happy life has a recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and the outer patterns mesh.”

He reads limerence as melding together in harmony. It is not simply the fact of matching our map of the world, our information, with another person's that we value. We coat information with meaning, with emotional value. He cites a controversial theory that love is not an emotion, so much as a motivational state.

And what turns limerance at the individual level into a source of social structure is that we compete with others in order to connect. We can see this most clearly in the competition for mates, but it applies very broadly. We compete in patterned, predictable ways. These patterns are also information that we coat with meaning and emotion.

Social Animal 3: Good Character Comes from Right Perception

David Brooks' premise is that we are moved primarily by our emotions. This is especially important in understanding how we can come to have good character.

Most models of character focus on either the will or the reason. Neither work very well. They are not strong enough to overrule emotion.

Instead, the crucial step in building good character is the first one: how we perceive the situation. This is where our emotions are first engaged. Perceiving and judging are the same act.

People of good character perceive the world the right way. This makes it possible for their reason and their will to channel action in the right direction.

How we perceive the world the right way is a mystery, the result of a million good influences. The most important influences come down to:

• Being in a virtuous community;
• Seeing virtuous action; and
  
• Doing virtuous action

Social Animal 2: Marriage as Map Meld

David Brooks starts The Social Animal with a marriage and a baby. This lets him describe marriage as a "map meld," where two people gradually meld their maps of the world together.

The map meld, in turn, lets Brooks describe the minds of mammals in general as growing through "mindsight." We intertwine our lives with the lives of others. This applies to husband and wife, and to parent and child. We learn to feel what others are feeling by mirroring their actions in our minds – even if we do not mirror them in our bodies (this is the theory of "mirror neurons"). We mirror what others are feeling by interpreting the meaning of their actions.

I especially enjoyed Brooks' contention that humor is a tool we use for bonding with other people, and is itself the reward for getting our minds in sync with theirs.

Social Animal 1: Reason Lightly Guides Emotion

I have been favored with an advance copy of David Brooks' forthcoming book, The Social Animal: A Story of Love, Character, and Achievement. It is a substantial and interesting book about having a fulfilling life. Brooks makes his theoretical argument engaging by framing his philosophical ideas and empirical theories around the story of the fictional couple Harold and Erica.

Brooks' overarching idea about how people work is this:

“The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”

One of the scholars Brooks draws on is University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt expressed this idea metaphorically. Our emotions are an elephant, and our reason is the rider. That gives some idea of the relative power of the two forces in our psyche.

I like Brooks' way of putting it, because it does equal justice to science and philosophy. Our bodies have strong tendencies, which is why sociobiology is so helpful in understanding our basic instincts. But our culture has also found ways to train our habits to direct our bodies in helpful ways.

Brooks puts the reason vs. emotion argument in a way I had not thought of before. In the story he tells in The Social Animal,

“The French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses. The British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiment, wins.”

Teaching Justice to the Privileged Youth

Last summer in Theory Camp we read Michael Sandel's Justice, based on his famous Harvard course of the same name.

This month I have been helping teach a Sunday School course on justice, using videos of Sandel teaching that course in a large auditorium.

Both book and course start from very individualistic conceptions of justice and work up to the communitarian argument. In the end, Sandel argues, we should see that we also have obligations of solidarity to groups that we did not simply choose.

Something I saw from the video, that I had not noticed in reading the book, is that this course is designed to bring accomplished and privileged young people, especially young men, from their natural starting point - I am an individual responsible only for myself - to the more mature position that they are responsible to a much larger whole. Indeed, accomplished and privileged young people - Harvard students, for heaven's sake - have greater responsibility to society than other people do.

Though Sandel is teaching an enormous class, he does call upon students in each class. His assistants run around with microphones, so the students can be heard responding to the challenges he has posed for them. Sandel always asks the students' names. And again and again, the students making the individualistic arguments are men, and the students groping toward some sense of communal ethics are women. These are not all white people - this is 2011, and Harvard draws excellence from the whole world. But there is a gender skew in who makes what kind of argument. When you are watching for it, it gets almost comic.

I had a further thought as I noticed the trend of "Justice," the course. I think the whole discipline of teaching ethics is designed to get people with the fewest responsibilities to others - smart, privileged, leisured, single young men - to work their way up to a sense of their connections with the larger social world. This was true when Socrates was walking around talking to leisured bachelors, and is true today.

The practice of ethics begins with community; the teaching of ethics begins with individuals, who need instruction to understand community.

Date Tables

The one thing I most wanted to change about Centre College in my first two decades here was the seating arrangement in the dining hall. It was a big round room, full of big round tables. The fraternity men sat together in the tables around edges of the room, looking at the sorority women at the tables on the inside of the room. Independents, and the handful of couples brave enough to eat together, sat in the wings - literally marginalized.

A few years ago we tore down that building. Our new student center was designed, in part, to break up that somewhat toxic seating arrangement. And it worked. The tables are smaller, and the seating patterns are more diverse and less static.

In a journal for my "Family Life" class a student noted that now there are three kinds of seating in the dining hall:

• Round tables - where groups discuss whatever;
  
• High toppers - taller tables, well suited for people watching; and
  
• Date tables - where couples eat together, publicly proclaiming their relationship

Date tables, and the public display of relationship that they entail, have their detractors. I think, though, that they represent a large step forward from the previous culture that tended to limit much of the sober cross-sex conversation to the classroom.

No Wedding, No Womb is a Great Idea

Christelyn Karazin is a journalist who specializes in black women's issues. She has launched a blog and blogger project on one of the biggest: combating the 72% out-of-wedlock black birth rate. She has given this project the catchy name of "No Wedding, No Womb."

I think the rising out-of-wedlock birth rate is one of the most important sources of national problems. In no community is this problem greater or more pressing than among African Americans. I have long thought the major initiative to do something about it will have to come from black women. Therefore I am especially glad to see "No Wedding, No Womb," and commend Christelyn Karazin's efforts to everyone.

Fertile Women Are Most Attractive to Men - Unless the Men Are Already Committed to Another Women

A nifty experiment put men in a room with women who were at various stages of their monthly fertility cycle - unbeknownst to the men. The men were then asked to rate the women's relative attractiveness.

One interesting finding is that men rated women differently depending on where the women were in their cycle, even though there was no obvious visual sign of their fertility.

The more surprising finding is that the single men found the most fertile women most attractive, but men in a relationship found the most fertile women least attractive.

This seems to me a subtle chemical defense of marriage that is going on in men.

Are Actions "Direct Communication?"

In the "Family Life" class we are discussing gender differences in communication.

One difference is that women are more inclined to communicate their love in words, while men do it with actions. To take an example we used in class, a woman complained that her husband never told her that he loved her. "What do you mean," says he, "I washed your car, didn't I?"

Another difference is that men are more likely to be direct in speech - directly addressing a topic, and speaking directly to the person they are trying to communicate with. Women are more likely to be indirect - introducing the subject indirectly, and speaking to a third party in the expectation that the message will eventually get back to the person they are trying to communicate with.

One female student took communicating love through actions - a man washing his wife's car - to be indirect. I realized from this conversation that I had simply been assuming actions to be direct communication. The difference illustrates the point we had been discussing.

I would be curious to know your reactions to this question. It would probably be useful to name your gender in your response, if that is not obvious.

This is the Most Exciting Moment in World Politics Since the Fall of the Wall

The great moment when the Berlin Wall fell was an era when two great bastions of tyranny fell - most of the Communist states, and most of the Latin American capitalist authoritarian states. The world is a freer, richer, and more peaceful place because of those two great revolutions.

They were revolutions not just of one nation or another, but of many nations suffering under similar ideological regimes. The several revolutions fed off one another as they rose up. And, just as important, those ideological regimes lost heart, lost faith in their own legitimacy. The continuous pressure and example from the democracies was vital to both encourage the people and discourage the regimes. The democracies, the United States included, have many faults and mixed motives, and we also supported many of those oppressive regimes for a long time. But in that glorious moment, the good causes and good reasons came together.

The Muslim states are the last major bastion of ideological authoritarianism on earth today. We are witnessing a similar combination of happy forces against that ideology. There are sufficient pro-democracy populations in most Muslim nations to rise up, and to rise up with amazing discipline. The ideology that authoritarianism is a Muslim value is tottering, and is being opposed by Muslim intellectuals, journalists, and some religious leaders. And the democracies seem willing, even eager, to support democratic regimes in Muslim nations - even the ones with oil.

The news of the next few months will no doubt bring blood and horror, as some regimes - the Libyan, for example - fight back with brutal oppression. And we do not know what kind of regime Egypt will end up with. After the Wall fell, after all, the Russians gave up their empire, but the Chinese did massacre their democrats at Tienanmen Square. Some tyrannies will win this round, and some oppressed people will not even try to rise up.

I believe that when the dust settles, though, there will be, say, half a dozen Muslim democracies, and a several less oppressive Muslim regimes. Most importantly, the connection between Islam and authoritarian ideology will be broken.

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" Has Fine Ethnographic Film In It

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is a kind of documentary of poor white Southerners living extreme lives. It is framed by the commentary of people who are not poor white Southerners, notably musician Jim White, who like to put themselves near extreme lives in order to draw upon other people's passion and authenticity.

I think the commentary is mostly not helpful, especially when they try to claim that these scenes of people at the margins of American society represent the South as a whole.

I do commend, though, the segments shot in a bar, a prison, a coal mine, and Pentecostal church. These are fine bits of life. The people in all these places are clearly from the same place in society. They repeatedly talk about living a self-destructive life as young people. Some turn to church to turn their lives around. Some do not. Both, though, talk about God - and their willful attempts to follow God and live right - as their only hope for a decent life.

I think a fine short film could be made from just these scenes, with a neutral voiceover describing where, exactly, they are shot.

A big part of the film was showing off the performances of musicians described in all the commentary as "alt.country." I don't know enough about the genre to know if these were significant performers within it. The songs themselves were not my cup of tea; that is not essential to what I thought was most valuable in the film.

The filmed bits of real life, though, are worth the visit.

Financing the Ring

We had our first guest couple visit the "Family Life" class yesterday - the Newlyweds.

The piquant detail that the students most enjoyed: he paid for the engagement ring by selling his video games.

Semi-Coercive Medical Care for the Self-Destructive

I was talking to a doctor friend today. She treats many alcoholics, drug addicts, and heavy-eating diabetics who come to the hospital regularly to be cleaned up - only to go right back to their self-destruction.

Medical ethics and the law mean that these very sick patients can't simply be turned away, even if they have been treated and taught better many times before.

This is a "moral hazard" problem - when we subsidize help for people's problems, some of them will produce more of that problem than they would if they were on their own. That is the hazard of helping. Yet it is a great moral good when the able help the hurting.

I do not think there is an excellent solution to this problem.

The best solution I can think of is that the persistently self-destructive can have the free or subsidized care that they get now - at the cost of losing some freedom to damage themselves. For example, after the nth detoxification for an alcoholic, they have to take Antabuse, either implanted (if such a thing exists) or show up at a location for to be observed and certified while taking it. Accepting the detoxification would legally constitute voluntary acceptance of this restriction for a time - say, a year.

The Great Black Return Migration

A century ago the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to the northern cities began. They left to escape caste oppression, racism, lynching, and massive economic discrimination. Fifty years later, half of African Americans lived outside the South. Moreover, black Americans had changed from overwhelmingly rural peasants to overwhelmingly urban proletariat.

Now, fifty years further on, there is a significant move of African Americans back to the South. This great migration, though, is led by the middle class and professional class. They are heading to Sunbelt cities, not the "black belt" farm country their great grandparents left. Georgia has displaced New York as the state with the most African Americans. Atlanta has displaced Chicago as the city with the second most African Americans, after New York City.

I take it as a great thing, a measure of the huge progress that the United States has made in overcoming our original sin - anti-black racism. Fifty years ago, the American South was the last place black Americans would want to move to. Today, the South is as appealing to black Americans as it is to everyone else - which is quite a bit.

Facebook Versus the Church

Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University, makes a strong argument that "Facebook killed the church." His conclusion is this:

Why are Millennials leaving the church? It's simple. Mobile social computing has replaced the main draw of the traditional church: Social connection and affiliation.

I think Beck's insight is sound. The main appeal of any voluntary organization is the social connection with the people there. If it is to serve a function beyond social connection, then the activity that people do together has to be worthwhile in itself. Facebook can't replace, for example, playing sports together, no matter how much you like the camaraderie of the team - playing the sport requires others, and playing has a value to you beyond the social connection.

So what is the value of the activity of church? The stated goal is to worship God. I think it is a well attested sociological fact that collective worship can be more powerful than individual devotion - perhaps the most powerful of all human activities. But emotionally powerful worship is rare in ordinary church life, especially for young people.

My church is the kind of church that builds powerful social connections from regular, face-to-face interaction. Ours is a small-town church that plays a significant role in our town. It makes sense for us to get together regularly at church.

Most millennials are more likely to go to large, self-contained churches that could be located anywhere. The social space of a megachurch is not that much different from the social space of Facebook. They do not need church to make their social connections, which they then nurture daily by virtual means.

Of course, it helps that the people in my church are so old that most of them have not adapted to Facebook. But that will gradually change.

Free Public Radio From Federal Funding

There are few bigger fans of public radio than the Gruntleds. We start our day with "Morning Edition" each day. We are donors every year. Local public radio stations are the best network of local political reporting. Our local station, WUKY, has the best mix of music during the day. I have long advised students to begin each day with "National Professors Radio," just as most of their teachers do.

I think public radio would be better off if it were freed from federal funding.

Members like me can and should support the best news network on American radio. Rich people who like depth reporting should endow their local station and the whole network for everyone.

Moreover, National Public Radio would be better off if it were free from the endless threats from its opponents.

The time has come. Free Public Radio from Federal Fetters.

Right-Sizing a Family House

Yesterday I wrote about a family who found that their big dream house was separating them as a family. This led to some interesting personal replies and links about what is a good size for a family house.

We used to live in a lovely small house of about 1100 square feet. Facing the prospect of three growing kids and one bathroom, we moved down the street to a house of about 1800 square feet with two more half baths. It is hard to know how exactly to measure the space - we have an attic which makes a wonderful teen bedroom, despite the 4-foot ceilings in most of it. Likewise, the dry basement is good for storing things, though it is not living area.

In any case, I find the size of our house to be ample for our family. I am delighted that our house has long been the place that teenagers hang out and sleep over. Last Christmas we had our college girls back with their friends and a horde of teens in the attic - all at the same time. Mrs. G. and I sat by the fire, reveling in the life of the house.

As I look at the websites offering advice on a good square footage for families, the modest consensus seems to be about 200 per person. We are well over that. I have been trying to figure out how a smaller space would work for us. None of the kids share a room. We also have an old outside porch that has been enclosed, which is additional space, though a bit awkward. Still, we seem to be over the recommended family-sized house, without feeling too spread out. Hmm; perhaps I shouldn't count the attic and basement.

As I think about how we use the house, we do seem cozier. We tend to gather together when we are all home. Still, as I imagine what we would have to do with a room lopped off of each floor, we could adjust well.

I think one of the things that makes McMansions so hard on families is that each room tends to be large, larger than the family needs even if they were all together at once. That may be the next frontier in thinking about family-sizing a house.

The Power of Half of Our Too-Big House

The Salwen family were living a comfortable upper-middle class life. Hannah, a tender-hearted fourteen year old, was moved by the plight of the have-nots when her family had so much. This story is probably repeated in most upper-middle families.

What made the Salwens notable is that Hannah's parents were moved by her argument. The family cut their expenditures in half, so they could give to others more. They have written about their new life in The Power of Half: One Family's Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back.

What particularly struck me in their story is that the family's biggest move was to sell their "dream house" in suburban Atlanta and move into a house half that size. I don't know the exact sizes of these houses, but I have seen suburban Atlanta upper-middle class neighborhoods, and they can run to quite large. Kevin Salwen, the father in the family, reported the unexpected effect of living in their large dream house:

In our big house, we stopped communicating. We'd scatter to different rooms, far from one another physically and spiritually. The house actually began to weaken our love, or at least our ability to express that love.

I think the richer classes in America are often afflicted with this unexpected problem: their houses are too big for their families to live in as families. The much-desired structure actually undermines family life.

Perhaps a silver lining of the bursting of the housing bubble is that more people will want more modest houses, with manageable mortgages. And the unexpected benefit will be greater intimacy in their families.

Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator

I do learn interesting things from Malcolm Gladwell, but I also find his books a bit precious.

Evidently, other share this feeling: Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.

Premarital Sex 5: The Main Point

Most emerging adults engage in premarital sex. This has been true for awhile. What is new in this generation is that they have fully sexual relationships which they do not expect will lead to marriage.

Many think that getting broad sexual experience will help their later marriages. Some think that sex is no big deal. A few think that introducing sex early in a relationship will speed it along to true intimacy and love. They are all wrong.

The earlier sex is introduced in a relationship, the shorter it is likely to be.

Women tend to be emotionally hurt by sexual relationships that go nowhere, even when they think they won't care.

Men and women are scarred by broken relationships. The more broken relationships we have in our past, the harder it is to make a secure marriage in the future.

Interestingly, Regnerus and Uecker found that the intercourse itself was a positive factor in the quality of the relationship while it was happening, and even afterward. But that positive effect was outweighed by the negative of a broken relationship, and a broken sexual relationship was even more negative than a non-sexual one.

Premarital Sex 4: Drinking

Regnerus and Uecker found a pretty straightforward connection between drinking and casual sex:

“One in three women who drink almost every day reports having had sex with someone the first time they met, a number even higher than their male counterparts (at 29 percent).” (91)

“drinking does have a strong, linear, and enduring connection to the formation of casual sexual relationships: the more alcohol, the greater the likelihood of sex.” (280, n. 11)

Their research shows that young women who were sexually abused or strongly pressured into sex in high school or younger are more prone to casual sex or to sex at the beginning of what they hope will be a relationship. We know from other research that fatherless girls are more likely to turn to sex earlier and with older men.

A running theme of Premarital Sex in America is that emerging adults follow a small number of standard "scripts" about sex that shape what they think is normal. I think that some young women follow a script that says that casual sex is a quick way to get men to pay attention to them (which is true). But they also experience that casual sex and broken relationships hurt them, even if they try to tell themselves that it shouldn't.

Putting these facts together, I think young women who follow the casual sex script, even though it hurts them, use alcohol to self-medicate against the pain that their script - their lives - are causing them. Drunkenness provides a socially understandable excuse and fuzzes their memory of what happened.

Premarital Sex 3: Who Has Sex the Most?

Yesterday we looked at which unmarried young adults were likely to be virgins. Today we look at the opposite end of the spectrum in the same group.

Regnerus and Uecker start with a bit of bracing realism: “Men report more sexual partners than women do. Period. Everywhere.” This is not a false stereotype, nor a construct of our culture. How is this mathematically possible? Because some women have sex with many men.

They present the figures on how many sex partners these young adults, 18 - 23, have had, broken out by sex, ethnicity, education level, religiosity, parents' marital status, drinking habits, risk-taking habits, and other characteristics. Since real people are combinations of these categories, they also make a list of some common combinations. They then ask, what proportion of this group has had five or more sex partners?

The lowest category was not surprising to me:

Hispanic women who have gone to college, attend Mass, and have married parents: 0.6%

The second highest category was not a big surprise, either:

Black men, not in college, who first had sex before 16, and like risks: 58%

The highest category - the group most likely to have had five or more sex partners before age 23 - did surprise me:

White women who drink regularly and have had an abortion: 73%

Premarital Sex 2: Who Are the Virgins?

Regenerus and Uecker estimate that at 18, the threshold of emerging adulthood, 1/3 are still virgins. Who are most likely to be virgins?

• In college
• Religious
• Not prone to getting drunk
• Do not think of themselves as popular

Some subgroups that are especially likely to choose to delay sex:

• Asian men
• Regular churchgoers - men more than women
• Politically conservative women

The role of physical attractiveness is interesting in predicting sexual activity. In their interviews, the Texas team rated the physical attractiveness of their subjects, as well as asking the subjects to rate themselves. The actual physical attractiveness of the young adults they talked to was not correlated with whether they were virgins or not. However, people who thought they were attractive - regardless of what the interviewer thought - were more likely to be sexually active.

The basic fact of sexual attraction is that any willing woman can find a man for sex, especially among young adults. What needs to be explained, then, is why some choose not to. Young adults who are still virgins have a reason and a support structure that helps them stick to their choice.

The main reason is they want to finish their education, and sometimes get their careers launched, first. College students, and especially Asian men in school, are particularly moved by this reason.

The main support structure is a religious community. This is a complex matter, though: evangelical Protestants are more likely to have sex than mainline Protestants. Regnerus and Uecker argue that evangelicalism is such a relational, pro-marriage, pro-family culture that it makes sex more likely - in part because it also supports marriage and family life if they do get pregnant. Episcopalians and Presbyterians were more likely to be virgins: they were more likely to have education and career plans that would be derailed by early pregnancy.

Premarital Sex 1: They Don't Expect Sex to Lead to Marriage

This week I will be blogging on Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker's Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying. This is a fine, large empirical study that will be the standard work on this question for some time.

They are looking at "emerging adults," 18 - 23, who rushed through their adolescence, only to be in a holding pattern before full adulthood until their mid or even late '20s. Nearly all of them want to marry, but they connect marriage with having a job and being ready for kids - which is not where they are yet. On the other hand, they do not connect sex with either marriage or children. Instead, sex is something that women see as a natural part of a romantic relationship, even if it doesn't lead to marriage. Men don't even insist on the romantic relationship as a setting for sex, though they accept that rule if women insist on it. As a result, 84% of the unmarried emerging adults are not virgins, and most of them have sex fairly regularly.

Premarital sex is certainly not new. What is new, Regnerus and Uecker conclude, is that it is no longer connected in the minds of young adults with marriage, at least not to the person you are in a relationship with now. That, they say, is a sea change in our sexual scripts.

The Sort of Thing That Gives Christianity A Good Name

This is a real spirit lifter:

Egyptian Christians formed a massive human shield to protect their Muslim countrymen as they prayed during the violent protests.

Skin Graft Gun is an Exhilarating Good Thing

The long, painful, and dangerous process of skin grafts seems to have taken a giant leap forward. This is such a "wow!" story that it worth a whole day of hopefulness.

A World of Democratic States

The Muslim world is the major ideological holdout against democracy.

To be sure, there are still a few "Communist" states that justify one-party rule with a veneer of ideology. Yet nearly all of them have become market capitalist states in fact. I think it is only a matter of time - short time - before the middle classes being created by capitalism in those places demand a say in the government.

There are also military dictatorships and naked kleptocracies. This will always be true, I think - sometimes gangs get into power.

And there will always be organized criminal gangs in the poorest places, fighting with the legitimate authorities for control.

But since the end of the Cold War there has been only one large bloc of states that ideologically resist, if not reject, the idea of democracy - the Muslim states from Morocco to Indonesia. Turkey has been a Muslim nation with a democratic state for a long time, but it did so at the cost of a fierce secularism. Several Muslim nations have had elections, but they have had a very hard time holding two free elections on schedule, in a row.

Yet it is clear to me that there is a large core of pro-democracy Muslims in every Muslim nation, concentrated in the sectors that are connected to the world economy. If the wave of pro-democracy movements sweeping the Muslim world right now were to bear fruit in several states at once, the back would be broken of Islamic ideological resistance to democracy.

If the Muslim world became predominantly democratic, there is not now another serious anti-democratic ideology capable of creating a bloc of states. There would still be islands of tyranny, and there would still be plenty for democratic states to argue about, both internally and with each other. But we can imagine a world, within this generation, of democratic states.

Nurturing the Fragile Flower of Muslim Democracy

A great good thing may be happening in the world. Massive movements against dictatorship and for democracy have broken out in Egypt and Tunisia. Anti-dictator protesters are in the street in Yemen. Polite crowds pushing for parliamentary monarchy are on the move in Jordan. Massive street protests for free elections were suppressed recently in Iran, but the sentiment has not been crushed. The one great example of democracy in a Muslim nation, Turkey, has seen a Muslim party come to power without destroying democracy or the secular state.

The most encouraging thing to me about these movements is that they are led by local leaders of civil society organizations, who have grown up in uneasy independence from the state. There are, of course, dangerous people, secular and religious, who want to exploit this unrest. People just like them are in power now. But the crowds in the streets have been surprisingly disciplined. They seem focused on getting the bad regime out, and creating a legitimately elected regime in its place. What happens after that is up to the course of normal politics.

The second most encouraging thing to me has been the restraint and quiet positive nudges from the world powers. The U.S. and European governments seem to be helping the democracy movement, as much by staying out the way as by not propping up the dictators. The Russians, Japanese, and Indians seem not to be making things worse. The Chinese have been hiding the pro-democracy story from their people, not surprisingly, but so far have made no openly disruptive moves.

If there were a wave of democratic movements in the Muslim heartland the world would be a better place.

The Lesson of Vietnam and Middle Eastern Democracy

Elections were scheduled for 1956 in north and south Vietnam to create a government for a unified state. When it became clear that the Communist Party would win the election in the north, the strongman in the south refused to participate. He was backed up by the U.S. government. Instead, prime minister Diem rigged a referendum, in which he "won" 98.2% of the vote, and declared a separate state in the South. Thereafter, the U.S. backed an illegitimate government, which we later helped overthrow in an even less legitimate coup. After 20 years and millions dead, we finally gave up.

The Vietnamese Communists were, indeed, communists. They would have created a centrally controlled economy, and limited political freedom, no matter what we did. However, they were nationalists first, fighting what they regarded as a war of national liberation against the French. Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist, Communist leader, appealed to the United States for help, and quoted the Declaration of Independence.

I believe that if we had supported democracy, Vietnam would have held elections in 1956. If we had spent our political capital promoting democracy, instead of merely anti-communism, we might have pushed for free elections, commitment to future free elections, and protections for religious groups that feared persecution. Ho would likely have won. He would have made a communist, or at least a socialist, state. BUT if we had supported democracy, and honored the results of the election even if our opponents won, the whole disastrous Vietnam war could have been avoided. Vietnam would be, at least, the kind of market socialism that it is today, without the decades of catastrophe in between.

If the United States supports democracy even when our opponents win, we will serve our interests, and the good of other nations, better than we do when we accept dictatorship in the name of stability and short-term gain.

If all the Middle Eastern dictatorships held free elections, some of them would be won by anti-American groups. But if we support the legitimacy of democratically elected governments over and over again, their periods of anti-Americanism will be shorter and less violent. Indeed, if we supported democracy consistently, there would be much less anti-Americanism to begin with.

Democratic Dominoes in the Middle East

I am very hopeful about the possibility of a good "domino effect" producing a series of democratic states in the Middle East. Egypt is the most hopeful, with Tunisia close behind. Yemen is imaginable, though a long shot. The new nation of South Sudan, or whatever it will be called, is likely to at least to attempt to begin as a democracy.

Some friends to my right politically are worried that people in that region are not culturally ready for democracy, and fear that removing useful dictators will create a power vacuum for something worse. This is, of course, a real possibility, as Somalia shows. Nonetheless, I am very hopeful about a democratic movement that begins in massive, peaceful street protests, supported by a varied (and competing) set of opposition groups.

Other people on the news have been worried that free elections might bring to power people we do not like. Liz Cheney, who supported the Palestinian elections in 2006, now thinks they were a mistake because they brought to power a group she does not like. I think this position is based on a legitimate fear, but also on a basic misunderstanding of democracy. There is no contradiction in a democratic nation electing a government that opposes other democratic nations, including opposing the United States. Indeed, if the U.S. has supported a dictatorship that prevented democracy, we should expect that the first free government would be anti-American.

Democratic governments, though, tend to moderate over time and to get along with others. This does not even take very long; the knowledge that another election is coming soon moderates extremists now. In general, democracy is good for peace, freedom, and prosperity. The people tend not to elect governments that keep repressing them. The people tend not to elect governments that make big wars which require popular sacrifice and interfere with trade. If there were a wave of democratic revolutions in the Middle East, it is likely that some of the first governments would be anti-American, and some would be more strongly Muslim (these are not at all the same thing). Even so, I believe the U.S. should support the democracy movements in the Middle East, and in all Muslim lands. This will create more moderate states that are less repressive of their own people, less threatening to Israel and the West, and better partners to the U.S.

The Young Are Embracing "Mixed Race"

The New York Times has a nifty story about the younger generation choosing to identify more as "mixed race." I think the Census Bureau made a sensible decision in 2000 to allow people to choose combinations from broad array of races and ethnicities. The current younger generation embraces it.

I think, though, that two generations from now, most of the "races" that we now talk about will be archaic. And America will never have a "minority majority," but will have absorbed most third-generation-plus Americans into the great American ethnicity.

Does Jesus Require Us to Carry Guns

A Georgia church and the organization GeorgiaCarry.org filed suit against a law prohibiting carry guns in a church. The GeorgiaCarry.org president offered this argument against the law, which is a new one to me:

Stone wrote in a filing that his “motivation to carry a firearm as a matter of habit derives from one of my Lord's last recorded statements at the ‘last supper,’ that ‘whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one ... I believe that this injunction requires me to obtain, keep and carry a firearm wherever I happen to be.”

Ayn Rand Goes on Medicare

Ayn Rand's brand of libertarianism has always puzzled me. I don't think her vision of utterly independent individuals, only a few of whom are competent and forever under siege by the parasites, is at all like real human life. Even more puzzling, I don't understand why many people find it an attractive vision of life, rather than a dystopian nightmare. Last year I read Atlas Shrugged to gain some insight into the Randians. One of my libertarian churchmates, who had been shaped by the book in his youth, was eager to hear how it affected me, hoping I would join the movement. I told him it was the most preposterous story I ever read. Moreover, her view is so scornful of church - any church - that I didn't see how he as a Christian could reconcile the two.

Rand was particularly scornful of government programs that taxed everyone to help citizens when they are in need, like Social Security and Medicare.

I was particularly interested to learn, therefore, that the recently published memoir of people who knew Ayn Rand, 100 Voices, reveals that she herself went on Medicare. She did not admit this, and went on excoriating the "parasites" who did. Rand, a chain smoker, needed medical help late in life. She allowed her lawyers to quietly apply for the help under her real name, Ann O'Connor.

Rand was entitled to the help of Medicare. She had paid into it as other workers in the commonwealth of the nation did. She was entitled to is as a citizen who was ill and needed help. Rand accepted Medicare. But apparently the reality of her own need did not affect her ideology that people should not be in need.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Overall

I think any Democrat could have been elected president in 2008. That person would have faced extraordinary challenges, the worst of which were leftovers. Any Democrat would have come in with some version of the Democratic agenda. We have the "mommy party" aims of equalizing opportunity and providing a basic safety net, and the "knowledge party" agenda of education, new technology, new energy sources, and transparency. Any new Democratic president would have had 18 months to fix the inherited mess and to pass the most important new initiatives. After that, the continuing economic mess, even if it was getting better, would still be so bad that the Democratic Party would lose seats in the midterm election, and probably lose a house of Congress. All of this seemed clear (to me, anyway) in January of 2008.

I believe we got a better-than-ordinary Democrat in Barack Obama. I think he understood the challenge before him in the same outline that I did.

He hit the ground running, attacking the economic collapse as soon as he was able. I think he did a pretty good job. The decisions to save some "banks" and let others collapse had already been made. The bailout for AIG, the remaining "banks," and the car companies had already been made. The decision to have some kind of massive stimulus had already been made. Given that, I think the administration did a reasonably good job. The car company bailout has been managed pretty well. Cash-for-clunkers, even if it made no big economic dent, was worth trying, and did restore a sense of hope that the government was working on the economic problem. Also, it improved the fuel economy of the country's automobile fleet (that is what made a "clunker" worth trading up).

Obama also had a problem of winding down the wrong war, and pursuing the right one. This has been done about as well as could be expected.

At the same time, I am glad he had the nerve to spend most of his political capital on universal health care. From fifty years of debate and resistance by the companies that benefit from the old system, anyone could see this was going to be a huge fight. The opposition party was unusually united and oppositional, and some members of the president's own party were unusually opportunistic. Nonetheless, I give Obama great credit for succeeding. He had the nerve to go ahead with a new initiative despite the many fires he also had to put out, and he had the wisdom to put almost everything else on hold until that job was done.

If he had done nothing else but prevent a great depression and get universal health care, Barack Obama's first Congress would be counted a success. That he had quite a few other successes, and the most successful lame duck session in half a century, is a happy bonus.

Obama has done some things that I am disappointed about. I would have been tougher on the investment banks and AIG - at the least, they should not have been allowed to give those ridiculous bonuses until they had paid back the bailout. I think he should have cleared out all of our political prisoners - charged them, put them on trial, and gotten it over with. This would have meant revealing the torture, violations of human rights conventions, violations of our own laws, and the other ways in which we botched the prosecutions of possible enemies. This would have been painful and extraordinarily embarrassing to the United States, but the worst would be over by now. We help our enemies when we act like them; when we prolong the offense and cover it up, this only makes the problem worse.

I am a centrist and a Christian realist. I think President Obama is, too. He is probably a bit to the left of me, but he is also realist enough to know that the electorate is a bit to the right of him. He also does not act alone - the chief executive is partner to the legislature, both of whom are constrained by the judiciary. I think President Obama's chief partner in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi, was a very effective leader; Senator Reid - not so much. The judiciary was mostly its usual sensible self, except for the significant mischief of the Citizens United decision. In the new Congress, the president will face a persistent opponent in the new Speaker, and a competent obstructionist in the Senate's minority leader. President Obama's second Congress will probably be less successful than his first. On the other hand, the lame-duck session showed that the president's long and lonely pursuit of bipartisanship is starting to bear fruit.

I look forward to the next two years. I believe things will be even better in President Obama's second term.