Fear-mongers Undermine Society More Than Terrorists Do

David Brooks has a fine column on how happiness has far more to do with good personal relations than it does with wealth, power, or success. For the community-level (as opposed to individual-level) correlates of happiness, he gives this useful summary:

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

The opposite of trust is fear. The acid that destroys social happiness is fear. People who promote fear destroy society more effectively than do the people who commit frightful acts. The terrorist terrifies us once - and then we can pull together. The fear monger terrifies us all the time, undermining the very social asset that best helps us build a strong and happy society.

The Meaning of "Wife" is Changing, Yet Stays the Same at Heart

Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog, has a short piece in the New York Times Magazine about the changing meaning of "wife."

She notes that her mother, a divorced feminist who switched from teaching to lawyering, rejects being a wife. Belkin is a highly invested wife and mother, trying not to be too much of a helicopter parent. She thinks that the next generation of women won't know what to do with the wife role because it will be too indefinite, have too many possible meanings. She thinks the crucial change is that the men who young women marry are taking on more of the house roles, especially the parenting roles, that wives and mothers used to do almost exclusively.

I think Belkin is right that the key to changing the wife role comes from husbands taking on more of the kid-raising. Belkin also notes, though does not emphasize as a cause, that wives bring home almost half the family income among young marrieds, and a fifth of young wives make more than their husbands. I believe this latter fact is the other half of the equation of re-jiggering husband and wife roles.

On the other hand, biology will continue to make women into mothers in powerful ways. That will be the starting point for the great majority of married couples' role negotiations. I believe that the Millennial generation will differ most from the '70s feminism of their grandmothers in seeing that the crucial part of marriage is not primarily about the identity of husband and wife as individuals, but as a partnership to raise children.

Trying to Understand the American Civil Religion While Living It

Yale sociologist Philip Gorski offers a fine overview of the several traditions of American civil religion. The kind he likes, civic republicanism, is a middle ground between religious nationalism (think Sarah Palin) and secular liberalism (think Ayn Rand). In this ground-clearing essay, "Civil Religion Today," Gorski helpfully lays out the competing traditions, which was his main task. He also concludes that any kind of realistic story of American civil religion has to include the fact that hope does sometimes win.

I agree with all of this, and plan to build on it in my American religion course. I think the deep underlying idea of any study of American religion is the struggle of competing civil religions. This is a hard idea for students to get, though, so we work our way through all of the particular denominational traditions first.

What I am wrestling with now is how the tradition of civic republicanism can help me understand the particular narrative of American civil religion that I was raised in and embrace. My story sees America as a city on a hill, the nation with the soul of a church, an errand in the wilderness. The Revolution was a world-historical step forward in creating a democratic nation, which rests, as Tocqueville, said, on continuously reproducing a virtuous citizenry. The Civil War was the necessary re-making struggle of the nation to overcome our core contradiction between democracy and caste. This struggle was not fulfilled until the Civil Rights Movement. Our vocation in the world now is to be the last best hope of democracy without becoming an empire.

This narrative is a deep and real American tradition. What I am trying to suss out is whether the tradition of civic republicanism, apart from its specific American form, offers guidance and limits to how we can live out this narrative without being corrupted by the unprecedented world power that America now has.

Rodan the Stork is a Good Dad

Rodan, a stork, flies back 8,000 miles from South Africa to Croatia each year to return to his wounded mate. They raise a bunch of little storks. He teaches them to fly. Then back he goes to South Africa, to return again the next spring. He has been doing this for five years, and will likely keep returning.

Republicans vs. Democrats on Obama

A new Harris poll has some fascinating numbers on what Republicans and Democrats believe about President Obama. Since I reported earlier on some of the interesting beliefs of Republicans in a Republican-only poll, I am glad to have some comparative numbers. All the questions began "here are some things people have said about President Obama. Please indicate for each whether you believe it is true or false." I will give Republican vs. Democratic "true" answer percentages.

Let's start with some fairly straight-forward factual matters:

57 vs 15 Is a Muslim
45 vs 8 Was not born in the U.S. and so is not eligible to be president

Then let's look at his political intentions:

61 vs 17 Wants to take away Americans' right to own guns
51 vs 12 Wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government
41 vs 8 Wants to use an economic attack or a terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers
22 vs 5 Wants the terrorists to win

Finally, some global assessments of his being:

67 vs 14 Is a socialist
47 vs 12 Resents America's heritage
45 vs 8 Is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of
22 vs 6 May be the Anti-Christ

The last two questions are particularly interesting, as I believe they are, within the American civil religion, two versions of the same thing.

For the record, I believe all of these claims are false.

Recession's Silver Lining: Falling Divorce Rates

Divorce rates go down in recessions because divorces cost money. They typically go back up again afterwards. Still, we could cut the divorce rate in half if couples would just stick out difficult times. Some couples on the road to divorce before the recession will have time to reconsider while they wait out economic hard times. One of the things they can consider is that divorce is likely to make their economic difficulties permanent for themselves and their children.

Forty Years After "The Female Eunuch," Germaine Greer Celebrates Divorce

The author of one of the provocative blockbusters of '70s feminism thinks the feminist movement has been a great success. I mostly agree. I am puzzled by what she cites as evidence, though: the high divorce rate. She reads divorce as due to women heroically accepting hardship rather than acquiescing in servility. Some divorces, no doubt, fulfill this claim - much more so then than now. Still, I think she is way out of date on what drives most women to seek divorce today.

If divorce and feminism are importantly connected today, I think it is more that our high divorce rate shows the acquiescence of feminism in a false view of women and men as most fulfilled when they are most autonomous.

Obama's Big Year

Universal health insurance passed Congress last night. I believe this will be the signature achievement of the Obama administration. After all the compromises were made, both with Republicans and with fellow Democrats, the final bill was, as the president said, "straight down the center of American political thought." I think that within a few years universal health care will be as much a part of the grain of American society as Social Security and Medicare. We will look back on this debate and wonder why some people thought getting health insurance for all was such a scary idea.

I think many of the other things that President Obama wants to do have been waiting on passage of this law. Now he can go ahead with other elements of his agenda. He will be able end the war in Iraq, fight the war against our 9/11 attackers, close the Guatanamo Bay prison, end "don't ask, don't tell," draw down the war deficit, stimulate jobs in energy-efficient industries, make us less beholden to oil barons, work together with the great powers of Europe and Asia to defuse new nuclear threats. Oh, and while he is at it, improve race relations in America. I believe the president will have a big year.

President Obama's approval rating today stands at 26% strongly approve, 42% strongly disapprove. I believe that a year from now, those numbers will be reversed.

Vas Madness

A wonderful trend has taken off over the last three years: get a vasectomy, recover while watching the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament. Starting in Oregon in 2008, urologists all over the country are now promoting snip 'n' swish specials. (OK, I made that name up). Appointment days before the first and second weekends of the tournament, in particular, fill up. Some even send their patients home with the game schedules, pizza coupons, and a bag of frozen peas.

I think this could become V-day for men.

Politically Correct Commitment Tokens

Martin Donohoe has an article in the Human Rights Quarterly about how immoral flowers, diamonds, and gold are - that is, the very things men are most likely to give women as tokens of love and commitment.

He ends with this suggestion for alternatives:

Substitute gifts include cards (ideally printed on recycled paper), poems,
photos, collages, videos, art, home improvement projects, homemade meals,
and donations to charities.

I don't think most of these will work. Part of the point of a commitment gift, such as an engagement ring or a wedding band, is not aimed at the beloved women. Rather, they are meant to show the world that he has taken the plunge to commit to her only. Donohoe's suggestions of actions, rather than objects, strikes me as a particularly male way of showing love. All of these objects and actions are good and would, likely, be appreciated for their intention. But they do not take the place of engagement rings and wedding bands. If he wants an alternative to diamonds and gold, he needs something a little more public, substantial - and probably shiny.

Building Character in Rich Kids

We are reading Robert Frank's Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich in my senior seminar. Frank's main point is that there are so many rich people in America now - 10 million households of millionaires or better - that they form a separate subculture, the "nation" of Richistan.

Most of America's rich are new money, made by hard working meritocrats and successful entrepreneurs. A major problem for the rich in all ages is raising children without spoiling them. Frank reports that even in deliberate structured programs to train "aristokids" in the special problems of managing wealth, such as Wealthbridge, the children rarely have the work ethic of the parents. In the cases Frank presents, only the children who were deliberately deprived of money they didn't earn, or kids who for personal reasons wanted to outdo their parents (fathers), showed real drive.

I am glad that today's rich parents are worried about spoiling their children. I am glad that many of them are competing with one another to put huge piles of money in good works and charitable foundations, rather than simply hand it on to their kids to consume. These hard-working parents who were so successful at making money naturally want their kids to be good at the same thing. I think a more prudent strategy, though, would be to see the mission of inheritors to be wise administrators of charities, rather than following in their parents' footsteps to build even bigger fortunes. In the whole population of rich kids, of course, there should be some of each, and there will inevitably be some wastrels. Still, it is hard for parents of any class to see their children as having a different mission and destiny than the parents themselves had.

I am drawn again to the wisdom of John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

IQ and Faithful Men

Satoshi Kanazawa reports in the new Social Psychology Quarterly that the higher an adolescent's IQ, the more likely he or she is to be an atheist and a liberal as an adult. This correlation has been reported before.

What is new in this study is Kanazawa's finding that the higher a male adolescent's IQ, more the likely he is to value sexual exclusivity as an adult. The same is not true of women, who generally favor sexual exclusivity across the IQ board.

What Kanazawa does not note is that these correlations pull against one another in family life. Monogamous men are more likely to invest in their children, and their children, in turn, are more likely to succeed in life. Liberals and atheists, on the other hand, are less likely to have children in the first place. So even if Kanazawa is right that liberalism and atheism are an evolutionary advantage because they open people to new experiences, they seem to also be an evolutionary disadvantage. Monogamous men, on the other hand, seem to reap an evolutionary advantage regardless of ideology, because human babies require so much more investment than the babies of any other species.

Counting Classes (ABC Poll)

ABC News released a poll about how financially stressed the middle class is feeling. Asking people what class they are is always a tricky business. Americans will readily accept "middle class" as a designation, but are more resistant to labels that move away from that middle. Yet, logically and empirically, if there is a middle there must be a bottom and a top. What ABC hit upon was this: "Would you describe yourself as working class, middle class, upper middle class, or better off than that?"

Generally, if you give Americans three class choices - lower, middle, upper - 80%+ will choose middle. If you offer "working class" as an option, the middle group splits into "working" and "middle" halves. This poll adds the not-very-compromising "upper middle," plus the helpful euphemism "better 0ff than that" to draw out at least a few of the actually rich. They did not offer a "worse off than that" option for the actually poor. So what did they get?

Better off than that: 3%
Upper-middle: 11
Middle: 45
Working: 36
- and another 2% volunteered "Worse off than that."

The average income for the middle groups seems pretty realistic to me:
Upper- middle: $95,000
Middle: $55,00
Working: $35,000

This seems to me a good snapshot of the self-perception of a middle-class nation.

Telecommuting Takes Guts - For the Boss

National Public Radio has a series this week on Work-Life Balance. They cite a survey showing that 45% of companies offer telecommuting, though on an "ad hoc" basis (not further explained).

The central boss in the radio report, Katie Sleep of List Innovative Solutions, is enthusiastic about telecommuting for her employees. She especially likes the 95% retention rate over 16 years, which she (rightly) calls astonishing. But she notes two caveats. First, she doesn't telecommute herself, because she "likes being around people." And second, she has to be willing to fire employees who take advantage of the flexibility and lack of direct supervision that telecommuting offers.

I think telecommuting is an excellent development for much of white collar work. However, I think it also adds to the burdens of bosses, and increases the likelihood that they are the ones who need to regularly appear in the office, because telecommuting increases the difficulty of managing and supervising - even if the best workers are happier as a result.

Millennial Priorities: Parenthood Separated From Marriage

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a rich report on the Millennial generation, today's teens and twenties.

One very interesting finding about family life: most put "being a good parent" as a top priority, but only about a third put "having a successful marriage" as a top priority.

I don't think this really means that young people do not value marriage. I think it means that they think parents should be good parents no matter what - even if their marriage falls apart. On the whole, this high priority on good parenting is a good thing for the future.

I take this priority with a grain of salt, since millennials are much closer to being children than being parents. Only about a fifth of them are married already. We should revisit this question in a decade or so.

Pro-Marriage Rap Song

I did a Google search for "pro-marriage rap song."

The outcome? "No results found." In the whole internet.

"Black Women Save Only $5" is Very Misleading

Single white women in their prime working years have a median net worth of $42,600.

Single black women in their prime working years have a median net worth of $5.

That makes for a pretty shocking headline. However, the story leaves out the most elementary controls that would allow an apples-to-apples comparison.

An obvious one is whether they are, in fact, working. A second is how much education they have. I think it likely that a greater proportion of the black women in the large 18-to-64 age group are younger than white women in that age group.

The biggest factor we need to control for, though, is whether these single women are mothers or not. Most white single women do not have children. Most black single women, as best I can figure, do have children. Single women with children are not likely to accumulate any net worth.

White and black women with similar education are likely to start at nearly identical salaries, on average. I don't have comparative wealth figures with the appropriate controls, but it stands to reason that single white and black women with similar education and no kids are likely to accumulate similar net wealth.

Gendercide Much Worse for Third Children

The Economist has a cover story on "gendercide," the massive rate of abortion of girls in Asia.

At birth in natural populations there are about 103 boys for every 100 girls.

In many Asian countries, especially China and India, aborting girls has become so common that that ratio has become 120 to 100. Some provinces of China - the richer ones, where the one-child policy is better enforced and raising children costs more - the ratio is above 130 to 100.

Something I had not appreciated before is that the ratio goes up dramatically for each later birth. In India, which does not have an official limit on the number of children, there are more girls among first-borns than in China. For the second child, though, many Indian parents who already have a girl are more likely to keep aborting a second girl until they get a boy. For a third child, the ratio of boys to girls is 200 to 100 in some regions.

This rate of killing girls is horrible in itself. It also so short-sighted and dangerous. Those unmatched boys will grow into tens of millions of unattached men. Then we will all reap the whirlwind.

Do Men Delay College Graduation in Order to Grow Up?

There are 133 women in college to every 100 men. By age 25 there are 141 female college graduates for every 100 male graduates. The headline news has been that at age 22, the traditional age for college graduation, the ratio of female to male college graduates is 185/100.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, whose work I often cite in these pages, have opened the question of why men take longer to graduate from college.

It is well known that all through adolescence girls, as a group, are more mature than boys. I think that is one of the main reasons that girls are more likely to stay in school and go straight through to college commencement in the first place. The senior women at Centre often lament that their male counterparts aren't as mature as they are in thinking about marriage and children. I think this is one of the reasons that, on average, women pick husbands who are a couple of years older than they are - to try to equalize their maturity levels.

So here is my gruntled, hopeful, silver-lining-seeking hypothesis: men are taking longer to graduate than women because they are trying to catch up to the women in maturity.

Anonymous Sperm Donation is Harder Than it Looks

Sperm donation is easy, um, mechanically. As the donors say, they get paid to do something they do for free anyway. And the sperm donor business is so successful that there are for-profit companies, as well as many labs and non-profits. The technological and economic aspects get better and easier every day.

What is getting harder is to stay anonymous. The Donor Sibling Registry brings together children of the same father to compare characteristics. The biographical facts that donors give about themselves are becoming easier to search and cross list. And if the donor is ever in a DNA registry, each of his children is full of enough comparable genetic information to establish a match. Sperm banks are starting to back off of their claim of permanent anonymity. They promise that the bank will not release the donor's identity, but admit that technological advances may make them findable anyway.

I think the other part of anonymous sperm donation that is getting harder is the belief that children made from your sperm are not, in a deep way, related to you. Of course donors know that they are the fathers of the children made with their sperm. I think they have underestimated how strong a tie that actually makes, even if they never meet their children. For several generations social science has convinced the educated public that nurture trumps nature. As a card-carrying sociologist I was trained in this view. I have changed my mind over years of study and parenthood. I am holding the line at 50/50 in the nature/nurture debate.

I think there are so many points of biological similarity between fathers and their children that it would be an unusual man, and a very unusual child, who would not be moved by the similarity. Moved to try to make a personal connection. Which would make anonymously donating sperm and walking away forever harder to do.