"Going Solo" is Not the Wave of the Future

Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociologist, has generated some interest with Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. He starts with the fact that about a quarter of American households today are made up of one person - more than the number of married-with-children households.

Klinenberg does treat the mostly sad cases of poor people living alone, especially the frail elderly.  But his real interest is in the young and financially secure solo living group, who make New York their capital.

Klinenberg shows that living alone and loving it is a growing fraction of the urban population in developed societies, which is true.  He argues that solo living will become the prevailing form of life, especially if a Swedish-style welfare state subsidizes it. He particularly argues that proponents of marriage are fighting a rear-guard action for an anachronistic idea of togetherness.  This, I contend, is not true.  It is certainly not proven by his cases.

Most young singles, including the young divorced, are looking to marry, as his own evidence shows.  Even Exhibit A, the founder of the blog Quirkyalone Sasha Cagen, says that as she gets into her late thirties she, too, is ready to settle down and would like to find a husband.

Most of the old singles are widows who lived out their marriages until death them did part.  The fact that they are living alone is not proof that marriage is an anachronism, but that we are a very rich society who can support the old in their own homes. In fact, those who stay married are more likely to have the resources to maintain independent living in their widow or widowerhood.

Going Solo is more of a life stage than a lifestyle.

The Silver Lining of the Trayvon Martin Case

Trayvon Martin was a black teenager who was killed by an aggressive neighborhood watch member in a gated community in Florida. 

The killer has not been arrested. So far, the local police seem to have barely investigated the shooting.

There has been national outrage that, as it seems now, a trigger-happy vigilante is getting away with murder because his victim was a black boy in a hoodie.

So what is the silver lining?

That there is national outrage over the killing a black boy in a hoodie in Florida. And, as a result of that national outrage, something like justice may be done.

The Capitol of Panem is Galt's Gulch

Mrs. G. and I are working through the Hunger Games trilogy, as are many around the world. The story of a slave rebellion in a dystopian future America is gripping.

The inspiration for Panem, the brutal dictatorship in which the Capitol forces the oppressed Districts to send children to die in gladiatorial combat, is obviously the Roman Empire. Suzanne Collins, the creator of this world, says her inspiration came from watching a juxtaposition of a reality show and the Iraq war on television.

I have had another strong feeling while listening to the story, though: The Hunger Games is a kind of sequel to Atlas Shrugged.

In Ayn Rand's novel of a dystopian future America, the competent few are besieged by the incompetent many.  The competent must run everything and invent everything to maintain the little worlds of the helpless masses.  These Atlases carry the world on their shoulders.  All they ask is to be unrestricted in making a profit and living as they please. I will not be spoiling the plot to reveal that these Atlases get tired of carrying the world, and shrug it off, to let it collapse into Dark Days.

Atlas Shrugged is the most preposterous story I ever finished, for reasons I have detailed here.

The place these Atlases all sneak off to is an impregnable valley in the Rockies known as Galt's Gulch.

The Capitol of Panem is an impregnable location in the Rockies.

I can see a direct line of continuity between the little city of the competent few who should rule over the incompetent many, and the brutal capital of a police state in which the technologically advanced control the many, whom they regard as incompetent.

I don't mean that Suzanne Collins intended Panem to be derived from Atlas Shrugged.  But I can see how the descendents of the intentionally selfish John Galt and Dagny Taggert could become the intentionally cruel President Snow.

The Main Points of the "Book of Mormon" are OK.

Mrs. G. and I went to see "The Book of Mormon." It is quite funny in the over-the-top way that you would expect from the "South Park" guys who wrote it.  The show is also respectful and even affectionate about Mormons as clean-cut, decent, nice people who want to help everyone.  They are not as respectful of some of esoteric elements of Mormonism, but mostly they just tell them straight and let the audience react.

The main points of the musical are:
a) prophets speak in metaphors; and
b) kind acts are not wrong.

I can't go all the way with them to the actual conclusion of their story, but I can accept these main points.

Oh, and there is a subsidiary point with which I heartily agree: Orlando is not all it's cracked up to be.

More Love in Domestic Violence Cases Than in Paternity Cases

A Family Court judge visited our "Family Life" class today.  He talked about the young couples he sees in paternity court, and the repeat customers in domestic violence court. 

The judge said, as he has said to us in past years, that the mothers in paternity court want the fathers of their children to be involved in their child's life, but hesitate to simply share custody - because, they admit, they don't really know the man they had a child with.

The judge also told us, as he has before, that it takes a beaten woman an average of seven strikes by her boyfriend before she leaves him for good.  She keeps going back to him because, usually, she does love him - she just wants him to stop hitting her.

This led me to a question I had not thought of before.  Is there more love in domestic violence relationships than in paternity relationships?

Yes, the judge answered without hesitation.

Paternity court cases come from high school romances, or the equivalent a few years later, that happened to produce a baby.  They never were a strong couple, and were often not very mature.

Domestic violence cases, by contrast, usually involve couples who are invested enough in each other and in their children to keep coming back even after dreadful blowups.

Please don't misunderstand - I am not saying that love makes domestic violence in any way acceptable.  But seeing that love is involved in many domestic violence cases does help me, whose life is far from first-hand experience of either domestic violence or paternity court, have a more realistic picture of the lives of those who end up before a judge in each case.

Professors Don't Like Evangelicals. Let's Be Careful About That.

This table comes from a study of American college faculty by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. 

It is worrisome that professors have the most unfavorable view of a group that constitutes about a third of all Americans.

I urge my fellow faculty members to bend over backwards to be fair to evangelical Christians.  It is easy for both groups to feel like a beleaguered minority.  This situation leads to fear and reaction.

Moderates Expect a Broader Range of Views on Facebook Than the Extremes Do

Most Americans use social networking sites such as Facebook.  About 60% of all liberals and moderates do, and about half of all conservatives do. This is from a new study by Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith.

I was drawn to three particular findings of this study.

First, 38% were surprised to find that some of their friends had different political views than they thought they did. The moderates were the least surprised: only 33%.  By contrast, most of those on the extremes - very liberal (52%) and very conservative (54%) - were surprised to find out what their friends' views were.

I think this means that moderates are more attentive to what other people think, and less likely to assume that their friends agree with them.

Second, the extremes were more likely to say that they always agreed with the political posts of their friends - 20% of very liberal and 17% of very conservative, vs. only 5% of moderates.

This suggests to me that the extremes are more likely to live in an echo chamber of people who agree with one another.

Third, liberals were more likely to block someone because of their liberal views (28%) than either conservatives (16%) or moderates (14%) were. This part of the study did not distinguish between liberal and very liberal, on one end, and conservative and very conservative, on the other.

This suggests that liberals are more intolerant of differing views than other people are.

Arab Fertility Decline Means a Less-Scary Future for the Middle East

The Arab world is having a population explosion now.  This is an important push-force behind the "bloody borders" of Islam that Samuel Huntington cited in the "clash of civilizations" argument. This youthquake is also an important push-force behind the Arab Spring, of democratically oriented youth not willing to live under another generation of tyrants.

But the demographic tide is already turning.  As usual, economic growth, educational improvements for women, and, eventually, democracy, lead to a fertility decline down to replacement levels or below.  The young adult bulge in the Arab countries is scaling back their own fertility as they enter full adulthood.

Stable fertility in the Arab countries and Iran will match the stable fertility in Israel.  All of which promises a future in which the push-force of demography, at least, will ease up on the many strains in that region.

The Medium-Term Impact of Normalizing Mormonism

Mormons today are like mainline Protestants in the 1950s.  They are church-going, family-oriented, pro-business, mostly Republican, and don't see much difference between taking care of people through the church or through the state. Governor Mitt Romney exemplifies this way of dealing with the world.  Candidate Romney feels obliged to step away from his position, at least temporarily.

But that is not my main point today.

The thing that happened to the mainline Protestant churches was the Sixties. Many good things came from that cultural revolution, especially for the equality of the races and the sexes. But the Sixties were mostly a disaster for the mainline churches.  From that moment their cultural decline began, which has not slowed down to this day.

I think the Mormons are in for their own Sixties. 

If Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president, as I expect he will be, that will go a long way toward fully normalizing the LDS church as a regular American denomination. In that way, a Romney nomination would do for Mormons much what John Kennedy's election did for Catholics.

But I think the counterpart of Mormon normalization now would be a cultural revolution in the next generation.  Normalizing Mormonism will also normalize Mormon diversity.

Spanx is a Happy Success Story

Sara Blakely is a self-made billionaire selling very effective women's underwear, Spanx.  She is, at 41, the youngest woman who made her own fortune on the Forbes list of the world's richest people.

She invented her product and her business herself, while also being married and a mother. This fact would not be remarkable for a man, but is very unusual for a female CEO.

She cites as her influences, all from afar at first, Wayne Dyer, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey. She learned from failure.  She overcame her fears.  She seems to be a decent person. 

And now she promotes other female entrepreneurs, just to give back.

Better is Better: A Response to Impossible Perfectionists

Bill McKenzie, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and an old friend, asked a variety of religious leaders and professors in Texas to respond to my post on "The World is Getting Better." Some agreed with me, some disagreed.  A few, though, seemed not to accept the idea of "getting better."

My favorite response along these lines came from Cynthia Rigby, professor of theology at Austin Presbyterian Seminary.  She wrote:

Until every stomach is full, until every family is housed, until every child can go to school healthy, clothed, and with a pencil and notebook in hand, the world has not improved enough to throw around such generalities.

It is part of the Gruntled creed to believe that better is better.  Making things better is worth doing, even if we don't - or can't - make things perfect.

The Least-Happy City is Still Overwhelmingly Happy

Gallup has a nifty new well-being index of the 350 largest metropolitan areas in the country.

One of the items measured was happiness. 

The lowest-scoring city: Springfield, OH, at 82.3%
The highest-scoring city: Caspar, WY, at 94.2%

You know what is even more important than the happiness gap between these two cities?  How high the happiness percentage is in both of them.  Even in the least happy city, the overwhelming majority of people are happy.

College Town Story Has Shocking Omission!

College Towns are Happy Towns.  Yes.

The omission: Danville, KY.

(And I thank my sister for the title of this post.)

Is Hooking Up OK if Your School Is Far From Home?

I read a paper on premarital sex that offered a reason and reasoning about hooking up vs. seeking a serious relationship that I had not heard before.

In one case, a young man was going to school out of state.  He reasoned that he was not going to settle near the school, so any relationship he started there could only be temporary.  Thus, he justified hooking up - often and exclusively.

In another case, a young man went to a school near home.  The author, who knew both men, thought this was because the second fellow was looking for a wife who would settle with him in his hometown.

I have never run across this line of reasoning.  If I had only heard the first case, I would have thought it was a creative but particularly bogus way for a man to justify promiscuity.  But hearing the second case - and the author taking both kinds of reasoning as normal - makes me think I am meeting a subculture I have not met before.

My first guess is that these are working-class guys who always expected to settle near family, and find a job and wife in the area. They went to college because they were good athletes, not primarily for an education that would transform them as people.

Any thoughts on this matter?

In Praise of James Q. Wilson

Noted criminologist James Q. Wilson died today.  The author of the "broken windows" theory of improving social order.  Sometimes it is treated simply as a crime-control strategy, but really it is much broader.

The idea is that if a community lets a broken window stay broken, it sends a signal that the community is not organized enough or concerned enough to fix it. And if no one is watching little things, soon it loses the capacity to pay attention to big dangers, too.  Thus, the best way to start fighting serious crime is to vigorously respond to quality-of-life crimes.  These ideas have been tried in communities large and small, which has correlated with a significant drop in crime.

The larger sense of Wilson's theory, though, is in line with Tocqueville's insight that what makes American democracy work is the dense network of voluntary associations that come together to do whatever needs doing in our communities. The broken windows, literal and figurative, in our communities are not mainly fixed by government, nor by a few saintly individuals.  They are addressed by small groups of ordinary people who get together to deal with something that affects their corner of the community.

The next time something seems out of order in your neighborhood, call the neighbors, find a few who want to actually do something, and fix that broken window.  And raise a toast to James Q. Wilson.

The World Is Getting Better

I gave a 20-slide lecture tonight on this topic, in the wonderful Pecha Kucha format.

I share with you four of those slides.

In addition to the massive decrease in violence, the subject of several prior slides,

Anything Else Gotten Better?

•Sex discrimination

•Race discrimination

•Sexual-orientation discrimination

•Handicap discrimination

•Imperial control of colonized people

•Totalitarianism and authoritarianism

  Is that all you’ve got?  

•Food production has increased gigantically

•Transportation is cheaper

•Communication costs a tiny fraction of before

•Information is available on unprecedented scale

•The air is cleaner

•World population is under control

 

Wait, What Was That About World Population?  

•The population bomb was a dud

•No developed nation has enough kids to replace itself

•The two most populous countries, China and India, are at or below replacement fertility

•Nearly all the large developing countries are down to replacement fertility or very close

Is Anything Worse? 

•Rich-World Problems Are on the Rise:

•Obesity

•Cancer

•Heart disease

•Divorce and unmarried parenthood

•Global warming

Negative Interactions Corrode Society; Neutrality is Not Enough to Counteract Them

I am working on an idea about negative and positive social interactions.

John Gottman, a famous divorce researcher, has argued that in a marriage, negative interactions are so corrosive that you need at least five positive interactions to balance them out - and more than that to keep your marriage in an emotionally positive tone.

Several positive psychologists have said that in our normal social interactions with friends and acquaintances we should have at least three positive interactions for every negative one.

It seems reasonable to me that the least intimate social relationships - the anonymous cash transaction at an unfamiliar store - needs at least ordinary civility on both sides to keep both parties on an even emotional keel.

Which leads me to an idea.  Negative interactions are socially corrosive. They are not neutral, but costly to society.  People who are consistently negative leave a wake of social costs for other people, and not just the ones they were negative to. It is as if they walked through the social world, dropping acid on others.

Negative people impose costs on other, so more positive people have to salve those wounds with extra positive interactions. The positive people have to make up for the residue of the negative - on top of the normal civility that we need to make sure our own interactions are at least emotionally balanced.

A Further Thought from Randall Collins' The Credential Society

My "Social Structure" class has taken up Randall Collins' still-provocative 1979 book, The Credential Society. He argues that most white collar jobs could be learned by any literate person with, say, six month's on-the-job training.  We don't need all the schooling and credentials we keep piling on to train for the actual jobs that most people have.

I have read and taught this book several times.  This time, though, I was struck by a more radical implication than even the radical Collins meant.

I tell students early and often that at a liberal arts college like Centre we are not trying to train them for a job.  We are trying to form them into people who will be good citizens and live meaningful lives.  We also hope and expect that some of what they learn will be useful for their employment.  By the time they graduate, most students absorb the liberal-arts mantra.  But I think they take our protestations only half seriously. 

Today, though it occurred to me that to treat school as job training is to prostitute education for an unsuitable purpose. And the more a school tries to be job relevant, the worse a job of real education - moral formation - it does.

I am chewing on this.

Is Centre College a Privilege?

We are studying the concept of privilege in my "Social Structure" class.  I had them make an inventory of their own privileges and disprivileges, and analyze how that affected their lives.

As sociologists think of privilege, it means an unearned advantage, such as whiteness or maleness.  Privilege is contrasted with an earned advantage.

However, some of the students drew their understanding of privilege from a different discourse, more political science than sociology.  They contrasted privileges with rights.

Thus, the question of whether attending an elite college, such as Centre, is a privilege or not proved doubly tricky. 

Attending Centre is clearly not a right, so the second group thought it must be a privilege.  But attending Centre requires some work to earn a place, no matter how many unearned advantages you had helping you.  For the first group, attending Centre was not a privilege, even if various privileges helped improve their odds of admission.

Taking a longer view, though, once they graduate from Centre, they will benefit from some unearned expectations that other people have about how well educated they now are, independent of their personal achievement. 

So getting in to Centre is, I think, mostly not a privilege.  But successfully getting out again partly is.

The College Class Has Their Kids Within Marriage

This week's scary demography story is that most children born to women under thirty in this country are born out of wedlock.

The articles note that this is not true for college graduate moms, 92% of whom get married before they have their kids.

One detail struck me as interesting as much as a marker of the shifting class divide as of this demographic shift. 

For a generation the most important class divide in America has been between those who only graduated from high school and those who went to college.  Lately, though, some sociologists have argued that the big gap has shifted upward.  Now the main cleavage is between those who graduated from college, and those who did not.

The new report supports this new place to draw the line.  Child Trends, who conducted the study found that

The fastest growth [of out-of-wedlock births] in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree.