Only 45% of Kentucky Southern Baptists Say Jesus is the Only Way

A new survey of Southern Baptists in Kentucky found that most are pretty strong in orthodox Christian beliefs, somewhat likely to work through the church, and about even in the likelihood of having actually evangelized recently. Southern Baptists are the largest denomination in the state, making up about a fifth of the population. Louisville is home to Southern Baptist Seminary, traditionally the flagship seminary of the denomination and notably conservative under its current president, Al Mohler. In the broad spectrum of Southern Baptists in the United States (which, despite the name, is a nationwide denomination), Kentucky Baptists are probably in the middle.

So it is particularly interesting that when Kentucky Baptists were asked if a person sincerely seeking God could obtain eternal life through a non-Christian religion, only 45% disagreed. That is, less than half clearly took the official Baptist position that salvation is only possible through Jesus. The article does not make clear how many of the remaining 55% actually embrace the pluralist position, and how many didn't know what they thought. Lifeway Research, which conducted the study, has not yet posted the results.

Still, it is remarkable that this key claim of orthodox Christianity can't muster even half the respondents' assent in a conservative evangelical denomination.

I live among Kentucky Baptists. They are nice people. They are Southern people. They don't want to be mean or make a scene in public. So I take these survey results with a grain of salt. I am confident that most Kentucky Baptists are sure in their own minds that Jesus is the Way. They are also sure that it might seem mean to say so in public.

Burritocrat

OK, this one is mostly an inside joke.

My wife is an education consultant. Her ability to influence events consists of her vast brain and her ability to analyze and re-analyze mind-numbing datasets about education. And write clear statements of what's what. This often disconcerts other outside agitators who are not as good at analyzing what is going on. They think she has an inside track because she is quoted often.

Recently, one of the way-outside education bloggers called her a "bureaucrat." Given that her bureau consists of an iBook and our dining room table, this struck us as funny.

Years ago we got a buffet for the dining room. Our young son couldn't remember "buffet," so he jokingly called it the "burrito." This name stuck.

Mrs. G. is not a bureaucrat. She is a burritocrat.

Married Men and Women Save More Together

The Fawcett Society, a British women's advocacy organization, has just released a study about how men and women differ in how, and how much, they save money.

The main finding is that women save for others, but find it harder to save for themselves. They save for short-term goals more than long-term objectives. Women are more averse to taking on debt. Men, by contrast, are a little more likely than women to save in general, to save for the long term, and to take on debt. The biggest savers are married men. Unmarried men and all women save at about the same average rate: about $200 per month. Married men, by contrast, save about $300 per month.

Putting these facts together, it seems to me that the crucial variable in the savings rate is whether the men and women in question are married, and especially married parents, or not. We would expect that married moms would save the most for others, married fathers would save the most for the long term. Mothers probably have less income to save from than they did before they had kids, but married mothers can rely on their husbands to save more for the whole family.

The Fawcett Society, though, does not want to treat married parents as a unit for savings. Instead, they argue that it is a great advance to treat men and women as separate, regardless of their family situation. They do not want to factor marriage in to household savings decisions because "households change." They argue, correctly I think, that savings needs to be analyzed over the life course, but then assert that "a lifecourse by definition must focus on the individual." Yet in a deep sense this is wrong. Marriage makes two people one flesh, and they make their savings decisions, short-term and long-term, together and on the assumption that they will be working together. Sometimes, as we all know, this assumption turns out not to be true, but this does not mean that most married people do not make it, nor that they should not make it. The Fawcett Society, in an effort to treat "women" equally, distort the life experience of most women, and most men, who marry and save together.

Want to See More Economic Mobility? Put More Rungs in Your Ladder

Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution has released a study of family economic mobility. This is a companion to the study on racial disparities in economic mobility that I wrote about a couple of days ago. Isaacs' main finding in the new study is that two thirds of families have higher income than their parents did, but only half of them have moved up a rung on the income ladder. A rising tide has lifted nearly all boats; some have then risen even higher than average beyond the rising tide.

Isaacs makes an important point -- most people are better off than their parents were, but that is not entirely due to their own efforts. The entire society is richer, so many people are absolutely better off even if they have stayed relatively the same. For example, if you compare a hypothetical family in the exact middle of the income spectrum a generation ago and now, our middle family today will be absolutely richer and have a higher standard of living than the middle family a generation ago, but will still be in the middle of the income spectrum.

Still, there is a bit of statistical mystification here. Isaacs compares quintiles (equal fifths) of the income distribution. 2/3rds of families moved up in income, but only half of them - 1/3rd of all families - moved up enough to change quintiles compared to their parents. This one third is what Isaacs calls true upward mobility. But suppose she had been comparing not quintiles, but deciles? That is, suppose her income ladder had twice as many rungs in it? We can't tell for sure without real data, but it is likely that with twice as many rungs, we would see twice as much mobility (down as well as up). Likewise, I have seen studies by mobility pessimists who use quartiles. Not surprisingly, such studies show less mobility than Isaacs' quintile study does.

The main conclusion that I draw from this is not that "you can make statistics say anything," but that the income distribution is not a very helpful quantity to describe social reality. Only sociologists think of people in quintiles. The real rungs of the social ladder don't match the income distribution very well. It is helpful to know if people have more of less money than they grew up with. But knowing that they have changed quintiles (or quartiles, or deciles, or percentiles) doesn't really tell you if they have changed classes.

Class Beats Race - Hurrah!

The Pew Research Center has released a wonderful study showing a strong convergence among the white, black, and hispanic middle class. For the first time, a majority of African-Americans agree with the rest of the country that the main thing keeping poor blacks down is their own behavior, rather than racism.

Likewise, most black Americans think that the gap between middle class and poor blacks is widening, a view long held by most other Americans. The belief that the class gap is widening within the African-American community is shared by both ends of the black education and income spectrum. The Pew study made headlines with a peculiar version of this point: they asked

Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse OR Blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they have so much in common.

Most African-American agreed with the peculiar contention that blacks are not one race today.

All races agree that people in the same class are more similar than are people in the same race.

In the long run, this is hopeful in the fight against racism.

"Black Downward Mobility" is Really a Marriage Decline

The Associated Press has a story across the country today by Stephen Ohlemacher with headlines like "Income Gap Between Families Grows." They are reporting on a series of studies by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution on economic mobility. The news hook is that the black/white gap in family income is growing. The scariest finding is that nearly half of black children who grew up in middle class homes have moved down economically compared to the family they grew up in.

The main explanation extracted from the Isaacs studies is that black men's real earnings, on average, declined since the late 1960s, whereas white men's average earnings went up.

When we look inside the report, though, I think the more striking and more explanatory fact is what happened to black married families. In 1969, most black families (58%) were married-with-kids families. By 1998 that had fallen to a mere third. Single-with-kids families, meanwhile, had risen from a fifth of all black families to nearly a third (29%). It is reasonable to assume that most black children in the top two quintiles in 1969 were in married-parent homes. By 1998, as Isaacs notes, most American families needed two incomes to be middle class. Black marriages, and the income advantages that come with them, were declining at exactly the time when they were most needed for the kids to match the middle class lives of their parents.

I think the decline in black men's income is also an effect of the marriage decline. Men work the hardest and the most when they are married fathers. In 1969, two thirds of black men were married; today not even half of black men are married.

To be sure, the white married-with-kids rate has fallen, too. But most white families are still married-with-kids families, and two thirds of white men are still married.

I think the main cause of the black/white gap in income and mobility is the marriage gap.

Presbyterian Terrorists Stand Down

As a Presbyterian I celebrate the proclamation by the (Protestant) Ulster Defense Association that is will stand down its assassination arm, the Ulster Freedom Fighters. While they have not quite disarmed (and neither, in fairness, has their Catholic counterparts, the Irish Republican Army), the UDA said they have put their arms "beyond use."

The largely Presbyterian loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have been an enduring embarrassment and reproach to Calvinists everywhere. The Presbyterian Church in this country has promoted an exchange between Ulster and American Presbyterian colleges and universities that send pairs of Catholic and Protestant Irish students to the U.S., and Americans back to Northern Ireland. Centre College has happily participated in this exchange. We have long tried to help end the intra-Christian Troubles there.

With the Ulster Defense Association declaring that "the war is over," we may finally be ending the worst case of sectarian violence involving Protestants.

Richie Farmer, Orator

Richie Farmer was a famous basketball player at the University of Kentucky. That seems to have been why he was recruited to run for Agriculture Commissioner four years ago. His campaign posters still show a basketball going through a hoop, which is larger on the sign than the office he is running for.

Also, his name is farmer.

He was re-elected this week. In his victory speech, he proclaimed that he won because his message "resignated" across the Commonwealth.

He has a bright future.

Diversity is Bad in the Neighborhood, Part Two (Muslim Britain)

I noted recently Robert Putnam's finding that the more ethnically diverse a neighborhood is, the less social capital it has. He was not too happy to be reporting this.

A new study of British Muslims (by an NYU-led team reporting for a German research institute) has found that Muslims living in integrated neighborhoods had a stronger Muslim identity than Muslims living in segregated Muslim neighborhoods. The team, led by Alberto Bisin, found that Muslim religious and communal identity was stronger where Muslims lived together with non-Muslims.

Muslims have a stronger oppositional identity when faced with the daily contrast of non-Muslims. British Muslims are significantly more religious and fertile than their non-Muslim neighbors. For them, assimilation would mean losing two of the most important things in life. Muslims in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, by contrast, don't feel as threatened by British norms and are less likely to develop an oppositional identity.

The main point, I think, is not that ethnic or religious neighborhood integration is bad or good. Rather, integrated neighborhoods are less likely to have strong neighborhood institutions and identities, even if they do develop stronger ethnic institutions and identities.

A Good Spouse Beats Good Cholesterol

From the Smartmarriages quote page:

A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels did not.

George Valliant, MD, Harvard Medical School

The Marriage Gap Doubles the Gender Gap

The gender gap is the tendency of women to favor Democrats. In the 2000 election there was a 22 point gender gap. Less noted at the time was another gap, the marriage gap. This is the tendency of married people to favor Republicans. In the 2000 election the marriage gap was 28 points -- already larger than the gender gap.

A fascinating new study by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has found that the gender gap has declined, while the marriage gap has gone up. In fact, they project that in the 2008 election, the gender gap will be 15 points, but the marriage gap will be 35 points. The main conclusion that GQR draws is that if the Democrats can mobilize unmarried women, they will win hugely. Unmarried women are the backbone of the Democratic electorate, second only to African-Americans as a reliable bloc. In fact, since African-American voters are so much more likely to be unmarried women, there is a big overlap. Unmarried women are to the Democratic vote what white evangelicals are to the Republican vote. And, unlike African-Americans, the unmarried women bloc is as big as the white evangelical bloc, if not bigger.

The problem for Democrats in taking advantage of the huge advantage they have among unmarried women is that unmarried women have been much less likely to vote than married women. Until, GQR argue, now. Now, unmarried women are so mad at the Bush administration and the Republican Party in general that they say they are going to vote in 2008 at much higher rates than in the past. Unmarried women in general favor Democrats over Republicans by almost 50 points, and young unmarried women favor Democrats by nearly 70 points.

Unmarried women, say GQR, are the "Democrats' evangelicals." Now all the Democrats need to do is mobilize them.

Kentucky's Bellwether Election - Today

It is election day in Kentucky, and it appears, in these early hours, that the voters will remove the incumbent Republican governor for incompetence and ethical obtuseness.

I may have to eat these words by the end of the day, but the polls suggest I am on solid ground.

Kentucky elects its governor the year before the country elects its president. It is tempting to see this election as a bellwether of the next one. Sometimes it looks that way. Four years ago, when a Republican evangelical replaced a Democrat with a zipper problem, our race looked like a preview of the presidential race. Of course, Democrats had won for three decades before that, which did not at all presage Democratic presidential victories since Johnson.

Ernie Fletcher came in promising to "clean up the mess in Frankfort." He promptly committed exactly the same mess as his predecessors. And then denied it, on the grounds, I think, that "we are the good guys" and by definition can't do wrong. Then, when it was proven that two dozen of his guys had indeed done wrong -- led, I am sorry to say, by a former Centre College student body president -- Gov. Fletcher pardoned them all.

I thought he lost the election right there, years before it was held.

Then, when forced to admit that they had been guilty after all, he fired them, though they were still pre-emptively pardoned.

I suggested that he make a campaign pledge to pre-pardon his second administration for all their future crimes. He did not take me up on it. It appears not to have helped him anyway.

Antony Flew, Deist

There was a stir in religious circles a few years ago when Antony Flew, a famous British academic atheist, changed his mind about God. The New York Times Magazine today has an article suggesting a semi-senile Flew was led astray by religious scientists.

I read the evidence in Mark Oppenheimer's story a bit differently. As Flew tells the story, Christians who believed in reconciling faith and science befriended Flew more than two decades ago. They brought him to conferences, corresponded with him, and listened to his arguments. And Flew returned the favor, taking seriously the arguments made and the relationships that he was developing.

In the end, years before Flew's current aphasia, he publicly proclaimed several times that he was an Aristotelian deist. He was not a biblical believer, but he did accept the idea that the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence. He was not hostile to more specific scientific supports for a theistic worldview, but as a philosopher he did not claim to be current on the science behind them. Flew's religious audiences accepted that he was not a biblical believer, as they were. That he had changed his mind about atheism for intellectual reasons was the main point.

Flew's story reminds me somewhat of Norma McCorvey's. McCorvey was the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade, who in the early years after the Supreme Court decision became a crusader for abortion rights. However, she found that the evangelical Christian pro-lifers were nice to her and related to her as a person, including sympathizing with the sad conditions in her life that led her to seek the famous abortion of the case. The pro-choicers with whom she worked, on the other hand, were glad to have her as a symbol, but were, she said, personally condescending and uninterested in her as a person. McCorvey was herself born again, and is now a pro-life activist.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer quotes Richard Dawkins, a crusading atheist of our day, on Flew's changed mind. "He once was a great philosopher. It's very sad."

Halloween Homage

My friend and colleague Phyllis and I were honored by two of our wonderful students, Kerri and Ezra, for Halloween.

Me:




Phyllis:



Kerri and Ezra:

Do "67% Favor Birth Control for Students"? Really?

The Associated Press and Ipsos did a poll of attitudes toward distributing birth control in schools. The headline in many papers, our local one included, was "67% Favor Birth Control for Students." Yet when you look at the actual poll, here is the result to the crucial first question:

Which would you prefer for the public schools in your community?

37% Provide birth control only to those students who have the consent of their parents
30% Provide birth control to all students who want it
30% Not provide birth control to any student

How would you report that? I think the most honest way to present this finding would be to say that there is a bell curve of sorts: 30% are against school birth control, 30% are for school birth control, and 37% are in the middle, favoring schools administering parent-authorized birth control.

I think it is misleading to say simply that two-thirds of American adults favor school birth control. And none of the articles publish this breakdown of the answer -- you have to go to the AP/Ipsos site and look at the detailed results.

There is another finding of this survey, not reported in the AP article, that I think is more interesting:

What do you think is the better way to reduce the number of pregnancies among teenagers?

51% By emphasizing sex education and birth control
46% By emphasizing morality and abstinence

That is, the country is evenly divided on whether sex education should focus on abstinence or on birth control. Moreover, the survey did not ask any more nuanced question, such as should sex education teach both abstinence (the best plan) and birth control (not as good, but better than nothing)?

Coffee in the High School Library? Heck yes! Gosh!

The AP has a fun story on high school libraries opening coffeehouses. Young people today are not in the library habit as previous generations (mine) were. The school gets more kids to come to the library, the business students learn to run a business, and the school makes money. And kids get their morning caffeine.

Some people think that kids getting morning caffeine is a bad idea. That ship has sailed. We have been running the field tests on caffeine for at least 500 years, and the results are pretty good. It is mildly addictive; it does stimulate the brain. Good enough.

The librarian at Hasting High in Houston reported some results on how the coffeehouse affected student use of the library:

Before the coffeehouse opened, "they were running about 6,000 visits per year to the library and checking out about 3,000 books," he said. Now, "we're running about 65,000 visits and checking out about 45,000 books."

Coffee and books go together.

Five-Year Itch + Cohabitation = Seven-Year Itch

A new study from the Max Planck Institute has found that married Europeans are showing a divorce spike after five years, rather than the old seven-year itch. They interpret this as showing that people today get bored with one another faster.

I disagree. The seven-year itch always made sense on sociobiological principles. Seven years after the wedding, many couples will have two kids, and the youngest one is likely to survive childhood. If he is going to leave, or if she has had enough of him, each can imagine that a divorce at that point would not imperil the children's survival. The adults might imagine that they are young enough to remarry, even have more children, if they leave then. They might even think that it would be better for the kids if they didn't remember life with the absent parent.

Most couples today cohabit for a year or two before marriage. They might even have kids in that state. In fact, it is often the pregnancy that pushes the cohabiters to marry in the first place. When we add in cohabiting years, the new five-year itch is pretty much the same as the old seven-year itch. All that has changed is where in the seven years the wedding occurs.

Diversity and the Homogeneous Unit Principle

The downside of diversity, as I noted yesterday, is that it reduces social capital and group trust. People are more likely to invest themselves deeply and give sacrificially to a group with which they share the deepest things in common.

Churches grow best and most explosively when they are based on cells of people who are like one another, who share the deepest levels of culture. Booming megachurches may be made of all kinds on Sunday morning, but they divide into cells of similar kinds on Wednesday night. This is called the homogeneous unit principle. It is the church-growth version of "birds of a feather flock together."

Churches are more like families than they are like workplaces. That is, they are more like primary groups than secondary groups. And the more a church works like a family, the stronger it will be and the more likely it is to grow.

Big denominations can be very diverse. Big congregations can be somewhat diverse. But strong church cells -- the ecclesiola in ecclesia, however constructed -- need to be similar in the most important ways.

Diversity is Bad in the Neighborhood, Good at Work

Robert Putnam, famous for Bowling Alone, has now published a study that shows that neighborhood diversity undermines social capital -- positive civic networks -- in a dozen ways. In a recent Scandinavian Political Studies journal, Putnam, very reluctantly, reports that people living in ethnically diverse communities tend to

distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

At the same time, Michigan political scientist Scott Page reports in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies that people from diverse cultures make good work teams because they approach the same problem in different ways.

These two findings make sense to me. At work, in "secondary groups," we bring to bear only the relevant parts of our cultural background, suppressing the parts that aren't appropriate to that setting. In our families and neighborhoods, on the other hand -- our "primary groups" -- we bring all of our culture to bear on everything. We need to be able to live with and trust the people in our house. Our lives are better if we can live with and trust the people on our street to share our values.

Some people, Putnam included, view his findings with alarm. I do not. I think his study shows that race is a bad proxy for culture, and is getting worse all the time. When people view different race as a sign of different culture, they have reason to be anxious every time someone of a different race appears in their primary group. In a family, we can get to know individuals, and make a more informed jugment about whether this individual relative is or is not like us, regardless of the other social groups they may be part of. In a neighborhood, on the other hand, it is harder to find out what the neighbors are like -- especially if we view each other with suspicion.

The solution, I think, is to realize that race does not tell us much about someone else's values. Really, class is a much better indicator of whether the new family on the block is like us or not, and the outward indicators of class and status are still pretty crude. If we start from the assumption that people who have the money and the desire to move into our neighborhood are going to be like us in their class values, we might face ethnic diversity -- and sheer change in the neighborhood -- with less anxiety.

Cultural diversity is good for the nation as a whole, and good for the secondary groups within it. Cultural diversity needs to give way, though, to shared values at home, or the family won't work very well. Families do absorb new cultural elements, but slowly and for personal reasons. Neighborhoods are the battleground between these two principles.

On the Evangelical Crackup

The New York Times Magazine today has an excellent article by David Kirkpatrick on the disillusionment of evangelical Christians with partisan Republican politics. Many of the old religious right warriors are becoming disenchanted with how little they have gotten for preaching the gospel of tax cuts and the Iraq war.

There are lots of people who do not really understand politics. If you think 9/11 changed everything, you weren't paying attention; worse, you didn't think you were supposed to.

Many evangelicals are serious about the gospel at the individual, moral, person-to-person level, but just don't see how it is relevant to the social, ethical, group-to-group level. For them, politics is an intrusion on normal life, and the objective of their political action is to fix the intrusion so they can get back to their normal, apolitical lives. The religious right became a mass movement when the school prayer decision and the abortion decision intruded on their lives. They wanted a moral majority to put things back the way they were.

The political operatives who invented the Moral Majority, Inc. saw an opportunity. Their agenda was lower taxes, especially on corporations and large estates, less regulation of business, and more military and diplomatic force to promote American business and state interests. School prayer and abortion were not really their issues, but they saw a way to turn temporarily politicized religious people into a useful voting block for their primary interests.

The key point here, I think, is that evangelicals were always going to be a temporary voting block, and they were never going to permanently mobilized by the issues that mattered most to business conservatives. I have seen many a conservative Christian tie themselves in knots trying to explain why the gospel required that were cut business taxes or the "death tax" or build a larger Navy.

When apolitical evangelicals figured out that politics is mostly about material interests and always requires compromise, they would lose interest. Unlike the secular left, the religious right always has the option of giving up on politics because it is too political. Politics is an inherently bad way to preach or enact the gospel. The evangelical crackup is mostly what happens when people who are Christians by conviction and political by necessity figure that out.

Constitutional Boy

My sister sent this gem about my nephew:

Oh, so on the back of their chairs in their kindergarten class, they had a sheet that had three questions on it. I can't quite remember what the questions are but they might all of have been "I am" and then the kid fills in the blank. For example, Danny's friend Evelina's said "I am Evelina, I am beautiful, I am five." Danny's said "I am Danny, I am smart, I am following the constitution." Apparently his third answer was quite unique among his classmates and tickled his teacher.

The Dance of Integrated Neighborhoods

Most Americans want to live in integrated neighborhoods -- but different groups have different standards of what the right balance is. This leaves most people not getting what they want.

Reynolds Farley and his students did studies on black and white preferences in the 1990s. Most black and white Americans would like to live in an integrated neighborhood. The most common African-American preference would be for the neighborhood to be 50% black. Most white Americans would prefer their neighborhood to be no more than about 15% black. You can see the problem -- neighborhoods passing the 15% black threshold are more attractive to African Americans, but less attractive to whites; such neighborhoods tend not to stabilize at 50% black, but keep going to nearly all black.

Since the Farley studies were published, the nation has gotten more diverse, so much so that most researchers would not limit their studies to just black/white integration. This is a good development. The more people see that the options are not just black and white, the harder it is to think of a single tipping point that would make a neighborhood head to all one group or another.

What is striking to me about the Farley preference numbers is that most white Americans would like to live in neighborhoods that are as black as America as a whole is. African Americans make up at most 12% of the U.S. population (despite the widespread belief that the proportion is much higher). This is also about the same size as that mish-mosh category, "Hispanic."

Here would be a good study. Suppose you offered people the hypothetical option of living in a neighborhood that was:
60% Anglo
15% Black
15% Hispanic
5% Asian
5% All others

I think most Americans would go for it.

That is, I think most Americans would like to live in a neighborhood that looked like America.

Hong Kong's Weird Demography

Hong Kong's men are disappearing. The ratio of men to women has fallen from 1063 per thousand in 1993 (four years before the handover to China) to 912 men per thousand women today. They project that the ratio would plummet to 763:1000 by 2036, but surely there would be big changes before that gross imbalance were reached.

The number of unmarried young women has gone up dramatically. Hong Kong women are major players in Kay Hymowitz' "New Girl Order" that I wrote about yesterday. Single male numbers have gone up, too -- Hong Kong is a rich city for young singles. But the single women rate has gone up much faster than the bachelor rate. And Hong Kong men are much more likely to marry mainland women than Hong Kong women are likely to pair up with mainland men. This is ironic, since mainland China has a huge overhang of men compared to women. But Hong Kong women are much better educated and career oriented than mainland women, and less likely to be as subservient as mainland men normally want a wife to be.

The scariest number in Hong Kong demography is the fertility rate: 0.98 children per woman. Most industrialized countries are below the replacement rate of 2.1, but Hong Kong is the first (as far as I can tell) to fall below the one kid per woman threshold. No place can sustain a population pattern like that for long. The Hong Kong administrator wants to raise the fertility rate to 3 children per woman, which most people regard as wildly unrealistic.

The Hong Kong government offers no speculation as to where they men have gone. My guess is that the men have gone to the mainland. They are taking their world market savvy, honed in non-Communist Hong Kong, and are getting in on the ground floor of the booming post-Communist mainland economy. Odds are that those men will marry, but probably locally.

The New Girl Order Saves Capitalism

Kay Hymowitz has written another excellent City Journal article, "The New Girl Order." She writes about the wave of single women around the world with education, careers, busy social lives, and no immediate plans for marriage or children. The Bridget Jones brigade has already had an immediate impact on marriage rates and fertility, leading to gigantic drops in the fertility rate in the rich and growing economies of the world just in the past decade. Most developed nations have fertility rates way below replacement level, which will have severe demographic consequences very soon.

I was struck by another aspect of Hymowitz' description of the worldwide Carrie Bradshaws: they shop. No account of their lives seems to go more than three sentences without mentioning their prodigious appetite for shopping, both for goods and services.

A perennial problem for capitalism is that it has to keep getting people to buy things they don't need. There are, of course, billions of people around the world who would spend more on necessities if they could. The leading edge of the leading economies, though, are pulled by people buying goods and services that are not really necessities. The market for comforts, conveniences, and even outright luxuries is more profitable.

The globalized economy ever totters on the brink of disaster if middle class and rich people bought only what they needed. Which is why the New Girl Order is such good news economically. To have millions of women with money and no pressing need to save it is a boon to the luxury goods industries around the world.

Capitalism is saved. At least until we run out of workers in the next generation.

Victims of Victors?

I recently wrote about Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's new book Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors.

I am now in the midst of a workshop on promoting diversity on campus. I am entirely in favor of promoting all kinds of diversity on campus, especially diversity of thought. I am here as a presenter about one such program. Just because I am in the middle of such a conference, it has gotten me thinking about how we might think about being a minority (of whatever kind).

Sometimes it is taken for granted that the aim of diversity consciousness raising is to show the history of minorities as victims. The minorities are meant to come out of the event thinking of themselves as victims; the majorities are meant to think of themselves as oppressors.

I think Cosby and Poussaint are right. It is better to seek to be a victor than to think of yourself as a victim. Being a victim is weak. Sometimes this can't be avoided, especially during the worst of the oppression. But thinking of yourself as a victim keeps you weak. It is partially a self-inflicted wound that furthers the work of the oppressor. Being a victim runs counter, I think, to the best of American self-identity, too. We are a can-do people. If you are down, it is better for you (me, each of us) to find a workaround. This builds up the nation, too.

Victimhood is a reality. But it is not a good objective.

"Knocked Up" is Finally a Good Redemption Movie

... but man, it takes its time getting there.

Ben is one of the most hopeless boneheaded slackers I have run across in movies (and never, thank the Lord, in real life). Why lovely, competent Alison gives him a second look, much less a tumble, is hard to fathom. I guess this is the disbelief we are meant to suspend. Fair enough.

So Ben and Alison find themselves pregnant. They both try to do the right thing, very clumsily. It does take him an amazingly long time to get to Step One - move out of the Dim Slackers Pothouse and get a real job. Still, he gets there. And it is plausible, I suppose, that she does not tell him what to do, because she does not want to be as controlling a wife as her sister is.

Nonetheless, adulthood is not so scary that it really needs to be resisted so forcefully.

I will not go further in the plot to avoid spoilers. It will not surprise anyone who has seen the trailer that the film's tone is sweet, pro-baby, and ultimately pro-marriage.

Cosby is Right Again

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint have come out with Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. I have not read the book yet. I did, though, see Cosby and Poussaint's presentation on "Meet the Press." Cosby says that the terrible condition of African-Americans today is due to black family failures at least as much as it is due to systemic racism. In fact, I think the logic of his position means that black family weaknesses have more to do with African-American troubles than racism does.

Cosby has been criticized for not putting most of the blame on structural racism. Cosby's reply is that in the past -- the 1950s for example -- institutional racism was much worse, yet black families were stronger and the self-inflicted wounds of the black community were not as bad as they are now.

Cosby's argument on this point seems to me unassailable.

Top-Down Class Leveling

The rich live much better than the poor. The middle class live much better than the poor. But the rich do not live much better than the upper middle class. A $50,000 car is much better than a $5,000 car, probably ten times better. But a $500,000 car is not ten times better than a $50,000 car. Positional goods, as Fred Hirsch called them in The Social Limits to Growth, are valued by the rich because they are rare by nature. You can always make a new Rolls-Royce, but you can't make new mountainsides for houses with gorgeous views. But with millions of millionaires in the world now, many positional goods are bid up way past their added value.

The rich are much richer than they used to be. But they are not living that much better. We are leveling the classes at the top.

White Van Methodists

Megblum, the wonderful #1 Gruntled child, is home for fall break. She had an insight on the way home from the airport: people who drive white minivans are presumed Methodists until proven otherwise.

This was a lightning-bolt insight, based on no specific empirical foundation. When asked to explain this, she offered the idea that a white minivan reflects a sense of the gentle order of the world.

This seems to me to have deep sense in it. We would very much welcome comments.

Snapes on a Plane!

This is the funniest picture I have seen recently.

Middlebury Shines

Endub had a great visit at Middlebury. The students were smart, engaged, witty, and cheerful. The college is rich and has wonderful resources. The classes were great -- she stayed to ask questions, and was answered well. The Admissions guy liked her humorous art. And the campus was Vermont-in-autumn gorgeous.

Application to follow.

Haverford Nixed

The Endub has made one decision: Haverford is not for her. It is a pretty place, she liked the classes she visited, and her host was very nice. However, the students she met were hard put to explain why they thought Haverford was great, or who it would be great for. The group went over to Bryn Mawr to watch a game and stayed for dinner. They praised Bryn Mawr food, Bryn Mawr dorms, and most of the students in her group were actually majoring at Bryn Mawr.

As a Swarthmorean, I have natural antipathies to "the other place." Nonetheless, I was prepared to like Haverford if she did. But she didn't.

On the Road with Endub

I am taking daughter #2 on a college trip this week. Dispatches from the road as internet connections permit. First stop: Haverford.

Privilege Exercise

Tonight we ran an exercise based on Peggy McIntosh's famous article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." We had about 100 Centre students in the gym, lined up should-to-shoulder and holding hands. Then we read a series of statements, such as "if you grew up in a house with more than 50 books, take a step forward," and "if you have ever thought that the police stopped or questioned you because of your race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, take a step back." After a few questions, most students were no longer close enough together to hold hands. After 50 questions, they were spread out across the gym. I was working with a very helpful student who had much experience with this kind of exercise through the National Conference for Community and Justice. We adapted some of the questions to the Centre environment.

When the students were spread out into clear strata, we divided them into four groups, based on where the natural breaks seemed to fall. The top and bottom group were a little smaller than the two middle groups. The four groups then went into different corners to talk about how the exercise felt. We then gathered them all into one large group to share experiences.

This was a fine exercise. The top group felt guilty, and surprised that they were the most privileged - but also grateful to their parents and grandparents. The bottom group felt somewhat good about the obstacles they had overcome. On the other hand, they were the most reluctant to speak in the larger group. When I pointed this out, one of the most forthright said that she had a half-conscious feeling that her insights were not as valid as the more privileged and at home.

One of the best insights of the night for me was that the top group got there not so much by how often they stepped forward, but by how rarely they stepped back.

Preoperational Egocentrism? You Be the Judge

My sister was chaperoning a field trip of kindergarteners. On the bus on the way back the boys were playing "I Spy," including this hilarious gem:

"I spy something green."
"Your sneaker?"
"No . . . "
"Your other sneaker?"
"Yes!"

Piaget says that from two to seven kids usually show "preoperational" forms of reasoning. One of the most childish logical lapses of little kids, from an adult perspective, is egocentrism - that is, the kid's belief that everyone sees things the same way the child does. I have seen film of a wonderful experiment in which two kids are looking at an identical array of oddly shaped objects, but they can't see one another. One child is then supposed to describe one of the objects, so the other one can pick out the identical object. An adult doing this experiment might say "I am looking at the red ball," which would be readily understood by another adult looking at an array that included one red ball. A little kid, on the other hand, is likely to say "I am looking at this one." The other child might reply "So am I!" - though each is looking at a different object, with no idea what the other means.

So, is the above exchange an example of preoperational egocentrism in kindergarten boys, or an ingeniously subtle way to play "I Spy?"

No Efficient Number of Divorces

Stevenson and Wolfers continue with their assessment of marriage and divorce up to the point where economists and marriage advocates part company. S & W allow that married people are happier, healthier, and richer, but withhold judgment whether marriage is cause or effect. They ask

even if we isolate factors that create more or less divorce, these insights would only yield policy recommendations if coupled with an understanding of whether we currently have an efficient number of divorces, too many, or too few.

The concept of an "efficient number of divorces" is distasteful, at least, to marriage advocates. Even if we allow that sometimes divorce is the least of the available evils, it is still an evil. In thinking about the efficient number of divorces, Stevenson and Wolfers raise the analogy with the "churn" in the labor market. However, leaving a job can be a matter of indifference to the worker, as well as to the analyst looking down from on high. Not so, I think, with leaving a marriage.

Marriage changes people more than any other voluntary institution. Marriage and divorce are not just arrangements for material advantage. Every marriage carries the hope of building up husband, wife, their children, even their whole lineage. Every divorce is a social loss because it dashes that hope. Economists don't count the social costs of dashed hopes for personal and social upbuilding. But we can.

U.S. Marriage Rate Lowest Ever -- But Still Above Europe

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have an interesting working paper on the "driving force" in marriage and divorce changes. Stevenson and Wolfers are the Wharton School professors who cleared up the puzzle about the erroneous Census Bureau report that most marriages don't reach their silver anniversary.

One finding that they put in stark relief is that the marriage rate in the United States is at the lowest point in recorded history. Indeed, the marriage rate peaked in 1972, and has been dropping ever since. Americans still couple at high rates, but many of them are cohabiting rather than marrying. Most cohabiters think they will marry -- but they don't.

On the other hand, "Americans marry, divorce, and remarry at rates higher than in most other countries with comparable income levels." Compared to Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, Americans are more likely to marry and more likely to believe in marriage. For example, only 10% of Americans think marriage is an out-dated institution, versus a quarter of Britons and a third of the French.

Of course, they are facing a demographic crisis of falling birthrates, and we aren't.

National Center for Marriage Research

The Department of Health and Human Services has created the first federal marriage research center at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Sociology professors Wendy Manning and Susan Brown will direct the center. Manning and Brown already direct the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green. They are each experts on cohabitation. This is a hopeful development. I am looking forward to their conferences and research reports beginning a year or two from now.

Census Error on Divorce, Part Two

Betsey Stevenson, the Wharton professor whose critique of the erroneous Census report on divorce I noted yesterday, has provided a helpful clarification of why every marriage cohort is wrong in the Census table. The original report made the provocative claim that most marriages made in the late '70s did not make their silver anniversary. Stevenson and her colleague Justin Wolfers pointed that, actually, most did make it. The Bureau had done their tally before 25 years had elapsed.

I noted that all cohorts showed an unexpected 5% leap in divorce from 1999 to 2004. Prof. Stevenson elaborated in a gracious response to my query:

The problem is that for every group there is a fraction (about 10%) who haven't had a chance to make it to the last anniversary assessed by the census. The 2004 survey was conducted from July to September 2004, and hence it is impossible for around one-in-ten of those surveyed to have reached the last assessed anniversary. For instance, a couple who married in October 1994 were counted as part of the 1990-94 marriage cohort, but even if they stayed together forever, they could not have reached their tenth anniversary by the survey date. Thus the percent in that cohort reaching the 10th anniversary was understated. This problem affects all of the numbers along the diagonal--these numbers reflect only the percent of couples in a group that have celebrated that anniversary. Those not "making it" can be divorced, dead, or simply still waiting for their anniversary to roll around.

Stevenson and Wolfers will be releasing a more thorough critique soon. I plan to report on it when it appears.

The Census Bureau is More Than a Little Wrong on Divorce

The Census Bureau recent released an alarming report that most marriages from the late '70s on did not make it to their 25th anniversary. More careful examination by Justin Wolpers and Betsey Stevenson of the Wharton School reveal an elementary error. The Bureau was including marriages made in the latter half of 1979, but counted their longevity from mid-2004 -- before 25 years had actually elapsed. When those last few marriages were included, most of the late '70s marriages -- 53% -- did indeed celebrate their silver anniversary.

There is some further wrong, though. It was not just the Baby Boomers who showed a high divorce rate. Every generation of marriages showed a sizable jump in divorces in the five years preceding 2004 over the five-year period just before that. For example, for men married between 1975 and 1979, 5.6% divorces in the five years between 1995 and 1999, yet the Census Bureau shows nearly twice as many, 10.1%, divorced between 1999 and 2004. The late '70s were a bad era for marriage, but the marriage cohorts around this one, from the early '60s to the late '80s, show nearly identical huge leaps.

It is possible that divorce became much more likely for everyone in the early '00s. What this looks like to me, though, is that the Census Bureau changed the way it measured some aspect of divorce, causing an apparent leap in the divorce rate, without a real change in the underlying facts. More as this story develops.

Bad Motivational Posters (But Funny)

From aGits.

7-Year Marriage Limit is a Political Stunt

Gabriele Pauli of the German Christian Social Union party has proposed that marriages expire after 7 years unless legally renewed. Officially, Pauli is running for leadership of the conservative Catholic party. She had no chance of being elected, even though she did help bring down the previous leader. The twice-divorced politician is prone to stunts with the adolescent ambition of "shaking things up." This is another stunt. This idea is like the proposal made by famous feminist sociologist Jesse Bernard, after her own divorce, that marriages be five-year renewal contracts. That didn't go anywhere either. The whole idea misses the point: marriage is the most transformative relationship that you can choose to enter just because it is permanent and total. And children need permanent parents, not adjunct grown-ups on temporary contracts.

FDA, Lacking All Sense of Proportion, Bars Foreign Sperm

The Food and Drug Administration has banned the importation of sperm from 30 countries where there were some cases of mad cow disease. Now the sperm banks are running dry. I am not so concerned about the sperm banks. I do think it is a bad idea to take away everyone's choices due to an infinitesimal risk to a few. This is the bad side of the nanny state. It would be reasonable to require sperm banks to inform their customers of the risk. I am sure their lawyers would want all customers to sign armor-clad waivers. But still, this is a risk that people could decide for themselves.

Longest Divorce Case Puts All the Kids in Therapy

Peter and Nancy Tauck are my nominees for today's "worst person in the world" (as seen on Countdown). At the end of their record-setting 86 day divorce trial, which cost $13 million to prosecute, Nancy had falsely charged Peter with sexually molesting their small children. The investigation of the sexual molestation charge so messed up the kids that they are now in therapy. Both parents have been ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous. Nancy is allowed only a ten-minute daily phone call with the kids, which will be monitored. And she only gets $33,333 a month in alimony.

The Democratic Center Beats the Netroots

David Brooks has a fine column today on why the Democratic candidates who appeal to the liberal professionals and their bloggers ultimately lose to more centrist candidates who appeal to the more numerous regular middle class. This year, that means Edwards and Obama will likely give way to Clinton.

I am a professional and a blogger. I have stickers for Edwards and Obama on my minivan. But I think it is a good thing that my party is likely to nominate a solid candidate, like Senator Clinton, who can actually appeal to the center and win the election. The primaries are by no means settled, and many things can happen between now and the decisive Kentucky primary next May (ok, I am probably dreaming on that last point). I like our whole team, and will support the nominee. The other sticker I have on my van is for General Wesley Clark, who I would still vote for as I did last time. Realistically, I would like to see Gen. Clark as Secretary of State.

The point is, though, that the center really does lead where it counts. At the Gruntled Center, that looks like a good thing.

Why Should God Bless America?

At a conservative Christian Value Voters conference a church choir sang "Why Should God Bless America?," a parody of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." The new version asks why God should bless us when we deny that he exists by banning public school prayer and legalizing abortion. The Values Voters received it with thunderous applause.

Steven Benen of the liberal Talking Points Memo (linked above) imagines that a liberal parody of "God Bless America" would draw the ire of conservatives for messing with an American classic.

There is, though, a liberal answer to "God Bless America" - not a parody, but an alternative vision of God's relation to the United States. This alternative, Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land," was originally titled "God Blessed America for Me."

I embrace both Irving Berlin's and Woody Guthrie's vision of what America owes God, and thank them for writing two of the three greatest hymns of our civil religion (the third being "America the Beautiful.")

My gripe with "Why Should God Bless America?" is that its theology is backwards. The Values Voters expect God to bless America if we would just choose to follow a few rules. This view of God is too small, too tit-for-tat, while their idea of human goodness is way too optimistic for this Calvinist. Irving Berlin, by contrast, is asking God to stand beside America and guide America because we are not capable, without providential assistance, of choosing the right path.

The Values Voters want God to sign a contract with America. The grand old hymn asks, in grateful supplication, for God's blessing and help.

World's Tallest Elvis Tribute Artist is Coming!

Here is small town excitement at its most sublime. An ad in our local paper, the Advocate-Messenger, proclaims "Attention ELVIS fans:" A local paint store is sponsoring a show to commemorate that important event in the civil religion, the anniversary of the King's death (30 years! Where did the time go?) In addition to featuring Paul Staley, World's Tallest Elvis Tribute Artist, the show features a special guest whose claim to fame is that he is the 2-Time Winner of the Elvisfest of the Bluegrass.

Only ten bucks. Such a deal.

40-somethings Are Still Married, Barely

The Census Bureau just came out with its scary report that most marriages contracted in the late '70s did not make it to their 25th anniversary. Mrs. G. and I, who married in the early '80s did, thank the Lord, but we know ours is not the universal experience. My age group, the 40-somethings, seems to be the tipping point. In 2004, among all men 40 - 49 years old, 52.8% were in their first marriage; among women of the same age, 49.7%. This averages out to just over half of all Americans in their 40s are in the first marriages. Odds are that it won't still be a majority in our 50s.

Summers Rejected Again

Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, was hounded from office for suggesting that one of the reasons that women don't make up half of those at the top of science and engineering is that women don't make up half of those at the top of the math ability spectrum. Summers was invited to speak to the University of California regents recently. The faculty got up in arms, and got 150 signatures in a couple of days. Maureen Stanton, organizer of the petition drive, said "I was appalled that someone articulating that point of view would be invited by the regents," Stanton said.

This is why people despise political correctness. I think Summers is right. Even if you don't agree, the issue is an important empirical question, which can be addressed empirically. That is what universities are for. Perhaps the University of California regents could look into that. But no, they had no more spine than the Harvard trustees. They rescinded the invitation.

Marriage Beats Class, Eventually

George Vaillant has drawn some conclusions from his long-running study of aging men:

Among his most striking findings was that social class seemed to diminish in importance as the men grew older, while factors such as quality of marriage and coping mechanisms played more important roles in predicting happiness and success.

"American Girls" and Their Dads

Mrs. G. did all the work on this one.

As I wrote yesterday, Mattel has introduced a new doll in the American Girl line. Julie, from 1974, is the child of divorce. Each American Girl comes with books introducing her life and describing her distinctive adventures. What happens when we compare how Julie and the other girls relate to their fathers?

Amazon makes it easy to “look inside” the first few pages of books. In historical order, try these experiences.

---

Felicity Merriman pushed open the door to her father’s store and took a deep breath. She loved the smell of coffee beans and chocolate, of pine soap, spice tea, and apples. No place in the world smelled as good as her father’s store.

“Good day, Mistress Merriman!” said her father. He smiled and bowed.

Felicity grinned. Her father always pretended she was a fine lady customer when she came into his store. “Good day, Mr. Merriman,” she answered. She liked to pretend to.

---

Josefina shaded her eyes. Even from this far away, she could see Papa. He sat very straight and tall on his horse. He was talking to the workers in the cornfield near the stream. The rancho had belonged to Papa’s family for more than one hundred years. All those years, Papa’s family had cared for the animals and the land. It was not an easy life. Every one had to work hard. Some years there was plenty of rain so that the crops grew and the animals were healthy. Some years there was not enough rain. Then the soil was dry and the animals went thirsty. But through good time and bad the rancho went on. It provided everything Josefina and her family needed to live. It gave them food, clothing, and shelter. Josefina loved the rancho. It was her home. She believed that it was the most beautiful place in all of New Mexico and all of the world.

---

Addy Walker woke up late on a summer’s night to hear her parents whispering. She thought no more of their quiet voices than of the soft chirping of the crickets in the woods just beyond the little cabin. Often she awoke to her parents’ whispering. Addy liked the sound. It made her feel safe, knowing her mother and father were close by.

---

Papa’s black wool jacket flapped like a gull’s wings as he crossed the deck. “There’s a storm coming,” Papa said. “It could be dangerous. The coast is rocky here, and the wind is getting stronger.” Papa lifted Kirsten out of the coiled rope. Then he pulled Marta out too. “Come below where we’ll be safe,” he said.

---

“Jessie, did you know my mother and father?” Samantha asked.

Jessie spoke gently. “You know I didn’t, child. That accident in the boat happened when you were just five. You know I didn’t come to work for your grandmother till you were seven.”

Samantha had known that. Asking had really been wishing. She touched the locket pinned to her dress. Inside the small gold heart was a picture of her mother and father. She would have loved to hear Jessie talk about them. When Jessie told stories, she made everything sound like magic. Jessie would have made Samantha’s parents seem like a princess.

---

Sometimes, now that Dad was gone to the war, Molly would climb into the plaid chair and sniff it because that vanilla pipe smell made her feel so safe and happy, just as if Dad were home.

Molly remembered the fun they had at the table when Dad was home. He teased Jill and made her blush. He swapped jokes with Ricky and told riddles to Brad, Molly’s younger brother. And he always said, “Gosh and golly, olly Molly, what have you done today?” Suddenly everything Molly had done-whether it was winning a running race or using a multiplication bee—was interesting and important, wonderful or not so bad after all.

---

“Remember when we built that fort out of clay we dug up from the garden? And we dressed up our Liddle Kiddles in old time clothes.”

“I remember,” sighed Ivy. The room turned middle-of-the-night quiet. Julie and Ivy couldn’t look at teach other.

“I can’t believe you’re moving,” said Ivy, flashing her dark eyes at Julie.

It’s only a few miles away, across town,” said Julie. “It’s not like I’m moving to Mars.

“I won’t be able to blink lights at you from across the street anymore to say good night,” said Ivy.

“But we can call each other up,” Julie pointed out. “And you’ll see me on the weekends when I come visit my dad.” There was that lump again. She felt it every time she thought of being without Dad. She thought she’d gotten used to the idea of her parents being divorced, but now that she wouldn’t be living with Dad any more, suddenly it wasn’t just an idea. It was real.

---

So, for the first hundred years of the stories, girls start their stories by delighting in their fathers’ nearness. Then the one orphan is allowed to mourn, and the soldier’s daughter is allowed to pine. And then the child of divorce gets to protect her friend by hiding her grief out of sight.

Isn’t that an amazing triumph of individual liberation?

New From Mattel: Happy Divorce Girl

My girls had American Girl dolls -- Addy and Kirsten, respectively, for those who know and love the idea. American Girl was born just a couple of years before they were, and the first dolls were just the thing needful when they were ready for dolls. American Girl dolls are fully formed historical characters, with a whole backstory and books to fill in the historical narrative. One of the features that my wife and I, schooled in '70s feminism, most treasured was that each girl had some money of her own.

A few years ago Mattel bought American Girl. They did maintain the old characters, and developed them in coherent ways, but we worried that the American Girls would be Barbie-ized. My own kids aged out of dolls, so I have not kept up carefully. Lately, though, Mattel has brought out a new American Girl doll, Julie Albright, set in 1974. The crucial distinction that Julie has from previous dolls is that her parents are divorced. This is how Mattel describes her:

For Julie Albright, life after her parents’ divorce holds as many ups and downs as the hilly streets of San Francisco. Julie misses her old bedroom, her pet rabbit, her best friend, Ivy—and most of all, having her whole family together.
But Julie begins to see that change also brings new possibilities. By taking charge of her new life, she learns to believe in herself—and that love can hold a family together even when they live apart.

Ah, the "happy talk" divorce of the mid-1970s, when parents had to be free, and kids were expected to just suck it up. Divorce was not treated as a disaster that ended their childhood, but a change that brings new possibilities. You can buy Julie's school locker, complete with Brady Bunch poster (the happy blended family) and a "Hang in there, Baby" poster showing a kitten literally at the end of its rope.

Perhaps the later Julie books in the AG series can include Julie Torn Between Two Worlds and The Unexpected Legacy of Julie's Parents' Divorce When Julie Tries Dating.

"The Lives of Others" Not a Road to Damascus Moment

I commend to you the excellent new film, "The Lives of Others," by Florian Henckel von Donnsermarck. The central drama is the moral struggle within an East German secret policeman as he spies on a prominent playwright and his actress girlfriend. The policeman is a true believer in the East German state -- and the playwright is a hopeful socialist, "our only non-subversive writer who is read in the West," as another secret policeman describes him. The Stasi (State Security) man comes to see that his surveillance is just a tool of corruption and petty politics. The playwright, too, is driven to an act of covert rebellion against the police state. Their lives become deeply entangled. I'll not say more about the conclusion.

There is a lovely moment early on when a little boy asks the secret policeman if he is really a Stasi agent.
"Do you know what the Stasi is?"
"Yes. My dad says they are the bad men who put people in prison."
The audience knows this is a dangerous moment for the little boy's family.
"What is the name of ..." the policeman begins. And then he pauses. The actor - East German theater star Ulrich Mühe, who had his own large Stasi file in real life - shows the moral struggle going on inside the Stasi man using only his face.
"What is the name of your ... ball."
"You're silly. Balls don't have names."
The man lets it go.

In an interview included with the DVD, von Donnersmarck says that he wanted to show the policeman's moral struggle as slowly evolving, "not a Damascus moment." He remains the same tidy, quiet, almost compulsive man that he always was, even while his morals are changing. Von Donnersmarck, who spent some of the time writing the screenplay at the Cistercian abbey run by his uncle, said he didn't want his man to go from a gray bureaucrat to a hedonistic bohemian, like the artists he was watching. People don't change from Saul to Paul, the director said, unless there is divine intervention. "The Lives of Others" is about the moral changes we can come to make and choose for ourselves.

College Won't Recognize Fraternity Because it Excludes Women

This sounds like an Onion story, but it is true. The appeals court was shocked, shocked! to discover that fraternities excluded women. Oh, no, politically incorrect! The College of Staten Island are the monkeys in this case, but the same thing could happen many places.

Glamour on Faludi

Susan Faludi has a new book, The Terror Dream, arguing that 9/11 elevated manly men at the expense of strong and accomplished women. This is an interesting thesis, which makes me want to have a look at the book.

I heard about the book because a student gave me the review of it from Glamour. The review is one page, half of which it taken up with pictures of actresses with wedding dresses and babies.

What was striking to me was which piece of Faludi's argument the magazine chose to focus on. Their summary of her argument is this:

The 2001 attacks, she claims, made American feel vulnerable and created a longing for the good old days of 'manly men. As a result ...
Female heroes were ignored ...
Women vanished from TV talk shows ...
Grieving widows became the feminine ideal ...
June Cleaver replaced Carrie Bradshaw ...
The national 'bump watch' began.

The core argument, even as summarized by the magazine itself, seems to focus on the exclusion of strong and powerful women from public discourse. The element that Glamour focused on, though, is "Did 9/11 make us marriage- and baby-obsessed." Most of the evidence that the magazine cites is based on fictional characters in televisions shows, and to a lesser extent on the celebrities who portray them.

Now, Glamour does not pretend to be a serious policy journal, and I will not criticize them for having a simple review. I am glad they note serious issues at all, amidst their primary concern with, as they clearly state, glamor. I think the Glamour review is symptomatic of a powerful tendency in pop culture to turn all discussions of real politics into discussions of pop culture itself.

Get Warren Jeffs the Right Way

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints is a scary cult, and Warren Jeffs is about as scary a cult leader as you will find. He rules over their compound in Colorado City, Arizona, with an iron hand. The FLDS control every institution in town, and drive out anyone who doesn't conform to their views, such as no short sleeves in public, or Jeffs' order that all dogs in town be killed. Like most polygynous sects, the old men drive many of the young men out of town, so the old men can have all the women.

Most people were willing to tolerate the FLDS's polygamy with adult women. What has really turned the public and the law against them are the forced marriages of young girls. Warren Jeffs' trial begins today for ordering a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin against her will. People who have fled the group say that forced marriages for young girls are common.

What's wrong with this trial is the charge. Jeffs is charged with being an accomplice to rape for ordering an underage girl to marry, and presumably have sex with, a man who was a legal adult. This charge stretches rape law beyond the plausible. The prosecutors might lose, and Jeffs would slip away. Worse, they might win. If counseling people to marry, or return to a marriage, which presumably would include sex, could be legally construed as assisting rape, then anyone offering marital advice could be liable for prosecution. Unlikely, to be sure, but liable.

It is very hard to prosecute cult leaders. They tell adults to do crazy things, but it is the other people who actually do them. Unlike, say, a gang leader, they do not threaten to beat up their subordinates, or their families, or take all their money, or other dangers that secular law can recognize. The promises and threats that a cult leader can wield are beyond the law -- and should be. If Jeffs really did commit a crime, such as raping a four-year-old boy as one man has charged, by all means throw the book at him. But don't twist the law to get him just any way.

What is more effective against cults is ridicule. Jeffs was arrested in Las Vegas in a red Escalade, with wigs, sunglasses, 15 cell phones, and more than $50,000 in cash. Not exactly the actions of God's Annointed. Definitely fails the WWJD test.

Happy Russian "Conception Day"

Russia, like most developed countries, is facing a demographic crisis of not nearly enough babies to replace their current population. The governor of Ulyanovsk, Sergei Morozov, had a bright idea to do something about it: give everyone the day off, so they can go home and conceive. Under the wonderful euphemism "Family Contact Day," today has been set aside for making babies who would be born 9 months from now, June 12 -- Russia Day. To promote the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia Day" campaign, the Ulyanovsk government has set up exhibits and even a traveling "agit-train" full of helpful gynecologists and psychologists, a reminder of the old Bolshevik agit-trains.

I wish them well, and hope everyone in Ulyanosk has patriotic fun today. Happy Conception Day.

Married, High-Earning People Apologize More

The Pearl Outlet.com noticed that more people were buying pearls to apologize. (Male people, mostly likely, Mrs. G. notes.) So they commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll, asking people if they would apologize in three different cases: when they were to blame, when they were partly to blame, and when they were not to blame. In each case, married people were twice as likely to apologize to their spouses than unmarrieds were to their girl- and boyfriends.

Even more interesting, your likelihood of apologizing directly correlates with how much you make. Among people who made more than $100,000 per year, 92% said they would apologize if they were in the wrong, versus only 52% of those earning under $25,000, with proportionate results for the paygrades in between. When those same people thought they were blameless, the high earners would still apologize 22% of the time, versus 13% of the lowest earners.

The report of the poll leaves many blanks - especially whether there are sex differences in apologizing, and whether there is a difference between apologizing to your spouse and apologizing in a business or social situation. Still, a fascinating, and unusually strong correlation.

Sex Scandals Among the Powerful Are Worse

Michael Currie Schaffer makes a good point in The New Republic about the current wave of Republican vs. Democratic sex scandals. The Republican senators having sex with prostitutes or picking up guys in the men's room are sleazy. They deserve their humiliation, though, mostly because they are hypocrites. The Democratic mayors and governors who have extramarital affairs with other powerful people -- political aides, tv reporters, union officials -- are more dangerous because these affairs are more likely to lead to secret deals, payoffs, and conflicts of interest.

When two powerful people are married to one another, the public has some notice of the potential for conflicts of interest, and can keep an eye on them. In the case of elected officials, there are often legal safeguards against doing public business with the spouses of government officials. When the affairs are secret, though, the damage to the public can be hidden, too.

Extramarital affairs are sleazy any way you cut it. When both parties are power players, though, the sleaze is made worse by the corruption that is likely to follow.

The Largest Congregation Led By a Woman?

The Religious Research Association, a fine organization of denominational datawonks (of which I am a member), had an interesting exchange recently trying to find the largest mainline congregation headed by a woman pastor. The results (so far):

Rev. Jo Gayle Hudson, Cathedral of Hope, in Dallas, has an attendance of 1500+ and membership of 4500+. This is now a United Church of Christ congregation, but began as a Metropolitan Community Church. Indeed, it was probably the leading MCC congregation. This also explains how there is a UCC – that is, Congregationalist – congregation with the very un-Congregationalist name of "Cathedral." The MCC, a homosexual-oriented Pentecostal denomination, is not mainline, but the UCC is.

The next largest woman-led UCC congregation (the largest with a direct Congregationalist history) is Community Church UCC, Vero Beach, FL, led by Rev. Casey Garrett Baggott. It has a worship attendance of 1612 and membership of 2080.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, The Rev. Deanna M Wildermuth is Senior Pastor of Sharon Lutheran Church in Grand Forks, ND with a reported baptized membership of 4,781 and average attendance of 907.

In the Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination, the largest church with a senior solo pastor is First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest, IL. This church had 1,762 members and an average worship attendance of 478. In addition, First Presbyterian Church in Boulder,CO, with 2,204 in membership and 1,614 in attendance, has a female co-pastor.

A Southern Baptist added that, though the SBC is not mainline and is nearly universally opposed to calling women as senior pastors, First Baptist in Decatur, Georgia recently called Julie Pennington-Russell as senior pastor. Last year the church reported 2,671 members with 483 in average worship attendance.

What of the Episcopalians, America's ruling class denomination of old? I find it amusing that the Episcopal entry in this parlor game did not count membership size, but used a different scale:
"I DOUBT THAT THEY ARE LARGER, BUT ST JAMES IN NYC IS PROBABLY THE SECOND RICHEST (NEXT TO TRINITY .WALL STREET). IT HAS A WOMAN RECTOR."

Trilby Takes A Side

My wonderful son, Trilby, only takes sides to support the underdog. We are not a sports-oriented family, so side-taking in a physical sense doesn't come up very often.

Last evening it was past five and he hadn't turned up from school. I called around to his friends' houses, and eventually it came out that he had joined a group of other middle schoolers preparing for the big Friday night football game. The lads were painting themselves blue and white for the game pitting the Danville Admirals against our cross-town rival, the Boyle County Rebels. To his own surprise, Trilby was going to join in the revelry. When I eventually got him on the phone, he asked that we bring his eponymous trilby hat to complete his ensemble. Endub (daughter #2) and I went to the game ourselves, in part to engage in the charming small-town ritual, and in part to enjoy the spectacle of The Boy Who Does Not Take Sides with his face painted.

He conducted himself with suitable decorum through the game, and enjoyed himself with his friends. Endub says she observed some mild flirtation: a girl stole his hat, obviously wishing to be pursued; he caught up with her, rested his hand on her head, and said in a low voice, "I am inflicting massive pain." I believe she giggled.

We won a close game. At the end of the evening, Trilby, the sociologist's son, said that painting himself with the guys did create a bond among them. He added, "I still don't take sides, but just for this hour ADMIRALS RULE!"

A wonderful insight into a fine developing character.

MADD Logic: Ban Teen Driving

I support Choose Responsibility, a national effort to create a drinking license for 18 to 20 year olds. I live among college students. About a third of them don't drink alcohol at all, which I applaud. The majority, though, begin drinking underage. The rule we have set for ourselves today is that we adults forbid ourselves to teach students anything about responsible drinking before we turn them loose at 21. The result is a serious problem with binge drinking and regular drunkenness even among students who we know are smart and teachable. I think it would be better to try to teach young people how one can drink responsibly.

The main opponent of Choose Responsibility is Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Like all sensible people, I am against drunk driving. I feel safe in saying that all Choose Responsibility signatories are against drunk driving. What we differ on is which method will best reduce drunk driving (by anyone), and which method will best reduce teen drunkenness. I think the current method, formally forbidding teen drinking, has proven ineffective on both counts.

One of the arguments that MADD makes is that the mandatory 21 drinking age has saved 17 thousand teenagers who, statistically, would otherwise have died in drunk driving accidents. This is probably true. You know how we could save even more lives? Forbid teen driving altogether. Teenagers are much more dangerous drivers than adults are, especially teen boys. We could save many lives by forbidding them from driving. Is anyone ready for that national experiment? I'm not.

Yes, teen drinking is dangerous, more dangerous than drinking by adults is. But teen anything is more dangerous than the adult practice of the same thing, because teens take bigger risks and have less judgment about what is risky. In every other sphere we try to combat teen risk taking through education. I believe we should do the same with drinking.

When Breastfeeders Attack!

A local Applebees restaurant in Nicholasville, KY, asked Brooke Ryan to cover up when she breastfed her baby. Now they wish they hadn't. Ryan organized a "nurse-in" on the sidewalk in front of that Applebees. The web carried the story everywhere, and now 60 Applebees in 30 states may get the full La Leche this weekend.

Applebees has said they will send blankets to all of their restaurants for breastfeeding, and have proclaimed that they are 100% pro-baby, pro-family, and pro-breast.

I think they should go a step further. I think they should print breastfeeding blankets with the Applebees logo with their new slogan, "A Neighborhood Milk Bar and Grill." They could give away special logo nursing bras -- Applebras. And baby slings, too -- Appleboughs. The possibilities are endless.

Don't mess with moms.

Will Birth-Dearth States Not Risk War?

James Kurth raises the interesting possibility that the nations with below-replacement birth rates -- not only the industrialized nations, but also China -- will not want to risk their precious only children as cannon fodder in major land wars. Such a policy would, obviously, have its up side if it reduced the chance of war. On the other hand, there are times when a credible military, and the will to use it, are necessary for defense.

It is certainly true that the total birthrates of Western nations are below replacement, often well below. But these birthrates have not been spread evenly to produce a majority of one-child families. Rather, we have a rising number of women with no children, averaged in with the two or three child families of the middle class, and the three or four child families of the poor and immigrants.

Kurth rightly says that the "liberal professionals and professional liberals" are particularly unlikely to have large families. However, they are also particularly unlikely to send their children to war, no matter how many they have. The war-making class and the war-fighting class are as separated as they ever have been, thanks to the all-volunteer force. Short of a large draft, things will stay that way.

Demographic contraction will have a significant effect on how big a force we could muster in a large war. But I don't think the trend toward few children in the educated classes will translate into any greater reluctance to make war at all. Chelsea Clinton and the Bush twins were the precious result of their parents' only birth, but it did not make their commander-in-chief fathers any less likely to commit the country to war. Those kids weren't going to serve, anyway.

Religion Under Liberalism Does Not Quite Equal Secularism

Stanley Fish has a piece in the New York Times entitled "Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same." He argues that liberalism

"is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion – the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge – as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality."

Fish says that the liberal state will tolerate all religions -- all religions, that is, that are themselves tolerant. He is right about this. From this Fish concludes that

"The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces."

Here I think he makes a mistake. Most American faiths have made their peace with the liberal state, but they also have a wing, at least, that believes that their own faith is, indeed, true. Such democratic faiths refrain from triumphalism and intolerance not because they don't believe their creeds to be true, but because they believe that intolerance is an ineffective way to spread the faith. In a market society, good market competitors win, while crusading warriors lose. Most versions of Christianity, in particular, have been chastened by the disasters of the religious wars and their own experiences of intolerance, both on the giving and the receiving end. I believe that Calvinism has the best-developed theory of why a chastened, self-critical, fair-competition faith is the most insightful basis for evangelism in a fallen world.

Faith within liberal society need not be eviscerated, just because it is humble.

Zen My Pimpmobile

My nominee for the next step in reality television.

Because less is more ...

Anglo-Protestant America

"The principal theme of this book is the continuing centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture to American national identity." With this claim, Samuel Huntington throws down the gauntlet in Who Are We?, his study of American national culture. Huntington distinguishes between Anglo-Protestant culture and the "American Creed," the Jeffersonian virtues in the Declaration of Independence. He argues that the Creed, while great and central to American identity, is too thin to build a nation on. In fact, he argues that any ideology is too thin for a nation to cohere around -- a problem that drove all the communist nations to return to the nationalism they had originally despised.

Huntington is clear to say that American individuals do not all have to be Protestants. It is the culture as a whole, not the faith of each individual, that shapes the collective identity. I am inclined to agree with him on both points -- that ideology is not enough, and that the distinctives of American culture are rooted in the peculiar tension of the English-speaking Calvinist and Arminian church cultures.

Age vs. Life Course

I teach students the "sociological triad" of race, class, and gender. I have come to add a second triad: age, religion, and region. These factors almost always matter in understanding any social phenomenon.

Later in the term I will have students write their own four-generation sociological narrative, from their grandparents to their (hypothetical) children. I want them to think of their family story in terms of these six standard social forces. In the spirit of leading by example, I wrote such an account of my own family, and gave it to the class to read.

The hardest factor to apply to my narrative was age. At any given moment, age matters quite a bit in shaping one's social circumstances. Over time, especially over generations, though, we move through the various ages, if we are favored with a long life. How to represent the effect of age in an over-time story?

I was seized with a sudden inspiration: how often did the members of my family go through various rites of passage at the customary age? This proved to be a fruitful measure of age-normalcy (or not) for the whole lineage, not just of one or another individual in it. I think this customary-age idea could be turned into a standardized measure of whole family lines.

Positive Inequality

I have assigned a good article, "The Rise and Fall of Narratives of Benign Inequality," the lead essay by David Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi in their fine Inequality Reader. They start with functionalist arguments made in the 1940s and 1950s that inequality serves a social purpose. They review several arguments that inequality is benign because it is declining. Then they outline some of the more recent arguments that inequality is bad in ways previously unexplored, such as in creating terrorism or environmental degradation.

Yet they never really take up the challenge of the functionalist argument. What Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued in their famous article of 1945, for example, is that inequality serves a positive good. Society needs to get people with rare talents and/or training into hard, socially useful jobs. Therefore, it is good for society if such positions carry more rewards. Hence, inequality is functional for all. The later studies that Grusky and Szelenyi consider are not arguments for the social necessity of inequality, but empirical studies of declining inequality. Since income inequality did not flatten out, as the Kuznets curve predicted, and has been rising lately in the age of Bill Gates, those optimistic studies of a generation ago seem naive.

Yet empirical studies of the rise and fall of actual inequality, especially of something so elastic as income, or wealth, does not address the main point raised by Davis and Moore: is inequality, in some form and to some degree, ultimately beneficial for all?

From Minnesota

Classes began this morning. In my Social Structure class I allowed that we would be studying the main social forces that sociologists believe shape the social structure, especially race, class, and gender. In the spirit of full disclosure, I told them that I had become convinced that there are deep, complementary differences between men and women, which are likely to shape all social structures. Afterwards, a student came to see me, not sure her views would really be compatible with the premises of the course. She put the potential conflict with wonderful, and revealing, delicacy. "I'm from Minnesota, and so are my parents. We moved to the South when I was little, but my family is not really from here."

I assured her that the class would be empirical throughout, and that she was welcome to argue with the evidence and the discourse of the class to her heart's content. She is staying.

On Vacation -- See You in a Week!