Habits Beat Deadlines

My friend Mark Mallman had an interesting post on his blog entitled "Deadlines." He is a master's degree student in sociology, and is having the normal graduate student trouble of getting down to the writing. He had tried to get his advisors to set deadlines for him, but it didn't really work. Both he and the advisors knew the deadlines weren't serious.

Instead, Mark has adopted the harder but more rewarding habit of a fellow student of setting aside a time each day -- 8 to 10 a.m., in his case -- to write. The rules are simple but firm:

She [the fellow student] does not allow herself to email, text, answer the phone, answer the door, eat, or play solitaire. She does not allow herself an out. The trick is, even if she only writes a hundred words in the two hours, it's writing only time.

Mark has adopted a similar rule, and it is already having good results. He is writing. I have a rule something like that: that is how I write a blog post each day. I have not been as strict about which distractions are excluded. When I get down to writing that book, though, I think these stricter rules will be necessary.

I suggested a similar rule to my undergraduates. They don't have a master's thesis to write, but they all have papers and quizzes, as well as notes and letters, that they should be writing at any time. They might not have two hours a day, but I think one hour a day is realistic for undergraduates.

In fact, I expect that nearly everyone reading these words has something that they are supposed to be writing all the time. Unless we are professional writers, we treat writing as a side job to be done only when we can no longer put it off. But our lives would be better, and our writing would be better, if we made a habit of absolutely setting aside time to write each day.

Because habits are more powerful than deadlines.

The Class War is Not So Simple at the Top

Robert Frank, in Richistan, reports that those with a net worth of $1 to $10 million tend to vote Republican in order to reduce their own taxes, while those worth more than $10 million tend to vote Democratic and give to liberal causes in order to “preserve the system of fairness and opportunities they had growing up.”

Likely Abortion Politics

I posted about abortion the other day in response to a friend's challenge. This led to an interesting further exchange, which I reproduce here.

I was glad to see you decided to respond to the Robbie George piece on Obama and abortion with a blog entry a few days ago. But I must tell you I was generally disappointed in the result, primarily because I thought you dodged the issue. It is true, of course, that George was extrapolating rather liberally from the FOCA language that you so helpfully provided. But that is the very point. As you well know, the left has famously supported an array of innocuous sounding policy statements, like the FOCA one, but then their lawyers argue from those statements for a regulatory regime and legal framework that goes far beyond what most people associate with the original position. Frankly, the FOCA position sounds roughly similar to our current abortion regime, which is what makes it seem harmless. But I can easily see NARAL and their ilk driving a Mack truck through the language to do exactly the sort of things George mentions in his piece. That was the issue you sidestepped by veering off into the argument about George’s piece being alarmist and rhetorically overblown. The piece may well have taken liberties, to be sure. But you provided no evidence (perhaps because no evidence exists) about what limitations on abortion Obama might actually find acceptable.

I don't know what limits Obama would put on abortion. Neither does Robbie George. Hillary Clinton has supported the 95-10 proposal. I expect that Obama would too if given a law to sign. It is clearly not one of his big issues either way.

Sure, there are people on the left who want to drive a truck though innocuous statutory language. Same thing on the right.

The truth is that there are not enough members of Congress who care enough about this issue, on either side, to force though a major abortion bill -- FOCA, anti-FOCA, or a serious compromise. FOCA will not be the first bill he signs, because there will not be a serious abortion bill in the next Congress, any more than there was in the last one (or dozen). And President Obama will not spend political capital to get one, any more than Pres. Bush did.

Well, now this is an EXCELLENT answer because you both acknowledge what seems to be true—that we will have to wait and see what Obama really thinks about abortion—and also provide a very politically grounded comment, that we’re just not in line for significant abortion legislation anytime soon.
Of course you’re correct that the right does the same kind of thing as the left on policy language—presumably that’s part of the ongoing struggle over the Defense of Marriage Act, for example. Seems to me this whole arena, of both sides trying to impose their views and policy approaches on the country via seemingly “safe” national legislation, would make a great conference topic for centrists who are trying to keep their sanity. I know an issue I’d love to see discussed in this vein involves “equal rights.” I’m certainly in favor of the notion of “equal pay for equal work,” for example. But I don’t have any clear sense of how this could be enforced without introducing so many skewed incentives that we’d end up worse off than we already are. Again, I’d like some centrist discussion of this rather than the usual bomb throwing from the political extremes.

To which I say, Amen.

All Taxes Redistribute Wealth -- That's What They Are For

There has been some very foolish talk on the campaign trail lately that one side is bad because they want to use taxes to redistribute wealth. This is silly -- all taxes redistribute wealth. They take from everyone to serve the common good. We all pay taxes so we can all have roads and schools and mail and security and thousands of other common goods. Some of our taxes go to individuals for their individual needs, such as school loans or medicare payments. Even the small fraction of Americans receiving straight-up welfare in order to take better care of their kids are serving the common good. The Earned Income Tax Credit is better than old-fashioned welfare because it only goes to people who are working, and only goes to working people who do not make quite enough to take care of their kids.

Rich people get back less money in services because they need them less, and poor people get more because they need them more. That is just. That improves the common good.

The Alternative to Arranged Marriage is Not Cohabitation

National Public Radio had an interesting series on arranged marriage among American Muslims. The main point was that even though American-raised, even American-born Muslims find themselves between American do-it-yourself mate selection and the arranged marriages of the Old Country, many American Muslims do find arranged marriages work out fine. Moreover, having your parents take an active role in mate selection takes out much of the anxiety of finding someone who is suitable without having to succumb utterly to American sexual norms.

Which leads me to what struck me most about this series. The final installment begins with this question to Shad Imam, who is now six years into his happy arranged marriage: "How do you marry someone you haven't lived with?" While cohabitation before marriage is common in the United States, and is the norm for college graduates, it is not really a good way to get to know a potential spouse. Cohabiters who marry have a higher divorce rate than people who do not live together before the wedding. The best-educated couples are starting to get this message, and their rate of pre-marital cohabitation is going down.

NPR is usually ahead of the curve on cultural trends. It is instructive to see that on this one they are still peddling the wisdom of a previous generation of mothers -- the antithesis of the moms who are arranging marriages -- to "give him a test drive first."

End Race and Sex Quotas in the Church

In my essay Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, I call for ending the Committees on Representation that are mandatory at all levels of church government in the Presbyterian Church (USA). This point is secondary to my main point, which is that the whole church would be better off if we had an establishment of authoritative leaders to draw on. We used to, but we do not now in part because we deliberately dismantled the structures that create and recreate an establishment since the Sixties.

Still, one of the reasons that the "old boys' network" was dismantled was to create more opportunities for people who were not old white men to be in positions of leadership. Committees on Representation were mandated to monitor compliance with the cultural mandate, and shame the recalcitrant.

There may have been a moment when it was necessary to mandate the inclusion of women in leadership positions in the church, and to mandate the inclusion of racial-ethnic minorities and disabled people on the monitoring committees. I believe that, as that generation retires and is replaced by my naturally inclusive generations, that moment when the church required demographic quotas has passed. They are becoming counter-productive because they foster the idea that sex and ethnicity are primary identities within the church, rather than all being one in Christ.

Yesterday I met with the General Assembly Committee on Representation, the highest such body in the denomination. They were gracious, and we had a civil conversation. I thank them for the invitation. You will not be surprised to learn that the committed members of the Committee on Representation were not convinced that their body was no longer necessary. Fair enough. Several members of the committee also argued that overcoming white male privilege requires people who are not white males to always be in the conversation. I think the church does benefit when people who are not white males are in conversation. But that is a means to a higher end, not an end in itself.

We are faced now with the prudential judgment of whether we still need formal structures to push for demographic representation, or whether the Presbyterian Church is now normally against sex and race exclusion. I believe we have reached the time for change.

De-McDonaldizing the Family

My Introduction to Sociology class is working through George Ritzer's McDonaldization: The Reader. Ritzer has extended Max Weber's argument that rationalization is the master principle of modernity into current discussion through the example and metaphor of McDonald's and McDonaldization. In the Reader he includes are article by Sara Raley on the "de-McDonaldization of the family." She wrestles inconclusively with whether McDonaldization - efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control by non-human technology -- has significantly shaped the internal life of families today. Raley opens the essay, though, with the claim that the definition of family has changed significantly since the 1950s Donna Reed norm. Then, one predictable model of family was normative. Now, all kinds of organizations count as family.

I do not think the broadening of how we talk about family really represents "de-McDonaldization." The normative understanding of family life that was honored more in the 1950s -- of a married couple with their children -- was not the norm because it was the most efficient, predictable, calculable, nor technologically controlled. It was normative because most people wanted to achieve that kind of family. Raley adds the ideal of a breadwinner father and housewife mother. That part of the ideal has clearly changed, though not, I think, for de-McDonaldizing reasons.

The ideal of marrying for life and raising your kids together is still the ideal that most people have of family life. Fewer reach that norm than in the 1950s, but most people still do. And even those who do not reach that standard in their own lives still tend to hold it out as a dream. Some people, of course, do not uphold the nuclear family as the norm. But most still do.

If we no longer make as much of a cultural spectacle of the nuclear family as an ideal it is not because we have deMcDonaldized the definition of family. We haven't even changed our cultural ideal. We are just more polite about respecting other family types as well.

The Abortion Campaign: What's A Centrist to Think

Obama and McCain had a back-and-forth about abortion. A friend sent me Robert George's scathing attack on Obama as the most pro-abortion major candidate ever. Five minutes with pro-life and pro-choice websites will give you your daily quotient of hysteria - and despair.

My position on abortion, in case you need to know that before reading the rest, is that it should be safe, legal, and abhorent.

My argument today, though, is about how we tend to argue about abortion, and other controversial issues, especially in election campaigns. So let us look at a potentially important outcome of this election: the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). Obama told Planned Parenthood that signing this act, assuming it passed Congress, would be the first thing he would do as president. Robbie George, a very smart guy and fellow Swarthmorean, says this act

would create a federally guaranteed ''fundamental right'' to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including ... a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons. In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs.

So, what does FOCA actually say?

It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

So how do you get from what the act says to all the things that George fears? The answer to this question could be repeated dozens of times in this polarized debate, and most others: Anything the other side does not explicitly prohibit, they must favor.

The point of this kind of argument is not to illuminate the truth. The point of this kind of argument is to create polarization. The point is to eliminate all middle positions. The point is to increase fear of the other side -- by reducing all arguments to Us and The Other Side.

In a free society, you can't prohibit polarizing and fear-mongering. What a centrist can do, though, is be skeptical of any argument that says if you do not prohibit every bad possibility, you must be for evil.

The Patriarchal Inherit By Default

I have previously reported Philip Longman's argument that the religious people will produce a growing part of future generations because they have many more kids than the secular do.

Longman also argues that families, and societies, with a patriarchal structure, will produce a growing part of future generations for the same reason: they have many more kids than the gender egalitarians do. In an article in Foreign Policy (March 2006) he argues that in all the industrialized nations, the families that emphasize paternal headship, investment, and service to the family produce larger families in this generation, which multiplies enormously in the next. Whereas family structure liberals average a little over one child per family, family structure conservatives are the overwhelming majority of the four-and-more-kid families. In France, for example, the early Gen-Xers who had three-plus kids have produced 50% of the younger generation.

With this kind of advantage in natural growth, Longman says we can anticipate continuing waves of conservative social movements and voting patterns, as the children of conservatives gain ground demographically in each generation.

Parsing Domestic Violence by Marriage and Class

This is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so you may have seen a statistic like this: Nearly 25 percent of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime.

This sort of statistic makes my students worry that they have a high likelihood of being beaten themselves. What this kind of scary blanket statistic obscures, though, is that educated, middle class, married people -- what the great majority of my students are likely to become -- are at the lowest risk of violence. As Waite and Gallagher note in The Case for Marriage, "the safest place for a women to be is inside marriage.” Being poor is an even greater risk factor than being unmarried: the National Family Violence Survey suggested that rates of "abusive violence" to women with annual incomes below $10,000 are more than 3.5 times those found in households with incomes over $40,000.

Domestic violence is a genuine problem for women and men of all marital states and social classes. But it is important in giving people a real sense of their own risks, and in fighting the culture of fear in general, to see that married middle class people are at low risk of domestic violence.

The Irrationality of Rationalization: California Marriage Licenses

We are talking about the "irrationalities of rationalization" in my Intro class. This is an idea derived from Max Weber's "iron cage," and developed most thoroughly by George Ritzer in his many works on McDonaldization. The idea is that as we transform every aspect of society to make it more efficient, calculable, predictable, and technologically controlled -- in a word, rationalized -- we also create unintended irrationalities.

A case in point comes from the news (as it always does when teaching Weber). California marriage licenses used to have a space for the name of the bride and the name of the groom. When the legal definition of marriage was expanded to cover same-sex couples, the state's bureaucrats followed the normal rules of bureaucratic rationalization: they changed the forms. They judged it more rational and efficient to have one form that could cover all cases -- both the traditional form that the vast majority of the form's users would want, and the rare exceptions. They opted for the most abstract, colorless, unromantic terms to use in place of "bride" and "groom." The new forms asked for Party A and Party B.

The "rational" solution to a problem of bureaucratic nomenclature, though, was an irrational reduction of marriage to many of the people who the state bureaucracy is supposed to serve, the taxpayers of California. Two of them, Rachael Bird and Gideon Codding, refused to use the new, abstract form when they got married, prefering to be bride and groom. The state refused to recognize their marriage. Law suits followed. Embarrassing publicity followed, pushing the bureaucrats to remember that rationalization is not supposed to be an end in itself, but to serve the people.

The state of California backed down. Bride and Groom are now back on the marriage license.

The Protestant Ethics Lives

I have been reading one of my favorite books, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with my Intro to Sociology students this week. They showed an interesting mix of two contradictory views in their own approach to work. On the one hand, they mouth fashionable cynicism that people only work for money. On the other hand, when I ask them about the people who shaped them -- their favorite teachers, the leaders in their community, their own parents -- they admit that those people work for a deeper reason. If they hit the lottery tomorrow, they wouldn't quit. Some work is, of course, a pretty bad job. But Centre College, and places like it, train people for work that they will find intrinsically rewarding.

As we tell them all the time, a liberal arts education is not to get you a job, but to make you into a better person. And one of the things that persons of good character do is work, work for the common good as well as to support their families, work for intrinsic reasons.

Bringing together these two contradictory views about work led to several "ah-ha" moments in class.

Library Porn

Wired has a story, with wonderful pictures, of tech entrepreneur Jay Walker's amazing library of creative class icons. My daughter sent me the link with the caption "Knowledge class style. Or, library porn. DROOL."

Amen.

Slacker Uprising

Michael Moore's new film, "Slacker Uprising," chronicles the sixty-some college rallies he held in the last couple of months before the 2004 election. He was particularly aiming at getting people who had failed to vote in the past to get off the couch and vote. He wanted them to vote for Kerry and against Bush, but mostly he called on them to vote. The film is a low-budget effort, available for download. It is a decent essay of a film.

The most fun part are the incentives that Moore offers to slackers. At the massive campus rallies he asks everyone who could have voted in the previous election but didn't to stand. Then, if they promise to register and vote, he hands them "slacker necessities": a package of Ramen noodles and a pair of clean underpants. I thought it was pretty funny. The Michigan Republic Party, alas, did not, and charged Moore with bribing voters. They lost.

The best part of Michael Moore's approach is his sincere desire to get people, especially young people, to think it is their job to participate in politics. Whatever you think of the content of his other films, these rallies are pure Americana, and a noble task. At several stops local conservatives try to bribe the student organizers or college administration to rescind the invitation. The students resist this pressure. In the one case Moore reports in which the administration caved in, the publicity from their timidity was so great that the 1000 students they expected at Cal State San Marcos turned into 10,000 when the students moved the event to the county fair grounds.

There is quite a bit of anti-Bush snark, especially from some of the guests. At heart, though, the message of civil participation was noble. And of all people, slackers need to hear that message.

To Save Your Marriage, Look for the "Marriage Friendly" Label

A study by Central Florida sociologist James Wright found that getting marital counseling from the average marriage counselor raised the chances for divorce by two or three times. What they have become, Wright says, is divorce counselors.

In response, marriage counselors who want to actually save marriages have created the National Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists. Created by Bill Doherty (U. of Minnesota) and Kathleen Wenger (Pepperdine), the registry sorts out a problem that most people would never suspect "marriage counselors" to have -- most are therapeutically neutral on the institution of marriage.

Half of Welsh Babies Are Illegitimate

More than half of the babies born in Wales this year will be to unmarried parents. The same is true in the north part of England. Britain as a whole is likely to pass the 50% threshold within a decade if present trends continue.

In the U.S. we worry because more than a third of all births are to unmarried parents. To see that the illegitimacy rate in the Mother Country is much worse, and about to pass a tipping point, is, in a way, comforting.

I think the crucial difference between Britain and U.S. that affects birth rates is that we are a much more religious people. While it is certainly true that religiosity does not grant any family immunity from out-of-wedlock births, it does make marriage before babies more likely. How much more likely? Looking at these figures, about a fifth more likely.

Sex-Change-and-Salaries Study Doesn't Quite Make Its Case

An ingenious study by Kristen Schilt of the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall of New York University looked at whether men's and women's salaries changed after they had a sex change. The new men earned slightly more, and the new women quite a bit less, than they had in their previous gender. Schilt and Wiswall take this as unambiguous evidence of gender discrimination. Their crucial claim is that "while transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically."

We usually measure human capital only by level of education. For these subjects, that stayed the same. However, a more biological line of research about men's and women's differences at work emphasizes that testosterone is correlated with more aggressive work, including the desire to be paid more as a measure of status. Sex-change therapy includes significant hormone infusions, which are kept up after the surgery, to change the way the new men and women behave, as well as the way they look.

We can't tell from this study what hormonal difference there was between the new women and the men they were -- the main direction of wage change. We know at least enough to ask, though, whether in behavior that affects work the subjects of this study really were the same before and after.

Amethyst Initiative vs. Choose Responsibility

I support Choose Responsibility, a national movement to create drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds. It was the brainchild of John McCardell, President Emeritus of Middlebury College. Last year McCardell was invited to speak to the group of liberal arts college presidents that includes Middlebury about the CR idea. What came of this discussion was the Amethyst Initiative, a call by some 130 college presidents to rethink the drinking age. CR promotes the Amethyst idea.

The news stories about the Amethyst Initiative have said it calls to end the 21 drinking age, shifting back to 18, as many states used to do. This requires federal action, because Congress tied every state's highway funds to setting the drinking age to 21.

I think it would be a bad idea to simply reduce the drinking age. I expect that McCardell saw the Amethyst idea as "half a loaf," a way to get his peer presidents to at least talk about the idea publicly. I worry, though, that a half-hearted and sluggish effort to simply reduce the drinking age, without getting something in return, will doom the drinking license idea.

The 21 drinking age has failed spectacularly and relentlessly. This is true on college campuses and off. Alcohol has always been part of human society since it was first discovered, and always will be. Our best shot at civilizing alcohol is to have the adults teach the kids how to drink in moderation. Hence, drinking licenses.

Clear away the Amethyst Initiative. On with the real debate.

"Religulous" Misses Its Own Point

Bill Maher's "Religulous" is exactly the anti-religion rant that it appears to be. He interviews religious people to make them look ridiculous. He takes sensible, caring, mainstream parts of a faith and mixes it indiscriminately with the extremist parts. He evangelizes for his own faith, secular rationalism; then, when challenged, retreats to the claim that "I'm just asking questions." "Religulous" is the film equivalent of Richard Dawkins' or Sam Harris' anti-religious books of the moment.

Maher tells us that his own religious education ended at about 13. His Jewish mother did not attempt to educate her children in her faith, and his Catholic father raised his two children as Catholics until he had a falling out with the church over birth control in young Bill's early adolescence. Maher's strong anti-religious zeal now is a relatively new development, as he was a wishy-washy "recovering Catholic" for decades. Recently, though, he has turned to a faith in rationalism beloved of many adolescent boys, myself included at that age. It is the faith that the vast majority of people on earth on ignorant, superstitious fools, and the world would be a better place if everyone were rational like me.

Yet early in the film Maher makes a different, better point. In a "gotcha" visit to the Trucker's Chapel at a truck stop in North Carolina, Maher admits that his faith is a luxury of the rich. He allows that if, for example, a man in prison said "I've got nothing in here except Jesus," Maher could respect that view. But people who are as favored as Bill Maher -- rich, famous, smart -- have the luxury of rejecting God and religion.

I believe that Bill Maher hit the nail on the head right there, as he sometimes does. He just failed to be as critical of himself as he is of everyone else through the rest of the film.

Kim Jong Il, You Betcha

A friend imagined a conversation between the Governor of Alaska and the Dear Leader of North Korea.

Well gosh darn it Mr. Kim Jong, you betcha we're still all riled up about them POW's we left back there and the veterans and American people are just gonna say we've had it with all the evil regimes and nucular weapons bein' the end all and the be all and now you're dealin' with a couple of mavericks. In my country we have a sayin' about pit bulls and hockey, now I don't know if you have hockey over there in Asia but here in America, Joe Six-pack loves his hockey. You know, I was on vacation in Seattle once, and I'm pretty sure I could see parts of Asia, lookin' out across the ocean there, so don't think you can sneak up on us, 'cause there are Americans in Seattle lookin' up at the skies just waitin' for one of your jets or one of those doggone missiles, and the American people are just gonna say no more. No more, you know, of the evil regimes and the nucular weapons and them WMD's. You're dealin' with a Maverick now in John McCain and he knows how to win a war, you betcha.

The Lost Generation of Black Family Research Since the Moynihan Report

My family class spent the past month reading research about black families. A student said today that she felt bad writing her paper on the subject, because it seemed like just bashing black families, especially black men. While we have read some encouraging news, especially about the achievement of the married black middle class, most of what we have read is a long litany of decline.

This got me reflecting about what might have been. In 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan produced The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he pointed out that the black illegitimacy rate had reached 25%, compared to a white rate of about a quarter of that. Moynihan argued that, now that the foundations of legal segregation had been demolished, it was time to work on the other social facts that threatened to hold back African Americans in the future. High on his list was family structure, something few others noticed at the time.

As anyone who has studied black families knows, Moynihan was subjected to a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that there was anything amiss with black family life. The phrase "blaming the victim" was invented to excoriate this report. As a result, it became taboo to study black families for a generation. The work written until the late '80s tended to praise the strengths of black families and hail their alternative cultural arrangements.

Then the empirical struck back. The conditions of black families, and other families, had gotten so bad that political correctness could not fend off reality. A flood of studies followed, which quickly discovered that during the lost generation, the black illegitimacy rate had gone from a scary 25% to a disasterous 70%.

In those lost decades it would have been very unpleasant to point out that things were getting much worse for black families, mostly due to the choices of black people themselves. This would have seemed like "bashing." But if we had been willing to research the facts and face the hard truth, perhaps the movement to restore black marriage might have started sooner. Perhaps we could have halted the decline before fatherlessness became the norm for African American children.

Black Teen Moms of the '60s Have Less Sympathy for Black Teen Moms Today

Katrina Bell McDonald and Elizabeth M. Armstrong of Johns Hopkins University went to a group of women who had been studied in a 1960s teen mothers study, and resurveyed at intervals since then. In 1996, on the eve of the current era of welfare reform, they asked these women, now in their 40s, to compare their experiences with those of teen mothers today - some of whom were their own daughters. In fact, 77% were already grandmothers, and 18% lived with their grandchildren.

The consensus of the women interviewed was that black teen moms don’t get the support today that these teen moms got in the ‘60s because teen pregnancy has been normalized in the poor black community. The community doesn’t rally 'round today they way they did then, because having babies seems less like a crisis for the family and more like a choice by the mothers. The older generation particularly disapproved of underclass culture; the former teen moms do not see themselves as having been part of the underclass. They think teen moms today (just pre-welfare reform) had become welfare-dependent in a way that ‘60s teen moms were not, when welfare offered less.

Like many grandparents, the women studied here thought that kids today are worse than they had been, so they have less sympathy for the younger generation's self-induced crisis. The former teen moms liked welfare reform because they thought it would make today’s teen moms more self-reliant.

Paradoxically, this self-reliance would, I think, make the former teen moms more willing to help.

Unexpected Black Drug Use Finding

A student just brought an old study by Cheryl Amey and Stan Albrecht to my attention.

They found that

“Although both white and Latino adolescents from two-biological-parent families are less likely to use drugs than their counterparts from differently structured families, Black youths who come from similar two-parent families are among the most likely users of both alcohol and marijuana.”

Amey and Albrecht don't have a good explanation for this, and neither do I. My best guess is that the black two-parent families have fewer married parents than the white and Latino two-parent families. The black marriage rate is so low that it is common in studies like this to conflate married and cohabiting black parents. Cohabitors, especially cohabiting fathers, are less likely to discipline kids strictly than married fathers are.

My Welfare Reform Plan

In response to an earlier post on welfare reform, I got a thoughtful question from Ari at NYU. I started to write back to him directly, but the thought his question inspired led me to develop a new post in the ongoing GC dialogue.

At this point I am inclined to abolish welfare altogether. The Earned Income Tax Credit is really a much more effective and politically feasible kind of poor support. If we expanded EITC, provided basic medical care for poor people, and some supplements for child care, we could eliminate welfare for able-bodied people, period. The truly disabled could be absorbed into Supplemental Security Income. The lazy would sponge off their mothers.

Your question, though, was about fathers. I think the crucial failing of all father-involvement programs thus far, especially those aimed at black fathers, has been that they are unwilling to push marriage. They cite the low employment rate, high rate of committing crimes and getting caught, and other obstacles to poor fathers marrying and supporting their families. The most important fact about marriage and fatherhood for men, though, is that it tends to change them into productive people. Waiting for men to get responsible first, then having them marry, will not work with many men, especially those already on the track to poverty. Simply being willing to say it, to use the bully pulpit in every way to push parents to marry for the sake of their children, would help change the climate.

There are many couples with children who are waiting until they save enough money to have a wedding. This is sick. See my posts on "Marry Your Baby Daddy."

If we are to keep welfare, the next strongest step down, I think, would be temporary sterilization of the mother and father for as long as they receive welfare. The "temporary" is the crucial word here - Norplant works, and was only squeezed out for political reasons. A male equivalent could easily be developed. Getting welfare would depend on identifying the father, who would also be subject to temporary sterilization. If she was unwilling to identify the father, or he was unwilling to cooperate, she could only get, say, half the benefits. Equally important in this plan is that it only applies to people on welfare. If you are not asking the taxpayers to foot the bill, you can pursue any foolish plan you want, just as you can now.

At this point we come to the chasm of the politically feasible. The basic fact is that you can't make people think and live like the bourgeoisie. If they don't live their lives by planning ahead, deferring gratification, working now to reap benefits later, then showing them the benefits they could get later from planning ahead now are mostly to no avail. The part of welfare reform that works is that you have to get a job or lose your benefits now. The part of welfare reform that would work with the middle-class welfare reformers, but will not work so well with most welfare recipients, is the lifetime limit on getting welfare. They take what they can get today, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow. They are survivors, not planners. If they were planners, most wouldn't be on welfare in the first place.

Given this fact, one good thing we can do is de-racialize the welfare discussion. Most people on welfare are white. This is always a surprise to my students. And most black people are not on welfare, or even poor. This goes double for other non-white ethnic groups. This is also often a surprise to my students. As Promises I Can Keep makes clear, young welfare moms of all races reason in similar ways. The main obstacle to disconnecting the welfare and race discussions is the way-low black marriage rate. As I have pushed here often, the forces trying to improve the lives of African Americans have to be willing to push for marriage. Marriage is good for all races of kids and couples. I am convinced that if the marriage rates for all races and ethnic groups were the same, almost all other ethnic differences in social problems would disappear.

Finally, I should say that the current welfare reform is pretty good. It has led to massive reductions of the welfare rolls from women who could work, many of whom were already working. It is hard to extend to men because most of them aren't on welfare. Many are sponging off women who are on welfare, but there really isn't any way in a free country to touch them if the women let them sponge. Things are already getting better on the welfare front.

Where Poor Young Fathers Come From

A study of very young men, 16 - 22, at a health clinic in Philadelphia compared the ones who had fathered children with the ones who had not. None of these guys were married; only a couple (out of 91) were virgins. The average age for first intercourse was about the same - 13 vs. 14. The key difference was that the guys who did not have children had had father figures - 82% vs. 50% - and they themselves had a plan for their lives.

One striking difference between the two groups was how they approached sex. The non-fathers had sex much less often, and were much more likely to use contraceptives when they did. Among the fathers, 70% reported having intercourse more than once a month (the highest frequency category they could choose), and 55% reported that they never used contraceptives. No wonder they had babies. One wonders about the women they had these babies with, since nearly half of the fathers (45%) said up front that they did not expect to support their children.

Roxanne H. Fisher, R.I.P.

My friend Roxanne died last week, losing a long fight with breast cancer at 47. I am coming home from her memorial service. Roxanne was not a famous person. She was a plant biology professor with a love for ferns at Chatham University, where the memorial service was held. Many students and colleagues came to the service. She was a devoted wife and mother, and many members of her extended family were there. And she had a genius for friendship, knowing and connecting people across many decades and towns who came from all over. Like me.

Yesterday's service was actually the fourth. When the news of her passing reached Chatham, many classes stopped and the college community had a spontaneous gathering and mourning. The next day the block party in her neighborhood turned into a spontaneous appreciation of Roxanne. The formal funeral at the little country church in her home town brought out her family and old neighbors.

The theme of all of these memorials was that Roxanne Fisher was a decent, nurturing, teaching woman who stayed tied to the people in her life, and brought them together with one another. Two of her colleagues, themselves fighting breast cancer, spoke of how important it was to them to have Roxanne as a model, working and caring and trying new things to the end.

The core fact of Roxanne's death is just a sad, hard loss. But all the life around her memory is a triumph.

Oh, No - Penguins in My Whisk!

I am visiting with my sister, the mother of the famous twins who have appeared in these posts. She was cooking as we were chatting. She reached into a drawer for the next tool. "Oh no," she cried, "there are penguins in my whisk! The terrible people I live with have put penguins in my whisk!" And laughed an experienced mother's laugh.

I helpfully removed the small plastic penguins from their whisk-prison, and the cooking proceeded.

Marriage is the Solution to the Black Fathers Problem

In the concluding practical chapters to Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers, two leaders in promoting involved fatherhood and black marriage offer some useful conclusions.

Wade Horn gives an overview of programs that aim to involve poor black fathers in their children's lives. The bad news is that it is hard to find these fathers - half the mothers don't even know where they are - and it is even harder to keep them in the program, which they regard as a trick to get them to pay child support. Peer support programs don't work well, since their peers are not reliable, either. Improving visitation doesn't help, since they don't have much authority with the children. Getting absent fathers to cohabit doesn't help, because they are likely to disappear, which is even worse for kids, and 2/3rds of the kids in the house are not theirs, anyway. Horn concludes that fatherhood programs need to do what they have been afraid to do: promote marriage.

Which leads to the main conclusion of Enola Baird, a crusader for black marriage. She goes so far as to say that marriage was the great right that slaves gained with freedom. Marriage is the foundation of successful black families - as it is for other families.

Closing the marriage gap would do the most to close the racial gap. Then we would not need a conference on the problems of black fathers.

In Child Poverty, The Marriage Gap is Even Bigger Than the Race Gap

So says Maggie Gallagher in her fine chapter in Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers.

The black/white gap in child poverty is huge: 70% of black kids are poor, vs. only 25% of white kids. But the unmarried/married gap in child poverty is even greater: 81% of kids with unmarried parents are poor, vs. only 22% of kids with married parents.

How are these two rates connected? African Americans are much less likely to marry than whites, or any other racial ethnic group. Worse, poor black men are two to three times more likely to father children than other poor men are.

If the black and white marriage rates were the same, most of the racial poverty gap would disappear. The marital poverty gap, on the other hand, is not likely to close.

William Julius Wilson's Mexican Problem

William Julius Wilson has been arguing for years that the low black marriage rate, and all the bad things that follow from it, is mostly because low-skilled, family supporting jobs disappeared from the northern cities at the just the time that African Americans migrated there in great numbers. Not having jobs that would support families, black men did not marry, and black women did not marry them. Wilson has never had a good explanation for why poor black women kept having children with men who could not support the children. Still, his structural account of why the black experience would be different from that of other immigrants has been a powerful answer to more cultural explanations.

In a more recent study, in Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers, Wilson extends his long-running studies of poor people in Chicago. Now he give comparative work and marriage rates not only for black and white men, but also Mexicans. This poses a problem for his basic argument about the black marriage rate. The Mexican immigrants are no better educated than the black natives in the poor parts of Chicago, and so have no better access to family-supporting jobs. Yet Mexican men are more likely to respond to their girlfriends' pregnancy by proposing and seeking some kind of job. Most poor black fathers, by contrast, do not pursue marriage. Indeed, Wilson reports that what all the poor mothers want from the fathers of their children is that they support the family and be faithful; the black men regard this desire as unreasonable.

When Wilson was comparing poor African Americans in the city today with poor Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. of yesteryear, his structural argument (work disappeared) could be persuasive. Now, though, when poor African Americans and poor Mexicans in the same city at the same time report quite different marriage rates, and therefore quite different male employment rates, his structural argument clearly has a cultural hole in it.

Men Earn More If They Think Men Should Work

This headline sounds like a truism, doesn't it? Yet the researchers I will be arguing with, Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston of the University of Florida, think there is another reason: sexism.

Judge and Livington looked at the relationship between what people think about men working and women taking care of the home - what they call "traditional gender orientation" - and how much they earn at their jobs. The big finding, which has been getting some play in the press, is that women who have traditional views of women in the home make less than more egalitarian women. Men with the traditional view make quite a bit more than egalitarian men do, with the traditional men averaging $34,000 per year, versus $23,000 annually for the egalitarian men.

The researchers believe that someone must be unfairly paying men with traditional views more:

This implies that traditional men are rewarded in the workplace for seeking to preserve the social order, whereas traditional women seeking to do the same are not necessarily penalized.

I think there is a major flaw in the question they asked, and a simpler explanation for the income gaps. The flaw is that they asked about the ideal division of labor between men and women, rather than between husbands and wives. The way the question is framed, however, implies that what they really mean is men and women in a married (or at least cohabiting) household. Neither do they make clear whether there is a difference between the single and married people in their responses - which there should be if the question is implicitly about married people's behavior.

The simpler explanation of their findings, I think, is that men who are husbands and fathers are more likely to think that it is their job to earn more for their families, so they seek industries, jobs, and assignments that maximize what they take home to their families. Men who are not husbands and fathers, or who do not think it is their job to earn more for their families, will not seek higher paying jobs if it means working harder, longer, or further from home. Likewise, women who are wives and mothers are more likely to forgo some earning opportunities in order to spend more time with their families, either breaking up their careers for small-child-related spells or investing less in their careers all along. Either way, married moms acting the way married moms usually do are likely, on average, to be making less than other women.

88% Happy in Their Marriages

Parade magazine published its marriage poll this week. I am grateful to anyone who does family life polling, and I know Parade magazine has a greater readership than all the sociology journals on earth combined. The results of the Parade survey are very heartening. The great majority of married people are happy in their marriages. 71% are deeply in love, 73% are happy with the companionship of their marriage. Three quarters found their sex lives fulfilling. Over half would definitely marry the same person again. Half said they were loving and joyful - beat that with any other institution.

My only gripe with the Parade survey is that they don't lead with the good news. They lead with political adultery. The pull quotes all suggest scary mysteries. The highlighted stats all have a prominent zinger.

The good news about marriage is that most of the news is good. Sing it.

The Starting Point of the Creation/Evolution Discussion

Gallup has been asking representative samples of Americans since 1982 which of these three options comes closest to their own view:

God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. [Creationist view]

Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation. [Theistic evolution]

Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process. [Naturalistic Evolution]

Think of how you would answer this question.

Then estimate what percentage of Americans would choose each of these options.



The actual responses of American have remained pretty stable over the past quarter century. Here are the typical percentages:

Creationist view 47%

Theistic evolution 40%

Naturalistic Evolution 9%

Most people are surprised at this distribution. Most educated people, in particular, have a hard time accepting the idea that half of Americans would take the young-earth creationist position over other views.

I am impressed at how large the middle position, the theistic evolution position, is. If you force people to choose between creation and evolution, most people in a religious country will choose creation. If you give people a middle option, a sizable number will choose that. The constituency for naturalistic evolution, by contrast, is the same size as the constituency for "no religion."

Creation Museum Fun

I am giving a talk to the Centre College parents today about the Creation Museum controversy. I have blogged about the museum before. Today I just want to give you a few fun pictures:

A fine student riding the little Triceratops with a saddle.

A parody (sadly, not a real place).

A picture the museum can create for all visitors, using a green screen.

The Black Church Improves the Marriage Rate

Brad Wilcox has a report in the Institute for American Values series on black families, about the effect of religion on urban families. Churches are the main institutional anchors of the code of decency in the city, he conclude, and thus are vital to promoting marriage. All families are more likely to marry if they are religious. This is especially notable for black families.

Among parents in all ethnic groups (black, Latino, white), the married are much more likely to be regular church-goers, typically by 20 percentage points. For example, among black mothers, 63% of the married women are regular church goers, vs. 40% among the single mothers. The comparable numbers for Latina mothers are 50 and 33; for white mothers, 42 and 21. Men show similar gaps, though with lower rates of church going than women.

African Americans are the most religious large ethnic group in America. They are also the least married.

Church can't entirely close the ethnic marriage gap. Even religious African Americans with kids are still less likely to marry than comparable people in other ethnic groups. But religious institutions do help close the gap.

Married Black Men Earn More For Their Families

Claudia Sitgraves has produced an interesting research summary on "The Benefits of Marriage for African American Men" for the Institute for American Values. She reports that married black men work more than single black men, and make more, too -- 14 - 18% more in earnings. This is not so surprising - married men usually work more, and harder, and thus earn more than single men in all groups.

The surprising finding came from a longitudinal study (by the late Steve Nock) the followed black men through various stages of the life cycle. He found that the married men started earning more than most single men, as expected. He also found that those single men who nonetheless started earning at high levels were less likely to marry than their lower-earning single counterparts. The conventional wisdom is that higher-earning single men are better marriage prospects. It may be the case the higher-earning single black men are so sought after that they can reap the benefits of marriage without marrying.

This finding is a little disheartening for marriage proponents. It is worth following up.

How Bad is Bad for Poor Black Families?

A survey by the poverty program firm Maximus in New Orleans studied food stamp families, both the women receiving food stamps for their children and the men who fathered the kids. This was a study of poor families, but since 80% were black (at a time, pre-Katrina, when the city was 67% black), this is mostly a study of poor black families. Indeed, this is a good picture of some of the worst-off black families in the whole country -- poor, unmarried parents, who were poor even in a poor city in a poor state.

Ronald Mincy and Hillard Pouncy, two veteran black family researchers, analyzed the data hoping to find a "magic moment" when policy makers could promote marriage. What they discovered, though, was that most of the relationships were over even before the child was born. 70% of the women already had a child before the focal child of the study, and half of the fathers of child #1 were not the same as the father of child #2. Not surprisingly, the more children a man had by different women, the less he was likely to invest in any of them. Somewhat surprisingly, men with part-time jobs were less likely than men with full-time jobs to have their children stay with them even sometimes; it is likely, though, that the part-timers are living with other women, possibly with other children, and don't want his other kids in the house.

The main reason that the couples gave for not marrying was that they didn't have enough money -- though most of the women, and nearly all of the men, were working (sometimes under the table). Probing further into why the parents didn't marry, 2/3rds of the women and (somewhat surprisingly) 2/3rds of the men said they didn't think the other parent would be faithful.

Without marriage, half the men had drifted into a sometime involvement with their child, and another quarter had disappeared altogether. Even the "involved fathers" thought "supporting their children" meant giving money and gifts sometimes, on an irregular and informal schedule.

This study of the poor of pre-Katrina New Orleans is just one case study. It does, though, give us some baseline numbers of how bad the family situation is of the worst-off black families in America.

1000 Posts

The Gruntled Center has exhibited 1000 posts in its three-plus year run, and counting. That is 224 thousand page views. The most popular post: Palin's Religion.

Just thought you should know. Many more where that came from.

Black Marriage Research 1

This week in my Family Life class we are working through the fine series of black family studies done for the Institute for American Values over the past few years. Their major report, The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans: A Comprehensive Literature Review, is our starting point. It will not surprise readers of this blog that they found that marriage is beneficial to African Americans in many ways. In several comparisons between black and white marriages, whites tend to benefit more, especially white women. The researchers also found suggestions that black marriages are less happy and more conflict-ridden than white marriages.

This led me to wish for one control that the authors of this review of existing literature couldn't ask, since it wasn't in the original studies: social class. African Americans are, as a group poorer than white Americans. Poorer people, as as rule, have less happy and more conflict-ridden marriages. In reading the rest of these studies, therefore, we will be looking out for studies of the quality and benefits of black marriages controlling for class.

The Church Trust Clause

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has a clause in the Book of Order specifying that the congregation holds the property in trust for the whole denomination.

Every year some congregations want to leave the denomination. Naturally, they want to take their building with them. The denomination points to the trust clause. The civil courts almost invariably agree with the denomination.

I believe the legal issue is settled. Everyone should accept that. No more lawsuits gambling that some court will take the law into its own hands and decide differently.

However, I think it is also reasonable to let the departing congregation have their church building at some reasonable cost. This should be decided on a case-by-case basis. There might be some specific church buildings that the denomination will not part with at any price. That is a question for the presbytery, I believe.

As a rule of thumb, though, I think that if the congregation is willing to pay back to the denomination whatever funds were given or loaned to it by the denomination, plus some reasonable premium for years of good will - say, 10% more, to pick a number out of the air -- then the denomination should let them go, and godspeed.

I hate unilateral divorce, but at a certain point, if one party has already decided to leave, playing dog-in-the-manger with the stuff that remains does no one any good, and engenders further ill will.

Shove Maggot Palin

This is how I turned out on the Palin Baby Name Generator. (Meant only in humor).

The Marriage Gene

Hasse Walum at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has reported a fascinating finding: a gene combination that promotes monogamy in men. The Washington Post story actually states it that other way: a certain gene allele increases the risks that men will not stay monogamous. Men with two copies of this allele are at highest risk, one-copy men are in the middle, and men with no copies of this allele have the lowest risk of marital break-up.

This is a wonderful development. Genes are not destiny, they are just risk factors. Knowing your risks helps you develop work-arounds (if you are at high risk) or can increase your confidence (if you are at low risk).

I look forward to the development of an easy test for this allele. It should be entirely voluntary, but I hope it will be widely available.

Welfare Heiresses

One further thought from reading Jason DeParle's American Dream.

Welfare policy makers, and the vast majority of American taxpayers, look on welfare as charity to women who are temporarily unable to support themselves. DeParle's account makes clear, though, that the women receiving welfare did not think they were getting charity. They thought of themselves as survivors and workers, even if most of the problems they survived were of their own making and the work they did was very intermittent and unreported. They viewed welfare as a pot of money that they could use now. They didn't think about whether they were entitled to it, or had done anything to deserve, or whether, if they didn't really need it, it should better go to someone else or back to the taxpayers.

The attitude of the welfare recipients DeParle studied, in other words, was like the attitude of heiresses toward their trust funds. The money was just there; they didn't think about why. So they spent it.

Social Equality Brings Out More Sex Differences - It Does Not Eliminate Them

John Tierney has a fine article in the New York Times on an international study of sex differences in personality. Surprisingly, the researchers found that sex differences were smaller in poorer countries. Their hypothesis is that harsher environments take more of a toll on competitive and aggressive men.

The really interesting finding is that in rich, egalitarian societies, men's and women's personalities diverge more. This seems to me to support the sociobiological notion that sex differences are deep, and are more likely to be expressed the more conditions are optimal for individuals to realize their deep inclinations.

This finding is scary if you think the sexes are the same, and the genders are only different because sexist society makes them so. It is not scary if you think sex differences are complementary, and are a prime example of what is good about diversity.

A Centrist Sociological Imagination

C. Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination, tries to engage students by connecting the personal problems of individuals with the social issues of society as a whole. This is an effective approach to encouraging a sociological imagination in highly individualistic people.

The Sociological Imagination is a classic in the field, probably the single most influential introduction that American sociology has produced. I read it again recently and was struck by something that Mills' approach leaves out. He gets students to think about how their personal problems are connected to social issues. Mills does not ask us to consider how our personal blessings are connected to social issues.

I see the makings of a truly centrist approach to the sociological imagination: an equal emphasis on problems and blessings, vices and virtues, structures of oppression and structures of good order. Sociology has a strong bias toward criticism; we need a balancing passion for appreciation.

Not Making a Fetish of Planning

I believe that Everything Will Work Out Just Fine.

I do not want to make a fetish of planning.

Nonetheless, I do like to plan ahead. I value other people planning ahead, especially when their plans take account of other people's plans. I think planning is a basic bourgeois virtue. Planning is the counterpart of being able to defer gratification, one of the defining bourgeois virtues.

People who plan ahead are more likely to succeed in this life.

I think it is reasonable to wish to that people in positions of power plan ahead, and try to act according to a plan.

Still, when we were in college, Mrs. G. and I discovered that our lovely, wonderful, caring friends in Christian Fellowship were never on time, never fully prepared, never really planned ahead. They had the vice of their virtues. They were never on time because they lived life able to drop everything for someone in need. We had to say to one another "They toil not, neither do they spin ..." to remember Jesus' admonition to properly appreciate the lilies of the field. This is the old conflict of Mary and Martha. So we tried not to sweat it when planned activities came off half-baked. And we brought extras and allowed extra time, knowing what was likely to happen.

What inspires this self-reminder about the proportionate value of planning is that I have been reading with various classes a set of excellent books about poor people, in the slums, on welfare, and how many of them got that way. Truthfully, how most of them got that way. Visit the characters in American Dream or Code of the Street or Promises I Can Keep. They have little, and are building for nothing, because they do not live according to a plan.

So I consider the lilies.

I still plan, but try not to be an insufferable prig about it.

Palin's Religion

I think it is great that there is a pentecostal on a major party ticket. A hundred years after the pentecostal movement was born, it has become the leading edge of world Christianity. For my money, the worldwide pentecostal/holiness movement is the most important unknown story of the twentieth century, and shows no signs of slowing in the twenty-first. The Assemblies of God is now the largest of the Pentecostal denominations, so it stands to reason that the first pentecostal on the top political ticket would be a child of the AG church.

The Palins have since gentrified into a non-denominational Bible church that is not quite so emotional and demonstrative as her home congregation. I don't hold that against them -- people grow and change in their faith all the time. And she has not repudiated her old denomination, but goes back to speak to the kids and her old pastor with evident pride. I honor that, too.

The great strength of Holy Spirit churches is that they connect me with God in a powerful way. The weakness of Holy Spirit churches is that they can easily slip into connecting God with me to serve me. One of the reasons that I moved from Quakerism, a Holy Spirit church from way back, to Presbyterianism is that the God found in the Quaker meeting was so often too small. When you are waiting on the Holy Spirit to speak through you, most of the time you find the Holy Spirit only talks about stuff that you are - I was - concerned about. The thing I like about Calvinist theology is the continuous reminder that God is the sovereign of all Creation and far beyond our petty concerns.

There are videos on the web of Sarah Palin addressing her old church. The whole speech is very interesting, and I commend it to you. There is one bit that has been debated on some of the religion and politics blogs. Ron Dreher at Crunchy Con asks whether this prayer is "weird":


The crucial line is "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built."

Dreher argues that this is not weird; "This is not how I talk about God's sovereignty. But it's how a lot of ordinary people -- educated people -- in my part of the world talk. And I see nothing especially strange about it." I think Dreher is right that many people do talk this way. But I can't agree with them, or Gov. Palin. In fact, I can think of few theological ideas more dangerous than the notion that God is on my side, that God works on others to achieve what I want.

It would be too much to say that there is a developed theology behind saying that God's will requires building my gas line. This is not a thought out position, but a felt one. I am passionately connected to God, so God is passionately connected to me. I am loyal to God, so God is loyal to me. I back God's will, so God backs my will. Nothing weird about it. The most human way of thinking about morality in the world. But theologically very dangerous.

Palin-Fest

Last Sunday I blogged on Sarah Palin. I praised her genuine pro-life commitment in her own life. At that time, the "babygate" puzzle was hot. I had read on a blog that her daughter, Bristol, was pregnant now. I wrote that that settled the mystery of whether Trig Palin was really Bristol's child. The news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy had not yet hit the news, though, and the comments on that post, which were meant as partial praise, got tangled in the then-unresolved babygate question. For the first time in the three years I have been writing this blog, I pulled a post.

Since then I have watched and read with great care just about everything that has come out from and about Gov. Palin. The comments in the blog this week, on posts that were about something else, nonetheless raised many questions about Palin. So today I want to give a more considered response to the one-week celebrity of the Republican ticket.

I believe that we all have the vices of our virtues. Our weaknesses are usually the complements of our strengths. The list below, therefore, alternates what I see as Gov. Palin's strengths with her related weaknesses.

She is smart, charismatic, and attractive.
She did a good job reading a speech written by others, but has so far refused to answer questions in her own voice, speaking her own mind.

She seems to have a strong marriage, has devoted herself to her family.
She has used her office to persecute those she thinks threatened her family.

She has really walked the pro-life talk, having a baby in her 40s that she knew would be very challenging to raise.
She took crazy risks with that baby's birth. I still think there is something fishy about the whole "fly home from Texas" story.

Finding her teen-age daughter pregnant, she pressed the couple to get married, which is her grandchild's best shot at a stable family life.
She said having the baby was her daughter's choice. She has also said she would sign a law banning all abortions.

She has walked the pro-military talk, supporting her son into the Army in wartime.
She has not thought in any depth about the war her son is being sent to fight.

She is a strong Christian and is not afraid to own it.
She believes God supports what she supports -- the president, the war, the gas pipeline (!)

She has walked the pro-community talk, getting involved in her PTA, serving on the city council of her hometown, and serving as mayor.
She used her power ruthlessly - firing the chief of police because he intimidated her, pressuring the librarian to censor books, putting the city in debt for money pit projects like a sports arena instead of necessities like a sewage treatment plant. And she attacks community organizing, the most basic kind of community involvement. This is a real puzzle to me. Up until now, faith-based community service has something Republicans were for.

She has opposed corruption in her own Republican party, including that of its leader, Sen. Ted Stevens.
She ran a campaign for Stevens. She supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" that he championed. She actively sought earmarks for her town, some of which Sen. McCain singled out as examples of abusive pork-barrel spending. I don't mind politicians changing their minds, or even bowing to reality. I do think it a real character flaw when they pretend that they always had the position they have now.

She opposed the oil cartel that controls Alaskan politics.
She has brought in different oil companies to carry out her pet project, the gas pipeline. She does not support freeing America from oil dependence, she favors freeing America from foreign oil dependence -- which means more sales for the main commodity of her state.

She pushed stronger ethics laws, and undid some of the excesses of her predecessor as governor.
She keeps saying that she sold the governor's jet on eBay for a profit, knowing that this is not true. Knowing that anyone who follows politics knows this is not true. She got rid of the governor's driver -- but she makes phone calls and sends text messages while driving (this may be a pet peeve of mine).

She has mobilized many ordinary people who were lukewarm about participating in this election.
In defending small town, evangelical, gun-using Americans, she sneers at cosmopolitan, mainline, violence-fearing Americans.

She has helped normalize the idea of women in every political office, include President.
She praised Hillary Clinton for putting those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. This line brought boos. I expect she will not say that again.

She is a Gen-X "just do it" person who might actually accomplish something.
She doesn't seem to have a plan for anything she does. She reacts to events, doing the opposite of whatever stands in her way.

Picketing Fences

This is a very gruntled comic from the fine folks at xkcd:

American Dream 4: What Welfare Reform Still Needs

Jason DeParle concludes that welfare reform really did work in reducing the rolls, way beyond what anyone expected. And it has not led to masses of destitute people, in part because so many on welfare were already working when the new law forced them to "find" work. As DeParle says, the poor had more options than the reformers expected.

If welfare reform is to keep working, the bureaucracy and the policymakers will have to maintain the will to uphold the time limits and lifetime limits on welfare eligibility.

DeParle admits that he and the other poverty reporters missed the other half of what has worked in welfare reform: the Earned Income Tax Credit. EITC gives money back to working parents. It is the largest poverty reduction program in the country. Both parties support it because it gives money to working poor parents, proportionate to their work and their earnings. Sen. Obama proposes to expand EITC, and many states have or are considering their own versions to supplement the federal program.

The big domestic policy debate, for the poor and everyone else, is over health insurance. The Child Health Insurance Program is the foot in the door for federally supported health care for all. The debate is over whether to expand it to poor adults or not.

DeParle says what welfare reform still needs is more for child care, wage supplements, and transportation. He also thinks that the work requirement, though vitally important, has gone too far in eliminating most job training programs.

DeParle mentions in passing what I think is the biggest failing of welfare reform: it is only aimed at women. Welfare reform drove poor women from welfare to work; not men. This is especially true for African Americans. DeParle reports that about half of all black men are without regular legal employment, compared to perhaps a fifth of white and Hispanic men. The black illegitimacy rate is nearly 70%, vs. less than half than for the other groups. In the black slums, marriage has all but disappeared. For the women in DeParle's study, marriage was a dream on par with wanting a unicorn; none of them had ever been to a wedding.

I think what welfare reform needs if it is ever to actually reduce poverty and dependency is a way to promote marriage, fatherhood, and responsibility among poor men.

American Dream 3: Why Welfare Reform Worked

Jason DeParle shows in American Dream that the 1996 welfare reform was a huge success -- way beyond the expectations of either the Clinton Democrats or the Gingrich Republicans who worked together to create it. The combination of time limits, lifetime limits, and work requirements led to a 90% reduction in the welfare rolls.

The main thing that worked, DeParle concludes, was the work requirement. Even threatening to require work was enough to get many people to get -- and keep -- jobs, instead of trying to get welfare. And that worked, DeParle believes, because the women getting welfare didn't think of themselves as dependent on it. They saw themselves as workers. Most of them had jobs, off and on, which they lied about to the welfare office. They saw themselves as workers, even if they had never worked regularly. They saw themselves as survivors, even if most of the troubles they had to survive were of their own making.

The hard part of welfare reform comes now, when we have to sustain the will to stick to the lifetime limits as the economy recedes from the Clinton-era high. The easiest thing for welfare establishment to do is just give money to people who ask for it. Enforcing welfare is even more of a hassle for caseworkers than it is for welfare recipients.

That is why DeParle's account is so helpful: welfare reform has been a success for the former welfare recipients. That is why we should stick to it.

American Dream 2: The Black Working Class as the Crossroads

One implicit question in Jason DeParle’s American Dream is why the black welfare class was so large a proportion of all African Americans to begin with, and why it wasn’t shrinking faster.

Some of the single welfare mothers he studied had grown up in working class neighborhoods with two employed parents. Children of white working class neighborhoods are likely to move up in class, or reproduce their parents’ lives in new working class areas. Children of the black working class, by contrast, have been much less likely to reproduce their parents’ lives.

DeParle says that the main demographic difference between black working class neighborhoods and other working class neighborhoods is the high proportion of black single mothers. In the particular working class neighborhood that some of his subjects came from, about a third of the African American children grew up with single mothers. This is higher than the single-parent rate in non-black families (the national average is about a fifth), but much lower than the average for all black families, which runs to over half. Children in single-parent households are more vulnerable to the lure of the street.

DeParle also believes that there is another risk factor that black families have that is not so obvious. Almost all of the black working class families he studied had many connections, through family and friends, to the ghetto underclass. For the black working class, the “street” was never far away. This is much less true for the much larger white working class, and is still true when we consider the many different ethnic groups within the non-black majority. In Milwaukee in the ‘90s, the main area of DeParle’s book, half the black families in the city got some kind of welfare. The black working class is, of necessity, a minority among the minority. Moreover, black working class neighborhoods were typically right next to the slums, bringing the street literally to their door.

DeParle says the black working class is more precarious than other working classes because it is the “crossroads” between the middle class and the slums.

American Dream 1: Pre-Welfare Chaos

This week I will be blogging on Jason DeParle's American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare.

One of the debates in welfare reform has been about whether the welfare system created the social chaos that led many people to go on welfare in the first place. DeParle traces the families of three women who were single welfare moms in Milwaukee in the '90s back to the Mississippi plantation their ancestors came lived on a century ago. DeParle shows that the pattern of social disorganization of the "welfare plantation" was already well established on the sharecropping plantation, long before the great migration of black peasants to the northern cities and long before the invention of welfare. Women had children with temporary boyfriends, families moved often, the men were often violent and unreliable, and hard drinking was widespread. Moving north made things worse - the loose controls of extended family, country churches, and sheer social surveillance of the rural South broke down in the anonymous cities. But the basic pattern was already set.

This brings us to a central puzzle in the study of African-American family life. W.E.B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, the fathers of black sociology in this country, thought the weak marriages and high out-of-wedlock birthrates among African Americans were a legacy of slavery, carried on with little change under Jim Crow. Herbert Gutman, by contrast, changed the debate when he argued that the black marriage rate was about the same as the white rate in the 1950s, so the subsequent black family breakdown must be due to recent causes. Indeed, it was from the leftist Gutman's argument that conservatives like Charles Murray would argue that welfare caused black family breakdown. Recently, though, James Q. Wilson and others have revisited Gutman's argument, returning to the more intuitively plausible DuBois/Frazier line that slavery had long-term destructive effects on black families.

DeParle is a journalist, using illustrative anecdotes to discuss the effects of social policy (welfare reform). He is not trying to settle the sociological argument about the long-term trajectory of African-American family structure. Still, I think DeParle's case shows strong support for the DuBois-to-J.Q.Wilson side of the argument.

Teach Labor Day

Today we honor those who labor -- especially those who do the physically hard jobs.

At Centre College, we honor labor by laboring. Centre is its own world. We often begin the term on Labor Day. I think this is appropriate. One of the ways we can honor physical labor is by teaching the privileged (who will probably not be doing much of it) to treat their fellow workers with respect.

Those of you not laboring this day, enjoy your civil sabbath.

Fight the Dragon. Or Housefly.

To stop men from peeing on the floor, authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can’t help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

(From the very gruntled GOOD magazine.)

On the Forbes College Rankings

This is my final back-to-school story.

Forbes magazine just published its first college rankings. Centre College did exceptionally well -- 13th among all colleges and universities in the United States -- so you can imagine that we have been pleased. Still, modesty compels us to be a little skeptical of such a result.

A closer look at the method they used, though, increases my confidence in the result. The great weakness of the U.S. News rankings, the standard in the field, is that they are based almost entirely on inputs to education, such as endowment per student or student-teacher ratios, and not on measures of the outcomes of education. Forbes, by contrast, uses outcome measures. Specifically, the Forbes rankings, compiled by The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), used these five components:

1. Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who's Who in America (25%)

2. Student Evaluations of Professors from Ratemyprofessors.com (25%)

3. Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

4. Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

5. Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

Outcome measures are, in principle, better than inputs in figuring out what real effect a school has on students. And each of these outcome measures is not a bad one. Even the Rate My Professors score, which seems the sketchiest, is (as they show) well correlated with more commonly used measures of teaching effectiveness.

Forbes measured outcomes while controlling for the size of the school. This sensible procedure demonstrates that small liberals arts colleges really do stand out. Sure, every big U has some great student successes, but on a base of tens of thousands who pass through the ed factory. A small college with a good faculty, of which there are many, offers better teaching for most students than even the best universities. Sure, the University of Virginia (43) gets some really great students, but Centre College (13) does more with the fine students we get -- all of them, not just the stars.

I hope Forbes will push all the college rankers to focus more on outcomes, especially long-term outcomes.

Here, then, are the Forbes top 25:

1 Princeton University
2 California Institute of Technology
3 Harvard University
4 Swarthmore College
5 Williams College
6 United States Military Academy
7 Amherst College
8 Wellesley College
9 Yale University
10 Columbia University
11 Northwestern University
12 Wabash College
13 Centre College
14 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
15 Bowdoin College
16 United States Air Force Academy
17 Middlebury College
18 University of Chicago
19 Smith College
20 Pomona College
21 Wesleyan University
22 Haverford College
23 Stanford University
24 Hamilton College
25 Sarah Lawrence College

High School Graduation Peaked Last Year

A third back-to-school story:

All the public and private high schools in the United States graduated about 3.34 million students last year. That is likely to be the peak number for the foreseeable future, projecting out to 2022. This is the finding reported in the most recent edition of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education's series of high school and college projections.

The declining number of high school graduates will put further pressure on the massive expansion of college and college-like training to go deeper into the pool of warm bodies just to sustain the credentialing apparatus we now have.

Still, it is a very good thing that there are more high school graduates than ever before.

Murray is Right: Too Many Go to "College"

Here is another good back-to-school subject.

Charles Murray has written another provocative book, Real Education. A few months ago he gave a summary of his argument in the Wall Street Journal.

He argues that liberal arts education is for the intellectual elite. Our society is already good at seeing that the smartest kids get channeled toward the best colleges. We are not so good at channeling the vast middle of kids to vocational education. We do not give vocational education the same status. This inflates the value of college degrees socially and economically, and forces liberal arts colleges to try to provide job training for which they are ill equipped.

I am a sociology professor at a liberal arts college. Murray specifically slams a B.A. in sociology as telling you nothing about what the degree holder knows. I agree. In a liberal arts education, where you went to school matters more than which discipline you studied most.

And if you don't need a liberal arts education, or aren't ready for one now, by all means don't go to college just for social reasons. Vocational education, if it really teaches its craft, is honorable education, just as craft works of all kinds is honorable work.

Faculty Moderation

The New York Times reported in the dead of summer on the increasing moderation of professors. This seems like an excellent back-to-school story to me.

On a liberal-moderate-conservative scale, professors as a whole are more liberal than conservative, with a strong body of self-described moderates. Within disciplines, social scientists are the most liberal, with just over half reporting that position. Business professors have the most conservatives - about a quarter. The middle-most disciplines are computer science and engineering, which report nearly 90% moderation.

When we look by generation, the Baby Boomers, now aged 50 to shading off to retirement at 65, are the most liberal. Boomer humanities professors are the most liberal group of all, with nearly three quarters choosing that label and negligible percentages choosing "conservative."

The younger generations, though, are notably less liberal than the Boomers, and more moderate. Gen X humanities professors, for example, have only half the rate of liberals that their elders show.

There are significant variations by disciplinary area. The Boomer scientists are not nearly as liberal as their humanities counterparts are; Gen X scientists, though, show more liberals than their elders. My guess is that this reflects the massive increase in women in science after the Baby Boom generation.

The general trend across all disciplines, though, is that the professoriate will get less liberal and more moderate as the older generations retire. This is good news for centrism.