The World Is Getting Better

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

I share with you four of those slides.

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

Anything Else Gotten Better?

•Sex discrimination

•Race discrimination

•Sexual-orientation discrimination

•Handicap discrimination

•Imperial control of colonized people

•Totalitarianism and authoritarianism

  Is that all you’ve got?  

•Food production has increased gigantically

•Transportation is cheaper

•Communication costs a tiny fraction of before

•Information is available on unprecedented scale

•The air is cleaner

•World population is under control

 

Wait, What Was That About World Population?  

•The population bomb was a dud

•No developed nation has enough kids to replace itself

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

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

Is Anything Worse? 

•Rich-World Problems Are on the Rise:

•Obesity

•Cancer

•Heart disease

•Divorce and unmarried parenthood

•Global warming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Further Thought from Randall Collins' The Credential Society

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

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

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

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

I am chewing on this.

Is Centre College a Privilege?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The College Class Has Their Kids Within Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fool's Hell

Centrist Thought of the Day (Source: Me)


Just as there is a Fool's Paradise for people who worry too little,
There is a Fool's Hell for people who worry too much.

Men's Preference for Educated Women is Rising

I blogged a whole series on Christine Whelan's 2007 book, Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, starting here.  She has a new study advancing this point, with a nifty chart of men's changing preferences in women.

I am particularly struck by the big leap upward for "Education, intelligence," and, to a lesser extent, "Good financial prospect" as something that men look for in a wife.

I believe this change is especially prominent in the educated classes - proving the point that smart men marry smart women in a double sense.

(From "Measuring Mate Preferences: A Replication and Extension" by Christine B. Whelan, University of Pittsburgh, and Christie F. Boxer and Mary Noonan, University of Iowa). 

Creeping Predictive Analytics Are the Price of the Information Age

Charles Duhigg has a fascinating and somewhat creepy article in the New York Times on how corporations can know so much about you through "predictive analytics."  Target can figure out that your daughter is pregnant before you do, to take one example from the article, just from her series of ordinary-looking purchases.

Sellers have gotten so good at figuring out what you will buy and sending you suggestions when you are vulnerable to change buying habits that customers have figured out that they are being spied upon.  So the companies have developed a new layer of subterfuge to hide their suggestions within seemingly random offers, most of which they know you will ignore.

The irony of my reading this article in the online version of the Times is that now the Times knows of my interest in predictive analytics, and can tuck that away in its own database of thing to try to sell me - such as Charles Duhigg's book on predictive analytics and habit formation.

I am reconciled to the fact that in exchange for the thousand ways that I benefit daily from the information revolution, the price I pay is that information providers know a great deal about me. And some of them will try to sell me stuff, based on that information.

I don't see "living off the grid" as in any way an attractive strategy.  So the realistic options in a world in which large corporations and the state constantly spy on me are
1) live a public life; and
2) buy at small local stores.  With cash.

The Growing Education Gap Reflects a Marriage Gap

A set of new reports show that the educational achievement gap between rich and poor kids is growing.  These same reports show that the gap between black and white kids is shrinking.  But the race gap is still large.

I think both of these movements point to a crucial third term: the growing marriage gap between the haves and have-less.

Marriage doesn't cure everything.  After two generations of educational assortive mating - brains marry brains - there are growing ability differences between the top and bottom of the educational structure.

Still, people who marry before they have kids and stay that way do invest in their children's learning more, both inside school and out. They can close much of the educational gap by investing their time and improving their own knowledge, for their children's sake.

Most of the education gap is a family gap, which poor families can best address by making stronger marriages. This is a hard project, and not one the government can do much about.  But it is by no means hopeless.

Rick Santorum's Fight Against Satan

Rick Santorum has been criticized for a 2008 speech at Ave Maria University.  He argued that Satan had been attacking American culture for a long time - first through academia, then the elite they taught, then the mainline churches, then the politicians, and then the wealthy.

The line that has been making news this week is his attack on mainline Protestant churches, such as my own Presbyterian Church (U.S.A):

And of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious — to use both vanity and pride to go after the Church.

This criticism of mainline Protestantism as apostate and even Satanic is a common criticism made by all branches of the Christian Right, both Catholics like Santorum and, even more fiercely, by Protestants.  And they make a similar critique of the Catholic Church, especially the peace and justice side of Catholicism associated with the conference of bishops.  Ave Maria University and institutions like it were created by dissident conservative Catholics to have a safe place, set apart from the mainline center of their own denomination.

I urge you to listen to the whole speech, which is on the Ave Maria podcast site. The best part of it is his impassioned story of why it is worth fighting for what you think is a good cause, even against long odds and many defeats.  Santorum, who had just been defeated for re-election to the U.S. Senate, told the students they were lucky to be living in such a bleak time, when Satan had won over so many institutions in America and, of course, abroad.  They had the chance to enlist in God's army.  Which is how Rick Santorum sees himself: an unlikely private in God's army, fighting the Father of Lies.

Brooks is Right About Bourgeois Paternalism

David Brooks issues a call for "bourgeois paternalism" to rebuild the organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly.

I believe he is exactly right.  And I can't think of a better word than "induce."  You can't force people to be responsible.  There is no foolproof way to raise them to be responsible.  No genes guarantee it.  No family structure can be attentive enough to get responsible results every time.

BUT orderly families in orderly communities which are at least trying, unequivocally, to promote responsible behavior and eliminate irresponsible behavior is essential.  No amount of incentive or coercion - the favored left and right strategies - will work without responsible people.

The Asian Exception to Rising Intermarriage

About 15% of new marriages are to people of different races or ethnicities, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.  This is about double the rate of intermarriage of a generation ago.

The one group in which out-marriage went down recently was among Asian-Americans.  Asians had the highest intermarriage rate of any of the standard racial groups in this country to begin with - 30.8% in 2008.  But this rate dropped slightly to 27.7% in 2010.

I think I know why.  Highly educated people like to marry one another. Asian-Americans are much more educated than other racial groups.  Even though there are not many Asians in America, they are much more likely to be college graduates - making a good marriage pool for other college graduates.

About 23% of white-white couples are college graduates.

About 53% of Asian-Asian couples are college graduates.

And white-Asian couples? Only 41%.

Do Women Prefer Older Men, But Men Prefer One Age of Women?

David Buss, the author of The Evolution of Desire, a mainstay of my "Family Life" class, gave a lecture at Centre College tonight on "Human Mating Strategies."

He reported the familiar data that women seek men who are a little older than they are, whereas men prefer women who are a little younger. He showed that there is more variation in how much younger the men want to go, depending on the culture.  The women do not vary as much.

I had a thought as I was listening to him.  It is a hunch, but is worth testing.

Women prefer to marry men who are a little older than they are.

Men prefer to marry women who are in their early twenties.

A way to test this would be to ask the absolute age of a preferred mate, not the age relative to the person being asked.

Another way would be to ask teenage boys, to see if they, uniquely, are more attracted to women older than themselves.

Educated Women Over 40 Now More Likely to Marry

A generation ago a report that came be known as the Harvard-Yale Study spread the scary word that a college-educated woman who was still single at 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married.

This was not entirely true, and was not the main point of the study in any case.  But it is important background to this exciting change in the life of American women:

And according to calculations by the economist Betsey Stevenson, an educated woman still single at age 40 is much more likely to marry in the next decade than her less educated counterparts.

Contraception at Catholic Institutions: A Reasonable Compromise

I appreciate the justice of both sides of the recent argument about whether religiously affiliated institutions which employ and serve everyone should be required to offer contraceptives as part of their insurance coverage.

The issue is not about the freedom of religion.  By way of comparison, if churches were required to provide something contrary to their doctrine to their ministers, who were required to adhere to the doctrine, that would violate the freedom of religion.

But practically every large denomination sponsors ministries that serve the public - the Catholic Church most of all.  And nearly all of those ministries do not have a religious test for employment for every job. Therefore, as far as employee insurance goes, they are in the same boat as secular employers.

Nonetheless, I think the First Amendment requires the state to bend over backwards to try to accommodate the sensibilities of religious institutions, as well as what they can claim in strict justice.

So the decision by the Obama administration to not require church-related public ministries to pay for contraception directly, but instead to require their insurance carriers to do it, seems to me a just compromise.

Murray's Coming Apart: The Chipotle Epilogue

One of the unexpected fruits of my encounter with Charles Murray's Coming Apart  (see the preceding week of posts) was a lengthy and edifying Facebook discussion of Chipotle Mexican Grill.

I put this query to my varied group of Facebook friends

I am reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart. He has a quiz to see if his readers are in touch with regular Americans. One of the questions was this: How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? Applebee's, Waffle House, Denny's, IHOP, Chili's, Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday's, Ponderosa Steakhouse.

In his explanation, he said that members of the new upper class are likely to go to McDonald's sometimes, but are likely to skip the casual-dining chains for fancier non-chain restaurants. That is an interesting claim in itself.

My real question to you, FB friends, is his further claim. He did not include Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is also a top-ten casual dining chain, because it "is to the casual-dining genre of restaurants as Whole Foods is to grocery stores."

Is this true? I have never been to Chipotle, but I had not any impression of them as fancier than the others.

This query drew a rich response - 37 and counting, as of this writing - from just the kind of well-educated white managers and professionals who Murray say constitute the "new upper class."

Most who wrote agreed with Murray's basic contention that Chipotle had a different model that the other casual-dining restaurant chains. A sample of these kinds of comments:

Chipotle is for those who want fast-casual but are environmentally and/or health-conscious since Chipotles use sustainable and relatively local meats in each franchise.

I pick up "to go" from Chipotle very often. They market hormone free meat and fresh ingredients. You choose all toppings and they feature less mainstream brands such as Izze sodas and organic milk for kids. If that's fancy, I guess so.

I think Chipotle is part of Bobo [bourgeois bohemian] culture. The ingredients are infinitely better than most chain restaurants and customers can feel better knowing they are eating happier animals. 

It's not fancy, but I do think they are more hipster than a place like Qdoba. They advertise their sustainability and freshness much more. 

Some were more cynical about the actual difference between Chipotle and the other casual-dining chains:

I also wonder if a lot of this isn't about marketing. I noticed the comments above on Chipotle's advertising about sustainability, quality ingredients, etc. Cynically: really? Or do they serve the same stuff but market to the niche of people who fit the same socio-economic profile as Applebee's customers but want to try to eat responsibly. I think Murray's reasoning may be circular. It's not that (independently defined) elites -- for example, those with college degrees or X amount of money in the bank -- like Chipotle but not Applebee's. It's that elites - defined as those who like Chipotle -- like Chipotle. And what makes Chipotle elite? It's own advertising and Murray's perception of elite values.

In the end, though, I don't want to lose sight of Murray's larger point.  He contends that the class of highly educated managers and professionals who mostly run the country eschew the kind of places that the middle-middle of the country regard as good.  My overall feeling is that Murray is right. I have sometimes eaten real fast food for convenience, but if we go out to a sit-down dinner, it is almost always at a non-chain place. And this is due to exactly the kind of mild snobbery that Murray is talking about. I don't object to the food - I am not very picky - but I do object to the pseudo-Gemeinschaft and underlying sterility of the casual-dining chains. 

The only one I have eaten at in the past year is Waffle House, and this is because its proletarian quality is neither fake nor hidden.

Murray Coming Apart 5: Wrong on the Main Point

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

Charles Murray's main point is that a new upper class has emerged that is increasingly isolated from the rest of America, which is bad because this new upper class rules over the rest of America.  Likewise, he says a new lower class has emerged that is increasingly dysfunctional and in need of rule by others.

I think the main error in Murray's account of the new upper class is that it doesn't really cohere as a class, and it is not really the upper class.  He makes the puzzling and off-handed assertion late in the book that the new upper class is a subset of the upper-middle class.  This is not right.  This is not how upper classes work. I think it would be more correct to say that the upper-middle class and the working rich have been transformed by elite college graduates married to one another.  While the two top classes of managers and professionals have always been the haunt of top college graduates, in the past generation they passed a tipping point.  Now a sizable majority of Belmont consists of college graduates, heavily elite college graduates, who are married to similarly well-educated spouses. The majority is what is new.

However, the upper middle class, and even the working rich, are not the upper class.  The upper class are the owners of capital, many of whom do not work, and quite a few of whom are heirs. They have a disproportionate influence on the economic and political life of the nation whenever they choose to exercise it.  They live beyond the realm of the McMansion or Craftsman bungalows of the high earners.

Which brings us to another point.  The educated manager and professional class is increasingly divided into what I think of as the country club and coffee house wings.  As Bill Bishop demonstrated in The Big Sort, educated, high-earning Republicans tend to live in different communities, and different kinds of communities, than educated, high-earning Democrats do.  Far from forming a unified new upper class, the educated upper middles are increasing polarized.

Murray Coming Apart 4: Adding Non-Whites Barely Changes the Pattern

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

In the Bell Curve, Murray wrote 12 chapters about IQ and white Americans, making 90% of the book's argument about the growth of the "cognitive elite."  Then he added a chapter about IQ and race to make an entirely secondary point.  However, 90% of the storm of controversy about the book concerned that one chapter.

This time, Murray put right in the subtitle that this book is about white America.  Nonetheless, he does have one tiny chapter near the end where he looks at what happens to the trends in Belmont and Fishtown when he adds in non-whites.  And the answer is: almost nothing.  Belmont is disproportionately Asian, but the Asian group, still in single digits, closely follows the white pattern.  Fishtown is disproportionately black, Hispanic, and Asian, but each group is still a minority.  Moreover, the black pattern, which is somewhat worse than the white, is balanced out by the Hispanic and Asian patterns, which are slightly better.

The big difference between the racial effects in The Bell Curve and Coming Apart is that the former is about all of America, whereas the latter is only about the top and the bottom.  Most black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, like most white Americans, are in the middle. That means they are not included in the analysis of the new upper class and new lower class that makes up most of Coming Apart.

Murray's main conclusion is that America is coming apart, but on class lines, not on racial or ethnic lines. And inside the new upper class, and inside the new lower class, the people are becoming more like one another, even as the two classes are becoming more different from one another.

Murray Coming Apart 3: The Essential American Virtues

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

"If just one American virtue may be said to be defining, _______ is probably it."

How would you fill in that blank?

I would have said "liberty" or "the love of liberty."

Charles Murray does not. Instead, he says "industriousness" is the defining American virtue.

Murray offers four virtues as foundational for the American project: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion.

He considers frugality and philanthropy as virtues that eighteenth century Americans might also have argued for.  And he allows that social conservatives might argue for self-reliance. 

This is an interesting list in many respects.

I think it is very curious that a libertarian like Murray would not put liberty first, and that instead he thinks social conservatives would put a cousin of liberty (self-reliance) on the essential virtues lists.  I think he is just wrong about what either group primarily values.  I can see how social conservatives might be content with religion, marriage, and philanthropy as covering the crucial bases, with liberty as a necessary enabling (but secondary) virtue.

I think it is also curious that he does not even offer what social liberals might think of as essential virtues - first and foremost, equality.  I believe this is because Murray believes that too much emphasis on equality is what is undermining the American project.

The four virtues that he keeps are important to America, though perhaps moreso today than in the founding era.  American virtues were developed against European virtues, and compared to Europeans we are now, and have long been, more religious, more committed to marriage (which is proven by our high divorce and remarriage rate), and more industrious.  I have never thought of America as notably more honest than Europe, though perhaps 18th century visitors thought so because we eschewed false court manners. In any case, Murray finds it hard to find good indicators of honesty.

I would offer one further nominee for a distinctive American virtue, though perhaps only sociologists think of it this way: our social mobility.  As everyone knows, we have a very unequal society in class terms.  Nonetheless, most Americans believe our social structure is legitimate because we believe we can move up or down by our own merits.  This is a cousin to "self-reliance," but with more recognition of the trajectory that most Americans expect over their life course, not just their ability to be independent at any one moment.

And treating social mobility as a distinctive virtue requires treating liberty and equality, despite their obvious tension with one another, with equal seriousness.

Murray's Coming Apart 2: The New Generation of the Cognitive Elite

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued that since the Second World War our educational system has become very efficient at tracking high-IQ students into college, and the highest-IQ students into elite colleges.  In this book, Murray continues that theme with newer data.  He shows that after two generations of tracking brains into college and stocking the high-income occupations with college brains, the "cognitive elite" is now efficiently reproducing itself.

In previous generations, the elite of money married money.  But it is hard to pass on the skills that made the money.  Now, the elite of brains marries brains, and brains are more heritable.

Murray shows the mean white IQ of two generations of adults by the level of education they attained. I will reproduce that simple table here.  What is interesting here is that, even though 50% more people graduate from college than did a generation ago, the central characteristic of those who graduated - their intelligence level - has not. The first column represents the mean IQ of people who were 25 in the mid-'80s; the second, those who were 25 in the mid-'00s:


88, 89  No degree
99, 99  High School diploma/GED
105, 104  Associate's degree
113, 113  Bachelor's degree
117, 117 Master's degree
126, 124 Ph.D., LLD, MD, DDS

The upper-middle class dominates college enrollment, especially at elite colleges. This fact is well known.  Murray argues that this is true even with affirmative action.  Why?

“The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

Murray's Coming Apart 1: SuperZips

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

Murray's main point is that a new upper class and a new lower class have grown in the past generation. The new upper class is a brainy meritocracy who met in elite colleges and reap high incomes from their mental skills and work ethic. Murray fears that this new elite is now so large and rich that they can live an isolated life from other classes, especially from the new, and increasingly incompetent, lower class.

I will start with the best feature of Murray's analysis: the SuperZips, and the ideal types of "Belmont" and "Fishtown."

Murray shows that managers and professionals who run America are increasingly concentrated in neighborhoods where most people are college graduates, and live in households making over $200,000 per year. He uses zip codes as his unit of analysis, which are fairly large and mixed areas. Nonetheless, in a generation, the zip codes in which managers and professionals concentrate, mostly around large cities, have switched to having college graduate majorities, and have incomes (in constant dollars) which would in 1960 would have been in the top 1%, but are now only in the top 5%. These SuperZips also have a great disproportion of elite college graduates.

The main tool that he develops for comparison is an imagined "Belmont" and "Fishtown," based on the real upper-middle-class suburb of Boston and the real working-class-neighborhood of Philadelphia, respectively. The ideal-typical communities combine the qualities of their comparable upper-middle enclaves and working-class communities. Comparing such things as marriage and crime rates in this composite Belmont with the composite Fishtown is a very helpful way of compressing complex data.

And in general he shows that things have been steadily good in Belmont, whereas they have declined dramatically in Fishtown.

The rest of this series will cover the main points of Murray's findings, and my critiques and appreciations of his findings.

Millennial Protesters May Hate Institutions, But Are Weak On Alternatives

David Brooks has a pretty good column starting from the viral video "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." Brooks notes, gently, that the young man who made such a strong criticism of religion, Jefferson Bethke, humbly backtracked when some theologians set him straight.

Brooks took that retreat as an example of a larger phenomenon.  I think he really has the Occupy movement in mind, though he never says that.  Brooks' summary is this:

This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.

I am struck by the fact that this diagnosis matches what popular demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss predicted for the Millennials - today's twentysomethings.  Howe and Strauss thought that they would be a new "silent generation," nice people, good team players, but weak on a theory of institutions.  I don't know how old Jefferson Bethke is, but his screen name is bball1989, which makes me think he is 22.

I am glad young people are finding a way to raise a critical voice.  But they do need a positive, institutional theory of what they want instead.

Silly Idea: Divorce to Boost Economic Demand

Matthew Yglesias has a very silly column in Slate arguing that more divorces would stimulate the economy, because creating more households creates more demand for things households need.

This is a perfect example of being penny wise and pound foolish. Most importantly, the cost in human misery of divorce would far outweigh the short-term economic benefit. But even at the economic level, the short-term demand from new households would, I believe, be more than offset by the loss of productivity as married men became divorced men.

The Main Social Problem: Weak Marriage Rate in the Bottom Classes

Mona Charen has a fine column, "Social Pressure to Marry is Dead." She makes this strong claim:

"The collapse of marriage among the lower and lower-middle classes is rapidly tapping our national strength."

I agree. In fact, I believe this is the number one domestic problem in our country. If the poorer classes married and stayed married, child poverty would nearly disappear, crime of all kinds would decline, drug use would decline, household poverty would go way down, home ownership would stabilize, and general happiness would rise.

I think in general that things are getting better in the world. This includes the marriage rate among the educated classes, which is rising.

But one thing that is getting worse is the marriage rate among the bottom classes. And this is dragging everything else down.

The Rise of "Herbivorous" Men in Japan

Men with no interest in sex or women are now so common in Japan that they have a name: herbivorous.

A third of teenage boys in Japan (age 16 - 19, not the young ones), say they have no interest in sex. Some of them say they despise sex.

One possible cause: most teenage girls in Japan (59%) say the same thing.

40% of married couples report that they have not had sex in the past month.

The Japanese fertility rate is 1.37, way below the 2.1 children per fertile woman necessary to replace the existing population.

The idea that large fractions of young men would have no interest in sex is hard to grasp.

No one knows why.

How the Richest Woman in India Became the Leading Spouse in Her Marriage

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is the richest woman in India. She heads the drug company Biocon. Ariel Levy's fine portrait in the New Yorker shows the unexpected course that led a science-trained young Indian woman to fight sexist resistance to make a big business success.

I was particularly interested in how Mazumdar-Shaw's marriage balanced with her business career. Mazumdar-Shaw is married to John Shaw, from Scotland. Late in the profile, Levy gives this account of how the Mazumdar and Shaw union settled their particular work/life question.

Mazumdar-Shaw thinks of her husband as "a very secure person" who is comfortable in his supporting role. "After we got married," John Shaw recalled, "we sat down and Kiran said, 'Now, John. You've got a career in the textile industry. I've got a career in the biotech industry. One of us has got to give up our career, and it's not me.'" When he looked at her ledgers, he agreed.

Every marriage comes down to the individual qualities of the couple.

Still, I can't help but think that if Kiran Mazumdar had married an Indian, she might have gotten more resistance from her husband when she suggested that he give up his career.

And perhaps of all the non-Indians she might have married, she was fortunate in marrying a Scot - he agreed that he should be the one to step back and support when he looked at her ledgers.

Sounds like a fine partnership.

Jay-Z Announces He Will Keep Calling Women "Bitches."

I view the marriage of celebrities with trepidation, especially popular musicians. Nonetheless, I have some hopes for the union of Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z (Shawn Carter). They married before they had their first child - a rarity in their world. They are very publicly supportive of marriage and parenthood - also unusual, especially for a rapper.

I was delighted, therefore, to hear that Jay-Z proclaimed that the birth of his daughter had cured him of using the word "bitch" to refer to women

Alas, it is not to be. For reasons which are hard for me to understand, Jay-Z's publicist has released a statement that the rapper is not going to give up on calling women "bitches," after all. Despite being married and being the father of a little girl.

The more I think about this, the harder it is to understand.

A Possible American Trollope: Louisa May Alcott

Some months ago I asked for suggestions of which novelist, if any, was the American equivalent of Anthony Trollope.  Most respondents thought there wasn't one.

I am now reading Little Women for the first time.  I see a strong moral similarity between Alcott's project and Trollope's. He draws on a broader social world.  On the whole I think he is the better writer. Still, Alcott seems to be engage in a similar project at the same time, and with comparable popularity.

I offer this idea for the consideration of my literary readers.

Monogamy Succeeds Polygamy as Part of the Civilizing Process

Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, about which I blogged recently, argues that the civilizing process of the modern era is one of the main reasons for the massive decrease in violence in the world.

Pinker does not treat the change in marriage norms specifically in his consideration of the civilizing process. I have long thought, though, that one of the great social benefits of monogamy is that it should reduce the violence by groups of unmarried men that is a predictable by-product of polygamy. This, I think, is why monogamy is nearly universal in developed nations, despite the wide variety of religious and cultural traditions that these different nations developed from.

A new study by Joseph Henrich and others at the University of British Columbia found "significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, robbery and fraud in polygymous cultures found in Asia and Africa." By contrast, monogamy leads to more paternal investment, long-term planning, economic productivity, savings, and child investments.

These social advantages explain why even those who benefit the most from polygamy - rich, high-status men - are willing to switch to a monogamous social norm. The civilizing process leads to monogamy because of its greater peace and social investment for society as a whole.

Low IQ Correlates with Racism Through Social Conservatism

A fascinating study by Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Canada, found that people with low intelligence in childhood were more likely to be racist adults. This was expected, given earlier research on education and racism.

The new finding tried to answer how, exactly, the two became connected. Hodson's conclusion:

The factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

The researchers speculate that conservative ideologies offer a more black-and-white worldview, which would be more appealing to people who finding it hard to take the position of the Other.

These findings correspond with Hetherington and Weiler's studies of authoritarianism and polarization which I blogged about before. Hodson's psychological study does not really look at the political mechanism by which low-IQ people find out about socially conservative ideologies. Political scientists Hetherington and Weiler, on the other hand, point to the fact that conservative organizations and parties have, over the past generation, actively sought out fearful people.

It seems a reasonable step to me to suppose that low-IQ people are more fearful than others. That would be an excellent subject for the next study.

Sovereignty vs. Majesty

I am participating in the Christian Life and Witness conference at Georgetown College on the subject of "From the Academy to the Church."  Nicholas Wolterstorff, a distinguished Reformed philosopher from Yale, was drawing a distinction between the Reformed approach to higher education and a conservative Baptist approach (Georgetown is a Baptist college).  In the course of presenting an ideal type of the Reformed approach, he was asked about what is often considered the key Reformed doctrine, the sovereignty of God.

Wolterstorff surprised me by saying that Calvin does not seem to speak of the sovereignty of God. Instead, Calvin promotes the idea of the majesty of God.

Wolterstorff thought this difference presented Calvinism in a more hopeful light, because he reads the idea of God's sovereignty as the foundation of the most notorious Reformed doctrine, double predestination.

I, however, have always favored the idea of the sovereignty of God. I do not, though, connect it with predestination.  Instead, I see it as a claim by the Reformed that all of Creation has one order, which we can investigate by reason.

We agreed that "sovereignty" and "majesty" are clearly similar ideas.  It may be that they are simply different translations of the same word.

My question to you is this: Which term you find resonates better with your understanding?  It seems to me that sovereignty is a concept better adapted to a democratic culture, whereas majesty is a more monarchical concept.

Still wrestling.  Very fruitful conference, though.

Children as a Happy-Making Gift.

I have been synthesizing two lines of happiness research.

People who give more are more likely to report that they are very happy.

People who have children are more likely to report that they are very happy, even though children typically diminish their marital happiness.

I think it is very fruitful to think of raising children as a gift, a gift to society.

Giving the gift of raising children should make it more likely that you will be very happy.

Facebook is Not an Echo Chamber

Some people fear that social media creates an echo chamber in which we only hear opinions from like-minded friends which confirm our own.

Eytan Bakshy, a researcher at Facebook, conducted a fine, huge experiment. Facebook normally shows you links that your friends have posted. Using a modest sample of 253 million users, Bakshy suppressed some of that sharing, to create an experimental and a control group. He wanted to see how much people shared links, whether they shared links that were kept from them but that they found some other way, and whether they shared more from their strong-tie or weak-tie friends.

If Facebook were an echo chamber, we would mostly be sharing links from friends and from strong ties more than weak.

What Bakshy found is that we do share links from our close friends. And we do share links that we would have gotten from our close friends - Bakshy hid them, but we found them anyway. So far, so echo-y. But we also share links from our weak ties, ones we would not have seen otherwise. And the number of links we get and share from weak ties overwhelm the number we get from close ties. Weak ties bring us novel information.

My experience confirms this finding. I share opinions with close friends every day on Facebook. But I also get contrary information all the time. Some comes from a few close friends who do not agree with me. But most comes from weak ties - acquaintances who are "friends" but not really close friends. Even more often, people I do not know contribute comments to a friends' post disagreeing with that friend. Almost daily I find myself reading and checking a contrasting idea that someone I sort-of know put on Facebook.

This keeps me honest. Good for busting the echo chamber.

Big-Time Sports Did Not Eat Division III College Life

"How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life," by Laura Pappano in the New York Times, is an excellent and sad story.  Two interesting statistics that she reports:

Between 1985 and 2010, average salaries at public universities rose 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches. 

A study of University of Oregon students found that for every three games won by the football team, the grade-point average for men dropped 0.02, widening the G.P.A. gender gap by 9 percent.

The good news is that this is only a problem at Division I schools.  Division III schools, like Centre College, do athletics right.  And not all Division III schools are small, like Centre.  The University of Chicago, for example, or Washington University, are full-scale research universities.  But they keep sports in proportion.

Physical activity is a fine part of a well-rounded education. Athletics is a good addition to academic education. For those who don't want their academic priorities totally distorted by semi-professional sports teams operating near their academic institution, Division III does academic/athletic balance right.

World Population Pyramid Shows Some Big Declines Coming

This world population pyramid is fantastic.

Want to see something scary? Look at the population of Japan, Russia, and Italy now, vs. 2030.

I think world population is likely to stabilize. But some countries are looking at a demographic shrinkage so large that their societies will be fundamentally changed.

Have the Republicans Run Out of Protestants?

With Rick Perry's withdrawal from the presidential nomination race, the Republican Party is down to Romney the Mormon, Santorum the traditional Catholic, Gingrich the newcomer Catholic, and Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is a libertarian.  Libertarians are mostly unreligious, and a strong segment, like Jesse Ventura, regard religion as a crutch for the weak.

But Ron Paul also attends a Baptist church, is pro-life, and has been on both sides of the gay marriage issue.

I think Paul has not fully worked out the relationship between his religious views and his political views. He is clearly against the federal government being involved in moral and religious matters, as a strict libertarian would be.  But whether he would support or oppose the Christian Right position at the state level is not clear.

In any case, the Republican Party, which has made evangelical Protestants the foundation of its base for a generation, has now run out of any clear socially conservative evangelical candidates for president.

We Should Err on the Side of Internet Freedom

Today many internet sites, my daily tools and haunts, are protesting proposed legislation. The intent of the legislation - to prevent stealing intellectual property - is noble. The proposed method of control, though, seems so burdensome on internet content transmitters that it could really cripple this wonderful tool.

I am not expert enough on the details of the legislation to say more than that about this law or that. And I am confident that our legislative process will work out to a compromise that is not as bad as the proposed law. The political forces are divided and the economic forces are divided. This is the circumstance that makes for compromise.

The internet needs regulation. Every human institution needs rules and regulation. The question is whether our presumption is to err on the side of freedom or on the side of tight control. To take two extreme examples: we need very little regulation of how the rules of children's games work; we need strict regulation of how nuclear power plants operate.

The flow of content on the internet is, I submit, more like the rules of kids' games than it is like nuclear power. Light regulation is appropriate.

School Your Passion Toward a Real Problem, and Thus Find Happiness

Oliver Segovia has a fine piece on the Harvard Business Review blog with the unfortunate headline "To Find Happiness, Forget Passion."

His main point is that if you want a meaningful life, find a big problem to work on. Since it is a big problem, you will probably find a way to make a living at trying to solve it. And working on something worthwhile is likely to make you happy.

Segovia frames this point with a story of a woman who "followed her passion" into something liberal artsy (subject not specified), who ended up unemployed and depressed. This story, no doubt, is what led the headline writer to say "forget passion."

I think Segovia's point, though, is that working on a big problem that you have an initial interest in tends to engage your passion. Thus, his real message is not "forget passion," but try to school your passion toward something the world can use.

That way does lead to happiness, fulfillment, and probably enough income to live on.

The Best Measure of How Far We Have Come On King Day

... is a black president in the White House.

The Vocation to Discern Vocations

In Sunday School we have been talking about the Presbyterian calling to teach.  Everyone in the class is or has been a teacher of some sort. I think this is pretty typical for a Presbyterian Sunday School. I think I would not find the same thing in a random sample of adult Sunday School classes in most denominations.

Being called to teach has also meant that Presbyterians are disproportionately involved in creating schools.  The stewardship of society means that these schools are meant to serve everyone, not just Presbyterians.

One point that came out in the class that I had not fully appreciated before comes from putting the call to teach with the call to create schools.  Having a vocation to teach in institutions that serve everyone means that we also have a vocation to help everyone find his or her vocation - whether that includes teaching or not.

The vocation to help discern vocations vastly multiplies the social effect of the Presbyterian call to teach.

Christian Right Leaders Give Obama a Gift

Leaders of the Christian Right, a once-important bloc within the Republican Party, have endorsed Rick Santorum.

I believe this action will have two consequences.

First, evangelical Christians will not follow these once-powerful leaders, but will split their votes among many candidates, including Mitt Romney.

Second, the split within the Republican Party between the establishment wing, which backs Romney, and the evangelical wing, which does not, will widen.

The Republican Party has been effective in blocking a few of President Obama's policies, but seems to be unable to unite around any effective positive idea for governing, nor do they support an effective candidate to bear such an idea. By further splitting the party, the Christian Right leaders have handed President Obama another gift.

Twins Up Nearly 100% in a Generation Due to Old Mothers

The birth rate for twins has nearly doubled in the past generation in the U.S.

One third of this growth in twinning is due to more older mothers, who tend to have twins at a higher rate naturally than younger mothers do.

Most of the increase in twins - and triplets, quadruplets, etc. on to Octomom - is due to more women waiting so long to have children that they need fertility drugs.

"The King of Bain" is a Very Bad Film

"When Mitt Romney Came to Town," also known as "The King of Bain," the long-form attack ad that Newt Gingrich's supporters are running, is a very bad documentary.  It is the kind of sensationalist fear mongering that the right wing hates when Michael Moore does it. 

The film, which was originally made by Romney employees, was sold to a pro-Gingrich political action committee.

The film shows Romney and his firm, Bain Capital, buying up several companies, firing most of the workforce, making huge profits by getting other people to loan the companies money, and then shutting them down completely.  In one case they started a technology firm, got favorable ratings from Lehman Brothers, made a huge pile from the initial public offering, then sold off all their stock just before the company went bankrupt.

In each case - and the film says there are many more - Bain acts like the vultures that Rick Perry says they are.

What the film does not do is investigate whether the companies could have been run profitably at all.  The film-makers did not even ask whether anyone could have saved these firms.

I do not know the answer to that question.  So far, no commentators on the film have tried to answer it.  It may be that Bain Capital, and Mitt Romney, are indeed "vulture capitalists" or "mafia capitalists," buying profitable companies, suckering investors into giving Bain lots of money in exchange for worthless debt, then destroying the firms. It may also be that Bain Capital bought failing companies, performed necessary creative destruction, and saved the fragment that would otherwise have failed. 

I would really like to know which kind of businessman Mitt Romney is.  But "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" is a very bad way to try to answer the question.

What You Get If You Ask the Web If It's Cool to Be a Virgin

The website "First World Problems" had this intriguing item:

My daughter wants to know if it's cool to be a virgin. I'm not sure, but I know that if I Google the answer, it'll result in firing or divorce.

I am in little danger of being fired or divorced for pursuing such a question, so I did.


The first answer that Google yields is, surprisingly, a Yahoo! Answers Q & A from 2006 (!). The lead answer given then was "it's up to you."


A query from last year is a little scarier: "Is it OK to be 16 and a virgin?"  This, I am happy to report, brought several sensible and well-reasoned "yes" answers.

A similar query brought this response from TheSite.org, a British advice site for young adults:

I'm 78, still a virgin and so cool, I piss ice cubes.

You're doing the right thing.

 

The Pay It Forward Coffee House

I like good news, coffee houses, and Good magazine. This story has all three.

At the Corner Perk, a coffee house in Bluffton, SC, one anonymous customer started leaving money to pay for other people's drinks and food. This custom caught on, and now many people do it.

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has so interestingly demonstrated, seeing other people do good things fills most people with a desire to do good things, too.

Utopian "Third Party" Movements are the Bane of Centrism

I am grateful to Solomon Kleinsmith to participate in his blog collective, The Rise of the Center.

Recently I got to voice a pet peeve about something that has bedeviled every centrist forum I have been part of: the desire to create a third party between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

I think that in this country third parties are always utopian, sectarian, and do more harm than good.  In particular, they hurt the party that they are more in sympathy with by splitting the vote in an election. Not all third parties are centrist, by any means.  But the effect is the same: third parties are a gift your enemies.

Moreover, like all utopian endeavors, they take up too many evenings with too little to show for it.

The Republicans and the Democrats have nearly all the governmental action.  If you want to actually affect government policy, as I do, then you have to work within the big tent of one or the other major party.

There are many other ways to build up the world besides government policy, of course. Those other sectors allow for many fruitful centrist paths.  But American politics does not.

Most of the other participants in the Rise of the Center discussion, including Kleinsmith, disagree with me on this.

I would be interested in the thoughts of Gruntled Center readers on this topic.

Why President Obama Will Be Re-Elected

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

The main reasons that I think President Obama will be re-elected is that:

a) he is the incumbent, so the sizable majority that voted for him last time will want to vote for him again;

b) the economy is improving; and

c) the Republicans will be unable to unite around an exciting and unifying candidate.


President Obama has been a very good president.

Conditions in the country and in the world are improving.

Obama is playing the long game of politics very well. When he was first elected, he knew he had about 18 months to pass the main pieces of his positive agenda.  He did, most importantly by passing universal health care. He has also been relentlessly bi-partisan, working with any Republicans who were willing to help, compromising the way any competent politician must, and keeping his eye on the ball.  He has had even greater successes in foreign policy.  And he has waited until the turn into his re-election year to push back harder against the Republican leadership's intransigence.

The Republicans have played into Obama's hands.  They have positioned themselves as against health care for millions, against saving the auto industry, against regulating the investment "banks" that nearly destroyed the world economy, against regulating the payday lenders that batten on the poor and working class, against supporting democratic movements in the Arab world, against reducing payroll taxes for people who live on their earnings, against raising taxes on the hugely rich.  Most importantly, they have positioned themselves against compromising and working together in the way that government absolutely requires.

To take a signal example, I think universal health care will be a pillar of what most Americans appreciate about government, as they do Medicare and Social Security.  Republicans also opposed Medicare and Social Security, but at least some of them voted for it.  Not universal health care, though - the Republican leadership made sure their party was unanimously against it.  And they call it "Obamacare."  This short-sighted intransigence will come back to bite them for years to come.

The Republican Party is also suffering a three-way civil war among its establishment, social conservative, and libertarian wings.  The Tea Party, in particular, is almost as much anti-Republican as it is anti-Democratic. I believe the Tea Party has shot its bolt and will be irrelevant after this election.  But in the mean time, they will exacerbate the intransigence that is undermining the Republican Party as an actual instrument of government.

Obama Is Mostly Doing an Excellent Job

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

Yesterday I wrote about my main criticism of President Obama. Today I want to say that, on the whole, I think he has done a masterful job under very difficult circumstances.

President Obama first had to clean up the gigantic mess left by the previous administration. He prevented a major depression, ended a misbegotten war, is winding down a more justified war, killed bin Laden, ended torture, restored America's stature in the world, saved the auto industry, resumed regulating the finance industry, and started protecting the environment again.

Obama also came in to office with a positive agenda. His main achievement was to create universal health care, an objective of Democratic administrations since Truman. He started investing more in alternative energy, rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, working with our allies, and shifting our military focus toward Asia.

He also made the most of some unexpected opportunities, most importantly the Arab Spring. President Obama supported indigenous revolutions against Arab dictators, without sending American troops, spending a trillion dollars, alienating our allies, or creating loathing for America among the "liberated" people. The contrast with the Iraq war is striking in this regard. And the chances of successful democracy are greater than in Iraq, though still iffy in both cases.

One great achievement of the Obama administration is something it did not do: it did not make our enemies do worse things by threatening them. The President did not invent an "axis of evil," pushing them to invest in nuclear weapons against an American threat.

And President Obama achieved all of this in the face of a determined foe whose sole objective was to deny the president any achievements: the leadership of the Republican Party. As Senator McConnell said at the outset of the current administration, the main goal of Republicans is to deny President Obama a second term.

Obama has been a very good president. I hope in the coming year he will prove to be an excellent one.

Obama Is Doing Something Wrong in Fighting Terrorists

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

On his first day in office, President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo prison within a year. He did not.

Last year he ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, Anwar Awlaki, by a drone attack in Yemen.

Last week he signed the defense bill which allows the indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists.

Each of these acts is wrong in itself and dangerous as a precedent.

I normally support President Obama, so I have tried hard to understand why he did these things, and what principle or theory might lie behind them. I have not come up with a good account. National security, especially when dealing with terrorists, necessarily includes facts that can't be revealed to the public. Perhaps there are good reasons for these acts that are now hidden.

Here are my best guesses.

Some of the Guantanamo prisoners were so badly tortured under the previous administration that they cannot effectively be put on trial or released. Since their testimony was acquired by torture, it is worthless. The Obama administration ended the torture, but cannot undue what was done before.

A very small number of American citizens, such as Awlaki, have indeed become enemy combatants. Awlaki himself openly proclaimed this. Since he was in hiding in enemy territory, it was not practical to capture and try him as a citizen has a right to receive. The drone attack was the only practical way to fight that enemy, as we have with many other non-citizen enemy individuals.

When signing the National Defense Authorization Act, the president issued a statement that he objected to the provisions of the act that allowed for indefinite military detention and would not allow them on his watch. His opponents put this poison pill in the law precisely to embarrass the president. Since he had to sign the law in order to pay the troops, he accepted this compromise, while still rejecting this provision of the law.

I think these guesses on my part are the best case for understanding how President Obama could be party to these bad acts. Still, they only mitigate the evil; they do not justify it, nor end it.

I understand that we are fighting terrorists - enemy individuals and loose organizations that really do threaten us. The normal tools that states can use in fighting the armies of other states are not available. We have had to develop new tools to fight these enemies effectively.

I believe the Obama administration has made some effort to make the war against terrorists more legal than it was, and to make it still more legal and ethical as we go forward.

But I believe that President Obama has not done enough to fight these enemy individuals and organizations in a way that is in accord with American constitutional principles. This is my biggest disappointment with the Obama administration.

The Three-Way Fight Among Republicans

I am starting the year with a week of Big Picture posts.

Republicans normally nominate the person whose turn it is to run for president.  They typically pick a candidate who did respectably in their previous primary.  By that logic, it is Mitt Romney's turn.

Some newcomers also run in order to get in line for a future race, or at least to position themselves for a post in the next Republican administration.  I believe Jon Huntsman, my favorite of the Republican candidates this year, ran for this reason.

When I look at the rest of this year's Republican field, I see two things.

First, I think all the other establishment politicians in the party believe that Barack Obama will be re-elected.  Therefore, they decided to sit this one out.

Second, the Tea Party is a wild card. This movement is as much against the Republican establishment as it is against the Democrats. None of those who are running are exactly Tea Partiers.  Tea Partiers are mostly very conservative white Christians, drawn heavily from the petite bourgeoisie, who are the bedrock of any Republican coalition. I think Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann come closest. They are drawn to libertarianism, so they think well of Ron Paul.  But mostly they are not really against government, as true libertarians are.  Rather, Tea Partiers are against government spending money on people they regard as undeserving. All the Not-Romney candidates have been trying to mobilize the Tea Party, but none have a lock.

Herman Cain got into the race, I believe, to raise his speaking fees.  That is his main source of income.  Ironically, if he had not become the front-runner, this strategy might have worked.  Too much exposure, though, destroyed his credibility (if not his marriage).

Newt Gingrich, I think, never expected to be the nominee.  He does, though, wish he still mattered politically, so he ran to raise his profile. He may even get his wish.  I think, though, he has also raised his negatives, reminding a new generation of Republicans why the previous generation of Republican leaders pushed him out of leadership.

Rick Santorum is, I believe, actually the strongest social conservative in the race - which is saying quite a bit. He is a very traditional Catholic - not an evangelical Protestant.  One consequence of this fact, not usually appreciated by secular political commentators, is that traditional Catholics are not beholden to free-market capitalism, large corporations, or big banks.  This is also why Santorum is not the candidate of the Republican establishment.

As I write this, the Iowa caucuses are unfolding. Romney, Santorum, and Paul are leading.  I think the Republican race will continue with these three, or people representing the three Republican camps.

The Tea Party and the social conservatives will try to fend off the gravitational pull of the establishment candidate.

I expect that Romney, the establishment candidate, the my-turn candidate, will be the eventual nominee.

The World Is Better Off Than It Was a Year Ago

I like to start each year with a week of reflections on the big picture.

The worst dictator in the world died.

The worst terrorist in the world was killed.

Three Arab dictatorships were overthrown, which is good; by their own people; which is better; with Western help, but not Western domination, which is best of all.

Three other Arab dictatorships may be overthrown the same way. As well as the military dictatorship of Burma.

The world economy is slowly improving.  Europe has been able to avert economic collapse, and is slowly dealing with their currency and debt crisis.

China is cooperating more with the West in trade and in stabilizing Western debt.  China has also been helpful in containing North Korea.

Conditions are improving for women's education, careers, public lives, and general freedom throughout nearly all nations of the world. 

Conditions are improving for sexual minorities in most nations of the world.

Religious freedom is improving in most nations of the world.

World population seems to be stabilizing.

Let us not take for granted stable democracies in almost every corner of the Western hemisphere, the Northern hemisphere, and most of the Pacific island nations.

The generation-long trend of declining violence continues in nearly all nations.

All the great powers are working together to reduce the threat of war, both among great powers, and among little states.

To be sure, there are a few very bad actors in the world, some of them controlling states. And there are always uncertainties to worry about.  The world economy is recovering, but not recovered. The global warming trend may be getting worse. And bad things happen to individuals every day.

Still, the world as a whole is better off than it was a year ago.

There is a great deal to be thankful for, and hopeful about, in the world today.

Merry Christmas to One and All

The Gruntled Center will take a vacation until the New Year.

I am looking forward to an excellent 2012, and I hope you have the same.

A Dylan Thomas Trip to Shakertown

We had a delightful bit of providential timing last night.

Near Danville is Pleasant Hill, a restored Shaker community now known as Shakertown. It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful human-made place in Kentucky. I took the family there for Christmas Eve-eve dinner.

My mother-in-law brought a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales," a favorite family poem that I used to read to the kids when they were small. We started listening as we pulled out of the driveway. "I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six," and all that follows, carried us through the misty December twilight in the lovely Kentucky countryside.

As we came in sight of the entrance to Shakertown, Dylan Thomas was winding down Christmas day.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

And he spoke the last word as we pulled up to the stop sign opposite the Pleasant Hill gate.

So now we know: the distance from Danville to Shakertown can be measured in the scientific unit of one Child's Christmas in Wales.

China's Surprising Christian Distribution

The Pew Research Center has taken on the difficult task of estimating the numbers of Christians all over the world.  Yesterday I reported that the country with the third largest number of Protestants is China - many in underground churches. 

I was surprised, though, to see the ratio of Protestant to Catholic Christians in China. 

Using the same methods to estimate both groups, Pew came up with these totals for Chinese Christians:

Protestants: 58 million

Catholics:     9 million

I hope that some day, when China is democratic, these churches will be able to operate openly.  I expect that, when that day comes, there will be an evangelical boom in China - as is already happening covertly.

And, incidentally, sociologists will be able to get more definite numbers.

Which Countries Have the Most Protestants?

Which country has the most Protestants?  The United States - that one was not so hard.

But which countries have the second and third largest Protestant populations?  Not the largest percentage, but the largest number - a question that obviously favors the countries with the largest populations?

The answer?  China and Nigeria.

A new world Christianity is being built.

"Keeping Her Maiden Name" on the Decline

A young friend, recently engaged, passed on this story of the decline in married women keeping their maiden names.

The interesting statistics on American brides keeping their maiden names:

1980s: 9%
1990s: 23%
2000s: 18%

They also report a large, but probably not scientific, survey by TheKnot.com, which found that only 8% did in 2010.

The article suggests, by anecdote, that more women are using their maiden names as middle names for professional purposes, as Mrs. G. does.

I do remember noticing that among people we know, the trend seemed to peak with the late Baby Boomers of the college class of '77, but had was less common in our early Gen X cohort marrying in the early 1980s, even at a very politically correct college.

Marry Before Kids: An Answer to Tracy McMillan

Tracy McMillan has written very popular piece at The Huffington Post that is funny, insightful, and deliberately over the top, explaining to aging single women, like herself, "Why You Are Not Married." McMillan's politically incorrect advice has drawn some criticism, including Lisa Wade's piece at Sociological Images that I addressed yesterday.

I did want to take issue with one point that McMillan, a thrice-divorced single mother, makes:

if what you really want is a baby, go get you one. Your husband will be along shortly. Motherhood has a way of weeding out the lotharios.

 McMillan's advice is not completely wrong, but it is very risky.

On the one hand, it is true many women who have children out of wedlock do eventually marry someone, including most teen welfare moms (see Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep).

On the other hand, it is much harder to court with children.  It is less likely that step-fathers will be as good for kids as would natural fathers married to natural mothers. Most of all, McMillan's strategy discounts the bad effects on the children of their single-parent years. Things may work out OK eventually, but there are usually costs from the tough years.  And if things do not work out eventually, all the years are likely to be tough.

I think Tracy McMillan does offer a helpful reality check to single women who do want to marry, though she offers it in an almost brutal way.   But I think she errs in her advice about the relationship between marriage and children.