The Little Words Show a Couple's Mutual Interest

James Pennebaker, a U. of Texas psychologist, studies what happens to our use of function words - the, this, though, I, and, an, there, that - when we converse with other people.  He studied speed-dating couples. He found that when both used these words the same way and at the same rate, they were more likely to go on a real date.

This was not because, as I would have thought, these speech patterns showed an underlying similarity. Other studies have shown that couples with similarly complex vocabularies are more attracted to one another and make more stable marriages.  But that is not what is going on here.  Everyone uses function words.

Pennebaker concludes:
"When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically."

Chinese Civil Rights Lawyer Chen Guangcheng is Halfway to Freedom

Chen Guangcheng brought a lawsuit against Chinese provincial officials for forced sterilizations and forced abortions as part of the one-child policy.  The Chinese government did what it usually does: it cracked down on both the bad officials, and the good citizen who exposed them.  Chen was sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges.  When his four-year term was over, he was (illegally) put under house arrest. 

This week, despite being under intense guard and being blind, Chen escaped from his village, was spirited away by the human rights underground to Beijing, and has taken refuge in the U.S. embassy.

I hope a fruit of the upcoming U.S./China economic talks will be that Chen can leave China for freedom, and that his family will not be retaliated against.

What I find particularly hopeful about this story is that Chen's activism took the form of a lawsuit.  The fact that it is even possible now for a citizen to file a lawsuit against the government is a hopeful step toward legitimate government in China.

Wheelan's Good Life Advice for Graduates (and Everyone)

I endorse Charles Wheelan's sentiments in his Wall Street Journal piece, "Ten Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You."

I particularly embrace #4, "Marry Someone Smarter Than You Are."  This paragraph is pretty much my life story, swapping "software company" for "education non-profit."

I do take issue with one element of #1, "Your Time in Fraternity Basements Was Well Spent." Wheelan is thinking of time spent building lifetime relationships, based on making "meaningful connections with other human beings." Merely drinking together will not do that.  And hookups have a negative effect.

Enjoy Commencement season.

The Tide Has Turned on Gay Marriage

A new Pew poll shows that more people favor gay marriage than oppose it - 47% to 43%. 

That would not persuade me in itself.  But when you parse the data, majorities of women favor gay marriage, majorities of moderates favor gay marriage, and, most importantly, majorities of the two youngest generations favor gay marriage.

The tide has turned in favor of gay marriage.  In a decade, it will not be an issue in most places in America.

Mexican Immigration Turns the Corner

Mexican immigration has peaked and started to recede.

There are about 12 million Mexican immigrants in the United States.  Slightly over half of them are here illegally. 

In the past few recession years the in-migration has slowed to a trickle, and the out-migration has picked up.  Last year there may have been more people returning to Mexico than came here.

Those who were afraid of being overrun by Mexicans can strike another fear from their list.

Consider Three: New Evidence from Young Adult Families.

Mark Regnerus reports some early results of his survey of young adults, 18 - 39.

I was drawn to this portrait of the number of children in each family.  These data are on full brothers and sisters.

Only children: 21%
Two-child family: 34%
Three-child family: 24%
Four-child family: < 10%
Five-child family: < 5%

Thus, most families don't have enough children to replace the population (replacement level is, on average, 2.1 children per woman).  When you consider the people in the parental generation (older than these respondents) who had no children, they balance out those who had four or more kids.  The average educated mother has two children, which is a widely known norm.  What is less well known is that poor, unschooled, teen mothers also have, on average, two children.

Sociologists have known for some time that the population of this country is in danger of declining, as it is likely to do in all other industrialized countries. Many of my students feel freed by this news, as they want to have more than two children but were afraid that was irresponsible.  They had been taught the old story of a "population explosion" that their parents were taught.  The idea that they can have more is liberating.

The threshold for a stable population, I believe, is between two children as a norm, and three.  People like my students are the very kind most likely to be able to create stable families - educated, persistent young people who are no longer teenagers.

America would be better off if the norm for stable families was three children, rather than two.

As I have long urged my students, when thinking about family size, consider three.

Sliding Into Cohabitation is Not Worth It

Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, has a fine piece in the New York Times on how sliding into cohabitation can make it less likely that you will make a successful marriage.

This line is worth the price of admission:
"I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together."

My advice to students: don't live together without a ring and a date.

"Equal Pay Day" is Mostly Wrong

Today is "Equal Pay Day," an annual symbolic protest of the supposed gender gap in wages.  It is based on the number of additional days that women have to work into the new year to equal the median wage of men in the prior year.  Last year the median annual income of women working full time and year round was 77% of men's median income. Thus, women need to work an extra quarter of a year - that is, until today - to catch up.

The implication of this argument is that women make 77% of what men make due to discrimination.  A moment's thought, though, should dispose of this argument.  If women really did exactly the same work as men for only three quarters of the cost, no rational employer would hire men at all.

The American Association of University Women, who calculated this ratio, admit that when you control for several things that should be controlled for - college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children - the gap drops to 5% one year after college graduation.

The biggest difference is not simply between men and women, but between fathers and mothers. Married fathers are likely to work more, more steadily, and seek every opportunity to make more money for their families. Married mothers are more likely to scale back their work to have a better balance with their family life.  Married couples usually divide labor and specialize for the good of the family as a whole.

Of course there is some sex discrimination in employment. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama a few years ago, did address a real problem.

But most of the gender gap in wages is due to different choices of how to live that men and women, and especially fathers and mothers, make about work and family life.

Americans Couple Up When They Always Have

The age of marriage is going up, so the proportion of people who are married in their early 20s - the traditional age of marriage - is going down.

However, the cohabitation rate is going up, and it starts earlier than the marriage age.  Indeed, most couples cohabit before marriage.  Some do so as test for marriage, though that does not work as well as they hoped.

The upshot is that Americans couple up, move in together, and even start to have kids at about the time and rate that they always have.

As the new CDC report, First Marriages in the United States puts it,

"If entry into any type of union, marriage or cohabitation, is taken into account, then the timing of a first union occurs at roughly the same point in the life course as marriage did in the past."

Fewer Than a Third Think There is a Democratic War on Religious Freedom

A YouGov/Economist poll found that only 29% think the Democratic Party is "waging war on religious freedom."

Even among weekly churchgoers and people who say religion is very important in their lives, most reject this recent culture wars theme.

More Good News on Teen Pregnancy

Teen pregnancy rate in the U.S.:

1990: 116.9 per 1,000.

2010: 34.3 per 1,000.

This is the lowest teen pregnancy rate in forty years.

The rate is going down because teens are having less sex and using contraception more.

The Belief That Women Are Not Different From One Another is a Distinctive Difference of Women

One of the hallmarks of difference feminism is that women tend to make different choices than men do, and this is fine. Equality of opportunity for women and men is not likely to lead to the same outcome.

Egalitarian feminism, by contrast, tends to see any difference in outcome between men and women - a difference in the proportion of CEOs of large corporations, for example, or of average pay - as evidence of discrimination against women. They are committed to the idea that women are essentially the same as one another, as well as the same in essence as men, so inequality among women is also evidence that something is wrong.

The belief that women are essentially the same as one another, and that justice means keeping equality among women is, Deborah Tannen has found, one of the distinctive hallmarks of women's communication and relations with one another.

The belief by egalitarian feminist women that women are the same is one of the women's differences that difference feminism accepts.

Happy Easter - Even if it is the Most Pagan Holiday

The Resurrection is the peak of the Christian calendar.

The American celebration of Easter is the most pagan of holidays. 

Nonetheless, both are happy occasions.  I celebrate them.

Little Men Continues the Virtuous World of Little Women

Some months ago I read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women for the first time.  I do like it as a moral tale.  I nominated her as a possible American equivalent of Anthony Trollope.

Today I read Little Men.  It is also a fine moral tale.  Since it is set in a school, it is full of opportunities for explicit moral instruction.  Most of these do not take place in the classroom, but in developing the characters of the boys (and some girls) in their interactions with one another outside of class. The charm is in the mild and humorous incidents.  The deep appeal of the novel, though, is about the shaping of good character.

In the comments on my post on Little Women, it was offered that we shouldn't compare Alcott and Trollope, since one was writing children's literature and the other adult literature.  The more I think about this distinction, the less I think it holds up.  I think what the authors have in common is more important than the age of the subjects they write about or for.  They are both portraying a God-ordered world in which good character and good conduct are right and true, and in which those who do right can be happy, whatever their worldly fortunes might be.

You Still Have Only a Slim Chance to Have Your First Baby in Your Forties

The number of women in their forties trying Assisted Reproductive Technologies of all sorts has gone up dramatically in the last few years.

The proportion who succeed, though, has not.  The Yale Fertility Clinic puts the success rate after 42 at 9%, where it has been for some years.

Yet many women coming to the clinic, who are highly educated and well-informed about many other things, have only a vague notion that fertility declines dramatically in their thirties.  They are often surprised, even offended, when told that they waited too long.

Good News From Burma

I am so encouraged by developments in Burma.  The military government seems to be gradually letting go.  They allowed 45 by-elections to go forward - not enough to control parliament, but enough to create a base for the previously banned opposition.

And the great news: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nelson Mandela of Burma, was elected to parliament, and her party won 40 of the 45 seats.

We may see a free Burma within a few years.  And if President Aung San Suu Kyi tells me to call the country Myanmar, I will happily comply.

Manhattan Singles are a Life Stage, Not a Lifestyle

Eric Klinenberg, in Going Solo, notes that half of Manhattan households are made up of people living alone.  New York is certainly the capital of solo living in this country.  But they are not really representative of future trends elsewhere.

Many young people go to New York to try to make it big, or just to experience the cosmopolitan life - for awhile.  Then they pick a more realistic option elsewhere, or marry and move to the suburbs, or run through their trust fund or parental subsidy.

I think the fact that Klinenberg is a professor at New York University in Greenwich Village gives him a distorted view of how common, or sustainable, solo living is.

"Going Solo" is Not the Wave of the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Silver Lining of the Trayvon Martin Case

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

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

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

So what is the silver lining?

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

The Capitol of Panem is Galt's Gulch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Love in Domestic Violence Cases Than in Paternity Cases

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

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

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

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

Yes, the judge answered without hesitation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was drawn to three particular findings of this study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Medium-Term Impact of Normalizing Mormonism

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

But that is not my main point today.

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

I think the Mormons are in for their own Sixties. 

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

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

Spanx is a Happy Success Story

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

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

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

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

Better is Better: A Response to Impossible Perfectionists

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

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

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

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

The Least-Happy City is Still Overwhelmingly Happy

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

One of the items measured was happiness. 

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

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

College Town Story Has Shocking Omission!

College Towns are Happy Towns.  Yes.

The omission: Danville, KY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts on this matter?

In Praise of James Q. Wilson

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

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

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

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

The World Is Getting Better

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

I share with you four of those slides.

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

Anything Else Gotten Better?

•Sex discrimination

•Race discrimination

•Sexual-orientation discrimination

•Handicap discrimination

•Imperial control of colonized people

•Totalitarianism and authoritarianism

  Is that all you’ve got?  

•Food production has increased gigantically

•Transportation is cheaper

•Communication costs a tiny fraction of before

•Information is available on unprecedented scale

•The air is cleaner

•World population is under control

 

Wait, What Was That About World Population?  

•The population bomb was a dud

•No developed nation has enough kids to replace itself

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

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

Is Anything Worse? 

•Rich-World Problems Are on the Rise:

•Obesity

•Cancer

•Heart disease

•Divorce and unmarried parenthood

•Global warming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Further Thought from Randall Collins' The Credential Society

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

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

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

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

I am chewing on this.

Is Centre College a Privilege?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The College Class Has Their Kids Within Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.