Slaughter is Mostly Wrong About Women Having it All

Anne-Marie Slaughter's cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly is an argument that even ideal conditions for a woman "having it all" aren't enough.  I found it a very frustrating article.

Slaughter was a tenured dean at Princeton, married to another tenured Princeton professor who was a very involved father, with a full-time housekeeper to help care for their home and two adolescent children.  She got her dream job in the Obama administration. But after two years she decided to leave that job and go back to Princeton to spend more time with her family.

The way she put the choice to herself was to ask whether she was indispensable to her job or indispensable to her children.  Put that way, the choice seemed obvious.  She went home.

She was asked in an interview if the answer to that question isn't obvious for everyone? She dodged the question.  Yet, if those are the choices, the answer is obvious to every parent.  By that standard, no parents, fathers or mothers, would ever go to work.

My wife is a highly educated attorney with an important career.  When we speak as a couple to my "Family Life" class on this exact subject - Can women have it all? - the answer she gives is "yes, but not all at once." You can marry and have your kids and even start a career when you are young.  As your kids get more self-sufficient, you can devote more time and effort to your career, and really hit your stride in late middle life.  For healthy middle class people these days, life is long enough for most women to do all of these things.

Slaughter says that for older women that might be fine, but that these days marrying young and having kids early has "fallen out of fashion." (She is the same age as Mrs. G. and me.)

She says that women today need to fully start their careers, and then pause to marry and have kids in their late 30s or early 40s.  They can pick up their careers a decade later and head to a peak a decade after that. She also wants a woman president, 50 women senators, and equal representation of women in corporate and judicial leadership, who will remake work and social life so women like her can have it all.

This plan strikes me as unrealistic. It would require massive social engineering, not to mention rewriting biology. 

I am also stuck on her dismissal of the "having it all, but not at once" plan as "out of fashion." The best researcher in how highly educated women can have it all, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, concluded from her empirical studies that this is the most likely plan to work in the world that actually exists.  In fact, Slaughter reveals in the interview, though not the article, she herself first married in her early twenties to a fellow professional. She then divorced and married again at 35, and only then had children. So her social engineering looks more like special pleading for her own case than a necessity for all elite women.  And there is still that pesky biological clock to work with.

There are some elements of Slaughter's article that I think are very good, especially her critique of the "cult of face-time" in office work.

But on her main points I found her argument wrong-headed and ungrateful for her fantastic opportunities.

Fatherhood Makes Sociologists More Successful

The headline news of a study of women sociologists is that having children does not interfere with having a successful career at a research university.

What struck me about the study by Roberta Spalter-Roth and Nicole Van Vooren, though, is the even larger difference that having kids made to the careers of men.

The study divided these sociology Ph.D.s, measured a decade after getting their degree, into "ideal" careers as tenured professors at research universities, "alternative" careers as tenured professors at teaching colleges, or "marginal" careers as adjunct teachers and the like.

For the fathers, 80% were in either ideal or alternative positions, with only 20% getting by marginally.

For childless men, 41% were in marginal careers.

I see this is further evidence that marriage and fatherhood transforms men from the least productive to the most productive workers.

The Theory of the Creative Class Has Some Holes

Frank Bures is a writer who has been living the creative class life for some time.  He and his wife moved to Portland before it was Portlandia, to Madison because they thought it would be welcoming to cool creatives, and finally back to Minneapolis because they had friends and families and because it was substantial and cool enough.  Writing in the new Twin Cities creative-class magazine thirty two, Bures debunks the idea that cities can spark economic growth by attracting people like him.


Bures assembles the scholarly critiques of Richard Florida's "creative class" theory.  These criticisms are well taken.  The upshot is that smart techies can spark economic growth. But the big investment that some cities have made in drawing smart artists probably does not pay off in economic growth.

Bures is the first to say that the arts are good for life in a city.  But the correlations that Florida touts between having lots of artists and gay people (the most famous part of his formula) and economic growth are not really causal in the way he believes.

Paul Fussell, Author of Class, R.I.P.

Paul Fussell died earlier this year.  He is best known for The Great War and Modern Memory, a study of the effects of World War I on popular and literary sensibility.

For me, though, Fussell is primarily the author of Class. I have taught that book in my "Introduction to Sociology" class for two decades.  I often use it as the closer.  Fussell is mean about the status strivings of every class.  One of the students' possible assignments is to write a class analysis of their family Thanksgiving, an event that often brings people of different classes together on intimate terms.  Students find the book irritating, but also eye-opening. 

I have found that the people who write the most insightful books about the experience of social class are British literary scholars, steeped in English novels of the status struggle to be rated a gentleman, or not.  Fussell, though an American, was officially a scholar of British literature, especially of the 18th century.  His several books on the experience of war came from his own harrowing experience in World War II, but also from his study thereafter of the British war poets of the Great War.

For a teacher, the most helpful parts of Class are the illustrative examples of status markers from the early '80s, when the book was written.  These, inevitably, now seem quite dated to students.  Yet the basic idea remains true: status is not based on things, but on freedom.  And people whose identity is bound up in their things are not free.

I will leave you with one illustration of Fussell's insight about class.  He says the middle class is touchiest about class, sometimes denying that there even are classes in America.  He says the middle classes are most prone to use euphemisms and to avoid pungent words about topics they find embarrassing - such as the concept of class itself.  And this is shown in the short history of his own book.  My edition, an early one, is subtitled A Painfully Accurate Guide Through the American Status System. The edition the students now get, after some years of middle-class de-flavoring, is subtitled An Accurate Guide Through the American Status System.

Teachers are Better Read Than Researchers

Professors at research universities know far more than I do about their subject.  They not only read what they need to know to do their own research, but also what their competitors and fellow workers in the same vineyard are up to. I am grateful for the research they do, which I use all the time. 

But I am better read than the average research professor.  This is not to claim to be smarter, just more widely read.  A family sociologist, for example, will read in family sociology, and maybe a few other of the biggest intellectual books in a year.  I read pretty steadily in family sociology, too, because I teach it every year.  I am just now off to a workshop with leading researchers in the field to hear their latest.

But I also teach a social structure course every year, so keep up with class and status research. And I keep my hand in on the sociology of religion, my first specialty.  And read enough in social theory to teach it regularly.  And the books in "Introduction to Sociology" come from every field I read in.

Lately I have spent a few years learning the field of happiness studies, which draws heavily from psychology, economics, neuroscience, philosophy, and literature, in addition to sociology.

I read widely because I love to, first and foremost.  But also my job of teaching in a liberal arts college creates a structural necessity for me to read widely and keep doing it, year by year, because my students need and expect me to know a wide range of things.

I was thinking of this today due to a blogpost by Cal Newport at Study Hacks on ultralearning, the practice of learning a range of techniques which, in turn, helps you see new solutions to old problems.

Broad reading is not just for teachers.  One of the enduring aims of a liberal arts education is to make each student a broad reader all your days. This is a reason why liberal arts learning it the best preparation for life, #423.

Regnerus' Study Shows that There Are Differences Between Children of Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Parents

Mark Regnerus has published the first results of his New Family Structures Study, the first study to allow comparisons with a representative sample of adults raised by lesbian and gay parents. The controversy is already hot.  Up until now, the conventional wisdom has been that there is no difference between children raised by same-sex couples and those raised by their natural parents. However, that conventional wisdom was based on non-representative samples of same-sex parents - who are pretty rare, and hard to find in even the largest representative surveys.

To get a taste of the differences Regnerus found, each of these comparisons between the young adult children of intact biological families and lesbian-couple families is statistically significant. They show percentages of the children of intact biological families first, then of lesbian couples second:

Currently cohabiting:  9 vs 24
Received welfare growing up: 17 vs 69
Currently on welfare: 10 vs 38
Currently employed full time: 49 vs 26
Currently unemployed: 8 vs 28
Voted in last presidential election: 57 vs 41
Identifies as entirely heterosexual: 90 vs 61
Had an affair while married/cohabiting: 13 vs 40
Ever touched sexually by a parent or other adult (as a child): 2 vs 23
Ever forced to have sex against your will: 8 vs 31

Clearly, there are some differences between the children of lesbian couples and of intact biological families.  What exactly causes those differences will be the subject of much further debate.

I was struck though, by the next comparison in the table: between the children of intact biological families and gay-couple parents. Here are all the statistically significant differences:

Received welfare growing up: 17 vs 57

And that is it.

What might account for the difference between lesbian-parent effects and gay-parent effects? This is a complex question, not answerable from this evidence.  But I have a hunch: involved fathers.

Liza Mundy 3: Women Don't Want to Be Breadwinners, but They Can Adapt

In The Richer Sex, Mundy starts with the fact that 37.7% of husbands right now earn less than their wives.  Late in the book she allows that only 3.3% of husbands have no earnings, are home with minor children, and have wives with jobs.  This book is not really about "breadwomen" - wives who are the sole or even predominant earners in their families. It is about two-earning couples in which, at least for a time, she earns more.

Mundy found, as others have before, that it is harder for wives to respect lower-earning husbands than it is for husbands to respect lower-earning wives.  But Mundy also offers this helpful nuance:  "If there's anything that every woman I interviewed can't stand, it's a partner who seems to be standing still." This makes sense to me. And this may be the main lesson to take from the book:

Wives outearning husbands is not a problem, any more than husbands outearning wives is. What both husbands and wives want is a partner who pulls his or her weight in the family, and who is ambitious to do it better.

Liza Mundy 2: Avoiding Social Comparison With Your Spouse

The most interesting part of The Richer Sex for me was Mundy's discussion of social comparison.  We want those we love to do well, but we would like them to do it in a field that is not in direct competition with our own.  As women and men increasingly have the same levels of education and are entering the same fields, the opportunities for husband and wife do be doing exactly the same kind of work increases.  It is all but inevitable that we will make comparisons with people doing just what we do.  This makes the possibility of invidious marital comparison rear its ugly head.

This got me thinking about the ways in which couples specialize, at work and at home, in ways that take them out of direct comparison with one another.  Even couples who collaborate in their professional work usually divide the labor.  And I have known many married people who let some interests drop that might put them in direct competition with their spouses. 

Mrs. G. and I, for example, used to both work in the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and were very knowledgeable about education policy when we first came to Kentucky.  Other things equal, it would have made sense for me to teach sociology of education, and to become involved in Kentucky's nation-leading education reforms.  However, as my wife developed a career in education policy, I found that it made more sense to develop other intellectual interests, while fully following and bolstering her career as a supportive spouse.  And she has done the same with my professional interests - fully supportive and a good sounding board, but not a worker in the same vineyard.

In fact, she realized early on that we should not play competitive games against one another. I think this is a very wise policy.

Mundy reports the many ways that high-earning women subtly avoid professional competition with their spouses. I recommend that couples talk about this issue directly, and make explicit policy for the good of the marriage to avoid the occasion for invidious social comparison.

Just as a couple can meta-communicate about which communication style they should use in a given situation, they can meta-communicate about how they can work together without competing with one another.

Liza Mundy 1: The Coming "Breadwomen"

Liza Mundy, in The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, notes the rising trend of wives outearning their husbands. She foresees a day soon when a majority of wives will be the main earners in their families - what she calls "breadwomen."

Her core facts are these:

• 37.7% of wives with any earnings at all make more than their husbands (2009, Bureau of Labor Statistics).
• Women now hold 51% of managerial and professional jobs.
• Women are better represented in 9 of the 10 job categories most likely to grow in the next decade. 

Mundy does outrun her data a bit.  The recent rise from 20-something percent of wives outearning their husbands to 30-something percent may be a temporary effect of the "mancession" of 2008 - 09, in which men disproportionately lost their jobs.  And "nearly 40%" is not the same as "the new majority," as her subtitle claims.

Moreover, women who make only a little more than their husbands are not quite what we usually mean by "breadwinners" (and of the course same is true with the sexes reversed). 

Mundy's best observation is that women having been doing better than men in school for a generation, which comes just at the time when our economy is increasingly knowledge-based.  This should give the average woman a growing advantage in both actual knowledge and in credentials over the average man.

I think the main phenomenon that Mundy's facts reveal is that as wives match or better their husbands' educational credentials and career aspirations, their earnings are more equal. Usually he earns a bit more, sometimes she does. This means that in many couples, neither is really the breadwinner, but together they support their family in roughly equal measure.

Marilynne Robinson Week 7 (and last): A High Estimate of Human Nature

In Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale in which she attacks the "parascience" of Freud, sociobiology, and the new atheists, she declares her form of high-toned Calvinism:

I should declare at the outset my own bias. I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

I heartily agree.

Marilynne Robinson Week 6: Family Life as Loyalty

In her essay "Family" in The Death of Adam, Robinson offers that the core bond of family life is a feeling of loyalty and identity.  And if we start our experience of family life with a feeling of loyalty, then we are saved from the degradation of measuring whether our loyalty is deserved.

As I noted in previous posts, Robinson is arguing against a culture of fear.

How are loyalty and fighting fear connected?

“The antidote to fear, distrust, self-interest is always loyalty.  The balm for failure or weakness, or even for disloyalty, is always loyalty.”

Marilynne Robinson Week 5: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion is Suspect

Robinson, throughout The Death of Adam but especially in the essay on "Darwinism," is critical of the whole school of modern thought which believes that under the social and collaborative surface of life there is a deeper reality of selfishness and competition.  This is what Ricoeur called the "hermeneutics of suspicion," a wonderful comprehensive banner.  Robinson has in mind Darwin's own social thought, especially as he drew from Herbert Spencer.  She also includes Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and most of economics in her indictment. They promote a social theory of fear, about which Robinson writes eloquently.

The social theory of fear, selfishness, and competition pictures our current world as if we were consumed with a desperate struggle for survival.  Yet the actual experience of most Americans is freedom from mere survival, and the freedom to enjoy the fruits of civilization. Robinson writes:

All the forms in which this freedom has been celebrated, all the arts and sciences and philanthropies, are only possible because civilization is intrinsically sociable and collaborative.

 

Marilynne Robinson Week 4: Against Fear

In her essay "Facing Reality" in the collection The Death of Adam, Robinson argues that what we take to be reality is a collective fiction, resting on faith just as much as any other understanding of history does.

She argues that the dominant construction of reality in our culture today is based on fear.  Robinson then offers this powerful critique:

When they make fear the key to interpretation of history and experience, as they do so often, as ours does now, nothing contains a greater potential for releasing all the varieties of destruction.  Fearfulness assumes a hidden narrative – that we are all ill despite our health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse.

I see this again and again as I talk about happiness.  Most of the people I talk to are, on the whole, happy.  They know that their lives are full of good things, along with some bad.  When pressed, they concede that our social order actually has many excellent features. But, they say, this could only be temporary.  It could all go away.

"We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind."

The Creator called the world good. To me, to Marilynne Robinson, that is a good reason not to make fear the key to the interpretation of history. 

Marilynne Robinson Week 3: Home is a Superb Novel

Marilynne Robinson's Home is the counterpart to her Gilead - the same events, told from a different perspective.  Gilead centers on an old Congregationalist minister in a small town in Iowa.  Home centers on his best friend, the old Presbyterian minister in the same town. The action turns on the return of the prodigal son of the Presbyterian minister, who is named for the Congregationalist minister.

The father has a strong faith in the sufficiency of grace, which is tested to the limits by the helpless self-destructiveness of the son.  And the son yearns for home, for his father and sister and namesake, for faith itself. Their serious problems are not resolved fully.

But I spoil nothing to say that the sister, Glory, concludes the tale with "The Lord is wonderful."

Marilynne Robinson Week 2: Gilead is a Beautiful, Wise Book

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a fine piece of wisdom. An old Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town sees the glory and wonder that God made in the world.  He has plenty of misery and heartache to see, too.  But his gratitude for the glory and wonder shines through.

This is a blessing.

Same-Sex Marriage is Good Enough for the State (Which is Not the Same as the Church)

I recently wrote about the evolution of President Obama's position on same-sex marriage. Not surprisingly, this drew some critical comment. In particular, there were challenges to my suggestion that enshrining religious grounds for making civil law was dangerous for religious institutions. I was asked to clarify the evolution of my own thought on this issue.

Marriage has a vital public role in the good order of society.  I believe that role is primarily about raising children in as good an environment as possible.  Marriage is also the main institution in which real people (not corporations) save assets and transmit them to their posterity.

As a social institution, a child's two natural parents, married to one another, is the first best option. Other options - single parents, adoption, same-sex couples, widows, orphanages - can produce good-enough results, and are certainly better than not raising children at all.

To say that one social institution is better than another is not to say that each individual example of the former is better than each individual example of the latter. And it certainly does not mean that one is all good and all alternatives are bad.

The state has always supported marriage for the parents of children because every other institution for raising children is more costly, less efficient, and less effective for producing citizens.

The Christian church, meanwhile, has not always supported marriage of any kind, but only came to support marriage grudgingly.

The sanctification of marriage in civil religion is more recent still. The recent constitutional amendment condemning all extramarital sexual relations is an example of this kind of civil religion.

For the state to include same-sex couples as married, especially for purposes of raising children, is a decision like that of accepting cohabiting couples or adoptive parents as good-enough.  This decision, though, is only with reference to what the state needs from a child-rearing institution.

I think the Bible clearly condemns homosexual practice as a sin. But it condemns divorce even more strongly and clearly.  Both church and state have made their peace with divorce as a good-enough state, even without embracing it wholly.  I believe the church can do the same with homosexual practice. 

The state can normalize homosexual practice because it does not have a very good reason not to. That is a good rule of thumb for any state in a free society. And the state may prudently judge that children would be raised and assets would be saved and transmitted well enough by same-sex couples to normalize same-sex marriages.

That prudential judgment is the one the President Obama has made. I concur.

More Good News from Burma: An Ambassador

Burma is slowly heading away from the bizarre military dictatorship they have suffered under for decades, and toward democracy.

Secretary of State Clinton announced today that, as a result of these improvements, the United States will be reducing some long-standing sanctions.

And for the first time in 22 years, we will appoint an ambassador to Burma.

I hope that will not have to wait more than a year to see President Aung San Suu Kyi welcome the President of the United States to a fully democratic Burma.

A Consumer-Oriented Research Methods Class?

I am contemplating a heresy is sociology teaching: a "Research Methods" class aimed at educating consumers, rather than producers, of sociological research.

(I mean, of course, consumers of research - people who read statistics in the newspapers, for example - not consumers of commodities.)

This fall I will be teaching "Research Methods" for the first time.  I have been able to avoid this task for so long because my excellent colleague has borne that duty.  Alas, she is moving on.

I have always been skeptical of a free-standing methods class.  Looking at methods textbooks and beginning statistics texts confirms my sense that studying methods at a distance from a real problem that you are researching is impossibly dry.

On the other hand, I am a firm believer that half the job of teaching is helping students become culturally literate about what they should already know, and discerning consumers of what new knowledge they meet in the future.

So I have been thinking about teaching "Research Methods" aimed primarily at understanding the research that others have done and are trying to persuade us with.  This applies to classic studies as well as to the avalanche of election statistics flowing over us.

We would, of course, do some actual number crunching to get the hang of it.  I am thinking of giving each student a year of the General Social Survey to answer questions with.

But I would welcome your help in thinking about what a consumer-oriented research methods class would look like.

Marilynne Robinson Week 1: Housekeeping

This week I am reading the works of Marilynne Robinson.

Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), takes her central character, a young teenager named Ruth, to the physical and emotional edge of civilization. Her parents disappear and she and her sister go to live with their grandmother in a tiny lumber town on a huge lake in Idaho. When grandma dies, their not-quite-of-this-world aunt comes to care of them.

Ruth and Aunt Sylvia start loosely connected to the world. They attempt housekeeping as a normal connection with the world. This proves harder and harder. I won't say more about the plot.

I am reading Robinson as a serious Christian author.  She does have some deep comments about perceiving reality.

Still, do novels have to be about unhappy people in peculiar situations?

Evolution on Gay Marriage

President Obama completed what he described as the evolution of his position on same-sex marriage.  He has long supported civil rights for homosexuals.  In the 2008 election he supported civil unions as the state equivalent of marriage, reserving the term "marriage" for religious unions.

This has been my position, too.

However, I also see that it is hard for most people to hold on to a living sense of the difference between the law of the state and the order of the church.  Ironically, it is Southern Baptists who seem to have the hardest time with this distinction - even though when they were a sect being persecuted by the state church, Baptists pioneered the church/state wall.  In the recent North Carolina vote outlawing all non-marital sexual unions, the victors said that the Bible recognizes only a marriage of a man and a woman, and therefore the state of North Carolina should do the same.  They didn't even know they were overthrowing the church/state wall that they themselves had promoted to protect the church.

I think President Obama had a genuine change of heart sometime in the past few months, as he said.  But I also think the timing of President Obama's announcement of his support for same-sex marriage was affected by the North Carolina vote.  It has been clear for some time that the constitutional amendment was going to pass. This outcome would not have changed if he had announced his support of same-sex marriage before the vote.   But I also think the recent series of the statements supporting same-sex marriage by Vice President Biden and other cabinet officers was part of a planned roll-out of the president's new position. 

I think the success of legal gay marriage all over the United States is now inevitable.  I think the pace will be quick in half the country, slow in the other half - that is, in my half. But the demographic writing is on the wall - the younger generation not only supports same-sex marriage, they don't understand why the old people are against it.  And this is true of young Republicans, even young religious Republicans, just as it is of most young people.

The Tea Party Kills the American Community Survey

This is a sad day for sociology. 

The American Community Survey, the essential survey conducted by the Census Bureau between decennial censuses, has been killed in the House of Representatives. The bill's sponsor, Tea Party congressman Daniel Webster, believes that making an economic and demographic portrait of the country is an invasion of privacy.

The ACS collects data required by several federal statutes, and is hugely valuable to American businesses.  The Census Bureau has also said that eliminating the ACS will make the next census more expensive.

I have often noted the parallels between the current Tea Party movement and the Know-Nothing Party of the pre-Civil War days.  This time the "know nothing" label is more literally true.

The Loss of Lugar is a Sad Day for Centrism

Richard Lugar was one of the real statesmen of the U.S. Senate.  One of the measures of his statesmanship was his ability to compromise and work with Democrats.

The Tea Party candidate, Richard Mourdock, who beat Sen. Lugar in the Republican primary yesterday is against compromise.

I think if you are against compromise in principle, you have no business serving in a legislature.

I am glad that the country got the Lugar-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and put the former U.S.S.R.'s nuclear weapons under greater security.  You can bet that if Mr. Mourdock had been in that seat in 2007, there would have been no Mourdock-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative.

Small Businesses Need Help With Regulations More Than With Taxes

Sanders Daniel, a reader of the blog, sent me the results of a survey of small-business owners that his company, Thumbtack.com, did across the country.

The most interesting main finding, I thought, is this:

Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.

This confirms something that my small business friends say - tax cuts will make no difference in whether they create jobs.  Tax cuts are really the hobby horse of rich individuals, not of actual job creators.

The Thumbtack.com survey also found that what helped businesses think that a state was friendly to them, and made them feel optimistic about the future, was if the state provided training in how to meet its regulations.  The government service of regulations - which benefits consumers, but is a pain to business owners - can be aided by the further government service of training owners in how to meet and manage the regulations.

And on training, alas, Kentucky rates a grade of F. 

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.