Why Dropouts Were Not a Problem a Century Ago

A century ago so few people graduated from high school, or even elementary school, that what was measured was how much schooling they had, not how much schooling they did not have.

Today we have the luxury of conceiving of "dropping out" as a problem because most people get so much more schooling - and better schooling - than they used to. This is a huge improvement that we take for granted.

The positive way to see the same facts is that we have a very high high school graduation rate today, compared to the past. And it is getting higher.

Is There an American Trollope?

Anthony Trollope is my favorite novelist. I enjoy his Barsetshire novels very much. I am now working through his Parliamentary novels in sequence.

Which led to this question: Which novelist is the American Trollope?

I put this question to my colleagues in American literature, asking for their gut reaction. Their responses are helpful and fascinating, though not quite the answer I was hoping for. The first wrote:

Gut reaction: We don’t have a Trollope.

I assume you mean writes about family and community life from a generally optimistic perspective. The first name that comes to mind is Howells, but even in him there’s more darkness than there is in the Trollope I’ve read.

Yes, that is exactly what I was looking for, though I did not know that until my friend put it that way.

Well, I was going to give you Updike, but I’m sure you’ve read the Rabbit books. His life deteriorates—his family’s full of dysfunction. You could try Harold Fredericks’ The Damnation of Theron Ware (Updike rewrote it for his In the Beauty of the Lilies), but that’s (not surprisingly) about disintegration too. Do try Howells: if you haven’t read The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Hazard of New Fortunes, you should—you’d appreciate, if not necessarily like, them.

There are more contemporary social realists who love their characters too much to let them come to any real harm.

I have tried William Dean Howells' The Hazard of New Fortunes, which I found rather stuffy (and I like Victorian novels) - I will give it another go.

A second colleague offered this theory of why there is no American Trollope:

Our rather different culture doesn’t have a Trollope—or an Austen, for that matter. Which is exactly why I usually listen to either of these (right now, I’m in the middle of Emma) whenever I’m in the car alone. Both are so wonderfully sane and intelligent and basically comic in outlook, comedy always having to do with community. We’re too goddamned individualistic. No Brit could ever have written “Self-Reliance” or “Huck Finn.”

Our best stuff is darker, more philosophical, and more profound than Trollope or Austen were capable of. America is a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live here.

I do appreciate Trollope for his optimistic comic sanity. As a sociologist I am especially drawn to his portrayal of social types as they interact, which he does with remarkable even-handedness. I think an American novelist could write in all of those ways. Optimism is a famous American trait. Comic and sane writing about family and community should be within any culture's reach.

I am halted, though, by the idea that American individualism really does make it hard to write about social types within the stable social institutions of Trollope's world.

What I am wrestling with now is whether American social structures have always been so fluid that a Trollope could not have set his eternal dramas of marriage and status in them, or if this fluidity is something that afflicts all late-modern or post-modern societies.

A Happy Convergence of William James and G.K. Chesterton

I am reading William James' Pragmatism. I am hoping that it will be a good philosophical text to teach in conjunction with the current empirical work that shows that the practical lives of most populations are, in fact, improving.

In this connection I also recently read G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World. Chesterton and James were contemporaries, but I had not previously thought of them as conversation partners with one another. Yet James quotes Chesterton approvingly at the opening of this book to the effect that the most important thing to know about someone is his philosophy.

The point of James' pragmatism is that all we can know of truth is what kind of practical action it leads to. He says that pragmatism is a method, and is not wedded to any particular conclusions about what will prove practical. In making this claim, he reviews the argument between materialism and idealism or spiritualism. What impressed me in this argument is how much William James sounds like G.K. Chesterton, both in his tone and in his conclusions, to wit:

A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.

The Most Trusting Kids Are From the Middle

David Sloan Wilson ran a "cooperation" game with public school students in Binghamton, NY, as reported in The Neighborhood Project. This game paired kids, and set up the rules such that they would each benefit the most if they cooperated - if the first kid trustingly gave more, and the second kid proved trustworthy and gave more back.

He found that the richest kids and the poorest kids were the least trusting. The most trusting kids were from middle income neighborhoods that gave their children high levels of social support.

Penny-wise and Pound Foolish

Some family humor from the wonderful xkcd (click the picture to see the full image).

David Sloan Wilson's Curious Theological Claims

David Sloan Wilson is a successful popularizer of Darwinism in such books as Evolution for Everyone and Darwin's Cathedral. In his new book, The Neighborhood Project, he offers some surprisingly uncompromising theological claims for an avowed atheist. He writes:

An omniscient God would have created the different kinds of hymenopterans in a single stroke, but evolution exhibits a property that in technical jargon is called path dependence and in more familiar terms could be called you can’t always get there from here.

The second part of this claim is entailed by the Darwinian position. They believe that evolution shows no progress, and is not developing toward any teleological end, but is simply a series of adaptations to local conditions.

The first claim, though, is the one that caught my eye. Wilson simply asserts that a creator would have created all the varieties of creatures at once. This lets him show that some variants (in this case, of insects) seem to have developed later than others, thus disproving creation and proving evolution.

Wilson's victory, though, is over a straw man. The vast majority of Americans believe that God created the universe. Yet very few would claim that all of the kinds of creatures were created at the same time. The Bible tells the story as successive days of creating one kind of thing after another, whether you read those days at ages or as twenty-four-hour periods. The most hard-core Young Earth creationists allow for all extensive micro-evolution within the various "kinds" that the Bible notes. Mainline Christians believe in a longer and more intertwined form of evolution, most accepting at least the main points of the Darwinian theory.

The creationist majority differs from the secular minority over whether evolution is guided by God, and whether it is going someplace.

That is the argument that Wilson needs to address.

Happy Calvinism

Regular reader Ceemac posted this question:

Do you think it is in the DNA of Calvinists to be disgruntled? After all we have a commitment to always be working to reform church and culture. So we are inclined to look at a situation and focus on what needs to be fixed and not what is working.

I do think that a worldview that began with protest and reform does tend to emphasize the negative. Nonetheless, the core of the scripture that Calvinists confess is that God created the world and called it good, and Christ ultimately triumphs over sin. The basic message of Christianity from beginning to end is pretty positive, and Calvinists embrace that message.

I think one of the reasons the Calvinists tend to be so critical is that we find it exasperating that other worldviews do not see the good order God made in the world. Calvinists are stewards of the world in order to work with and bring out the good order that the sovereign God made.

I have toyed with the idea of writing The Happy Calvinist. That happiness is chastened by the knowledge of sin and the Fall, but nonetheless remains cheerful knowing that God triumphs, first and last.

Rick Perry is Who George W. Bush Was Trying to Be

I thought from the moment that Rick Perry mused that Texas might secede from the Union (again) that he was going to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. I still think so.

George W. Bush was a good-old-boy in the making from a small town in Texas. Then they sent him off, against his will, to the fancy prep school and university that his northeastern blue-blood family traditionally attended. He didn't like either one, spending his real energy on social life and cheerleading. He even got a further degree from another fancy northeastern school. He was a military pilot, but mostly to avoid the war. But as I read his history, George W. Bush never really came into his own until he got to be head cheerleader again for a sports team. That job used his best, Texas-honed sales skills. His Texas Methodist wife finally helped him straighten out, dry up, find Jesus, and become a stand-up guy. He was always a political amateur, but he caught the eye of a political professional, Karl Rove, who recruited the money and borrowed other professional politicians from Bush, Sr.'s shop.

Rick Perry was a good-old-boy in the making from a small town in Texas. Except his Texas roots went back generations, proletarian and petite bourgeois all the way. He went to the local high school, was an Eagle Scout, married a Texas Methodist who was his elementary school sweetheart. He then went to an iconic Texas school, where he majored in social life and cheerleading. He became a military pilot, but for real. His real education, as he tells it, came from his boss when Perry was a door-to-door salesman. Perry was a serious and competent Democratic politician, supporting Al Gore for president and backing Bill Clinton's health care plan. Perry switched parties when the opportunities were better, and drew the attention of Karl Rove. When Perry and Rove fell out, Rove picked up George W. Bush.

George W. Bush represented what the activated part of the Republican Party wanted, but in him it was an overlay that went against most of his training. Rick Perry, on the other hand, really is a white Christian businessman who supports government spending for people and interests like his, but is suspicious of government spending for others. And he is a competent politician who can learn enough about government to make just-in-time executive decisions.

I think Gov. Perry will give the Republican base a chance to try to replay the Bush administration, only this time make it come out better.

On Vacation

Chesterton Is Wise About What is Wrong With the World

I am treating myself to a dose of G.K. Chesterton, who I always find insightful and funny. Today I am finishing What's Wrong With the World, which begins with a fine slam on sociology:

A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.

The "definition and dignity of man" is really what the book is about, offering a stout defense of human beings against social schemes of left and right to make (poor) people adjust to some new order of the world.

Chesterton is a very healthy minded thinker, especially after his conversion to Christianity. He ends his introductory chapter with this wonderfully gruntled declaration:

I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

Black Women's Marriage Rate of 75% Is Good News

About 75% of black women have married by 35. This is a higher marriage rate than is often reported, which is pretty good news.

For comparison, about 87% of white women have married by 40 (the closest comparison I have, which will not be way off the "by 35" rate).

The black divorce rate is higher than the white rate, so the long-term marriage gap is wider than these ever-married figures suggest.

Still the black marriage picture is better than the 58% rate one often reads. Ivory Toldson and Bryant Marks, the researchers responsible for these new numbers, note that black women marry later, on average, than white women do, so a comparison of marriage rates for younger women makes the gap look larger than it eventually will be.

"Last-Place Aversion" Drives Welfare Haters

The most conservative class is normally the petite bourgeoisie. Not the top, not the bottom, but one up from the bottom. The lower-middles are especially opposed to benefits for the bottom class - even if it means giving massive breaks to the rich.

The Economist cites new research on this puzzle. It is not that Joe the Plumber('s assistant) really expects to be in the top tax bracket someday that makes him oppose raising taxes on the rich. It is because he doesn't want there to be any money redistributed to the class below him, which might raise them up to his level.

"Last-place aversion," more than rich envy, makes the petite bourgeoisie so passionately opposed to welfare.

The Gruntleds' TV Choices Show Our Centrism

Which of these shows, if any, do you watch?

Desperate Housewives
The Mentalist
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
CSI:Miami
NCIS
Criminal Minds

According to the YouGov/Polimetrix poll, Democrats and Republicans differ significantly in their preferences among these shows.

Republicans favor NCIS and Criminal Minds.
Democrats favor Desperate Housewives and The Mentalist.

This confirmed to the Gruntleds our centrist credentials: we are Democrats who watch NCIS and Criminal Minds regularly, but Desperate Housewives and The Mentalist not at all.

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth 2

Eric Kaufmann, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? notes that secularism's growth has come mostly at the expense of liberalized versions of traditional faith which tried to accommodate secular thought. Fundamentalism is actually a modern movement, using modern means of thinking about religious "facts," which fights secularism directly. Kaufmann offers a striking metaphor for the ecology of modern secular vs. religion fights:

“Secularism, like DDT, wiped out much of its opposition but also gave rise to new, resistant strains of religion.”

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth 1

Eric Kaufmann, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, explores what he calls the "soft underbelly of secularism: demography." Secularism has been growing in all developed nations, and there are secularized pockets among the educated in all countries. Northern Europe, especially, has gone a long way down to the road to irreligion. Since the Enlightenment began, intellectuals, both secular and religious, have been predicting the decline and disappearance of religion.

Kaufmann points out, though, that even in the most secularized society, secular people do not have enough children to replace themselves. In most societies, the moderate or mainline religious groups also have sub-replacement fertility. On the other hand, fundamentalists in every religious tradition have enough children to grow - some of them by gigantic accumulating rates.

Moreover, secularity grows by conversion, mostly from the slightly or moderately religious. The strongly religious, by contrast, typically build strong religious communities to go with their firm faith, which helps them retain their children.

The numbers from American Protestants can represent those from other countries and religious traditions. For a population to be stable and replace itself, each fertile woman needs to have, on average, 2.1 children. This is the magic number of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). The TFR of secular and Protestant Americans:
Secular: 1.5
Moderate Protestant: 2.0
Conservative Protestant: 2.5

Kaufmann predicts that secularists will continue to grow as a proportion of the U.S. population to mid-century. Then, though, the higher fertility and higher retention of religious conservatives (not all of them Protestants, of course) will catch up and become a larger and larger portion of the American population.

Tocqueville: Liberty Over Equality in the Happy Society

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

I chose Tocqueville with an eye to including his great work in the course on "The Happy Society" that I am developing. We would read it after Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. Aristotle says happiness is the end of human life. Mill says that society should be organized to promote the greatest collective pleasure. Both Aristotle and Mill think that some pleasures are higher than others.

Tocqueville does not say that happiness is the end of human life. He does not say that happiness is the end of social life. So why is this text useful for “The Happy Society”? Tocqueville argues that Americans have a passion for equality. They value it highly. Its rewards are immediate. They had a revolution to get equality and defend the social arrangements that make it possible. Equality is at least the analogue of what Aristotle and the utilitarians say happiness means to people.

Tocqueville’s concern does not end with equality, but is even more interested in liberty. He shows how Americans promote equal liberty – equality as the basis for each individual to have a fair chance to exercise liberty. Yet Tocqueville believes that the masses tend to value equality too much – even to the point of sacrificing liberty to keep equality. Only the enlightened and far-seeing appreciate the true value of liberty as the more precious of the two core values of modernity. I read Tocqueville as saying that liberty is a higher pleasure than equality. This is at least analogous to Mill’s argument about higher and lower pleasures. It may also be analogous to Aristotle’s contention that contemplation is a higher happiness than action.

Tocqueville: The Social Theory God Wants, Not What I Want

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville the liberty-loving aristocrat works very hard to appreciate the value of equality. Throughout the book he makes the claim that democracy is a better form of social organization than aristocracy because democracy reduces many great harms for the mass of people, even at the cost of limiting some of the excellences achieved by the best.

At the end of the book he raises the stakes for this argument, by arguing that God favors equality.

“It is natural to believe that what is most satisfying to the eye of man’s creator and keeper is not the singular prosperity of a few but the greater well-being of all: what seems decadence to me is therefore progress in his eyes; what pains me pleases him. Equality is less lofty, perhaps, but more just, and its justice is the source of its grandeur and beauty.”

The spectacle of Tocqueville wrestling to subordinate his class prejudice to his theological conviction is a fine example of the distinctive virtues of a religious social theory.

Tocqueville: Who Wants War in a Democratic Society?

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that aristocratic societies glorify war and disparage greed. Democratic societies disparage war, but glorify ambition. The danger for democratic societies is that their armies do seek, if not glorify, war. Armies in democratic societies are prone to coups if not given an external enemy to fight.

In the United States we have a very professional military, not at all likely to stage a coup due to inaction. This is due, in part, to the fact that they are frequently engaged in wars - we have two and a half going at the moment. When we do have peace, our military is not likely to agitate for war.

So if business in a democracy is against war because it is bad for business, and our military is not eager for war since they get tested enough, in what structural location in our society would we expect to find promoters of war? Military contractors. And if military contractors should become disproportionately influential in any particular party or administration - perhaps through a revolving door that put, say, a defense secretary in charge of a large military contractor, and then back into government as de facto head of warmaking - we might expect that kind of government to start more voluntary wars.

Tocqueville: Taking Domestic Liberty Through War Powers

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that democracy calls for a new kind of political science. He rarely talks about that science directly in the rest of the book - except for this point:

“All who seek to destroy liberty in a democratic nation should know that war offers them the surest and shortest route to success. This is the first axiom of science.”

I think the truth of this point has been shown many times, most recently by the massive expansion of the government's power to spy on American citizens that was instituted by a "small-government conservative" administration as part of the "war on terror."

As interesting, though, is that Tocqueville's one direct reference to making a new political science in Democracy in America is to how to scientifically destroy liberty.

Tocqueville: God vs. Gold as Guarantors of Value

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that the American conception of democracy (in his day, anyway) rested on a widespread belief that God is the guarantor of the trust and commitments that a democratic people make to one another. He thought that, from society's perspective, the particulars of religion did not matter so much as the fact that nearly all believed.

In other words, democracy depends on something outside of democracy itself, some source of fixed and absolute value.

It strikes me that this is what "goldbugs" think the gold standard does for money. They think gold is something that stands outside of the money system, some source of fixed and absolute value.

Except that God really does have the capacity to guarantee the value of a society's values. Gold, on the other hand, has no intrinsic and absolute value. The only "value" that gold has comes from the money system itself.