Turkey 1: Istiklal Avenue

I spent two weeks in Turkey with the Brown Fellows, Centre College scholarship students.

Istiklal Avenue is the main shopping street of the European side of Istanbul.  I will start my reflections on Turkey with a few light scenes from the street, suitable for a Saturday post.

Taksim Square, at the head of the street, is the main staging area for protests.  This one was against cheating on the university placement examinations on behalf of members of the ruling party.  Protests are so common here that riot police are permanently stationed on the square.

English is the second language of Turkey, especially in commercial areas. While American culture was not evident everywhere, I was impressed that the NBA was such a world brand that it could be displayed without any further explanation.

And the first item? A pet food ad that loses a little in translation to English. :-)

Marriage and Children Make People Happier Than Work Does

"Marriage and Children Make People Less Happy at Work."  So reads the headline reporting a new study of 10,000 Britons by Kingston University Business School.

The main finding is that when people get married or have kids, they are less happy with their jobs.  This is especially true of women.

Or in other words, getting married and having kids makes people happy, especially women. This tends to make other aspects of life, including work, pale by comparison.

I am not surprised that a business school puts the work effect first.  But I think most people put the family effect first.

Cohabitation Makes It Hard to Break Up, Even When You Should

Scott Stanley, one of the great scholars of marriage vs. cohabitation, reports, as other have, that people who cohabit before marriage are about one-and-a-half times more likely to divorce than are people who do not cohabit before marriage.

At the recent Schreyer Seminar he offered this account of why: cohabitors are more likely to marry someone they would not otherwise marry just because they are already living together.  At a certain point, it becomes easier to marry than to break up.

Marry at 25

The median age of marriage in the USA is older than as it ever has been - 26+ for women, 28+ for men.  But the age of coupling - including cohabitation with children - seems to be about the same as it has always been - when you are done school and beginning adult life.  When that is varies by class - about 19 or 20 for the less educated majority, and about 23 or 24 for the more educated minority.

Young people seem to be putting off marriage because they think that they need to be fully ready for adult life first.  I think this is an impossible ideal.  Moreover, it shows a misunderstanding of one of the foundations of a strong marriage: our commitment to each other, and to the institution of marriage, helps us become adults together.

At the same time, research on marital satisfaction shows that the happiest marriages tend to come from couples who marry in their mid-20s.  And this is also the age that most young people and most parents of young people regard as the most desirable age for marriage. 

Life leads to many compromises with our abstract ideals, of course, and most of the time these compromises work out.

Nonetheless, I am led to a radical idea for a social norm: plan to marry at 25 (give or take a year). This allows most people to make a good start at adult life, without setting an impossibly high ideal for being "ready."

Your mileage may vary, of course.  But I believe that planning to marry at 25 would be a good norm for most people to plan around.

Justice Roberts' Decision in the Health Care Case is a Triumph for Centrism

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the conservatives that the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause are not a sufficient foundation for the individual mandate in the universal healthcare law.  He agreed with the liberals, though, that the mandate could stand, because it is not really a mandate but an exercise of Congress' taxing power.

Some see this as an incoherent position, or some kind of sellout.  I disagree.  I think the Chief Justice has forged an important centrist position. 

In fact, I think he may be finding his way to be the leader of the middle of the court, so that the Supreme Court is more than just a battle of left vs. right.  He has said that he wants to see - to create - more unanimous decisions, and fewer of the horrible 5-4 slugfests that we have seen in recent years.  I wish him very well in that quest.

Hymowitz is Right About Young Adults Not Understanding What Marriage Does - But Did They Ever?

Kay Hymowitz' new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, argues that young men and women are delaying marriage so much these days because they see it as something you do when you are already an adult. Now, young people who plan ahead try to get all their education done and their careers started before they marry and have children. For many women, this means they wait too long for kids.  Men do not have the same timeline, so the mismatch between the sexes creates the problem Hymowitz is writing about. There is, she argues, no certain script for adulthood, which leaves "emergent adults" emerging (or floundering) for a long time.

I think this is true - which raises an important question about the past.

Prior generations found marriage to be a formative institution of maturity.  You got married, then you figured out together how to be adults, especially when the first child came along. The script of adulthood often began with early marriage, with or without pregnancy, with growing maturity to follow.

The question I put to her at a recent seminar was this: did past generations understand marriage to be something that forms you into an adult, or did they just get married as part of the script, and then find out how formative marriage is through experience?

Hymowitz didn't know, and neither do I.  I put this question to you, blog friends, for your thoughts.

Corporate Coup at the University of Virginia Turned Back: Sociologist Reinstated as President.

Good news for higher education in general, and sociologists in particular.

Blankenhorn Evolves to a Centrist Position on Same-Sex Marriage

David Blankenhorn, the head of the Institute for American Values, is an important advocate for marriage and for responsible fatherhood.  Recently he has become a noted opponent of same-sex marriage, especially during the Proposition 8 debate in California.

This week he changed his position, coming out in support of same-sex marriage. He has not changed his views that, on the whole, children do best when raised by their married natural parents. But he now says that "the equal dignity of homosexual love" is also an important social principle. The children raised by same-sex couples would be better off if their parents were married, and therefore social policy should be changed to make it possible for same-sex parents to marry.

I believe Blankenhorn's evolution to a centrist position on same-sex marriage is commendable.

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.