If the National Marriage Project told you it was going to rain, would you bring an umbrella?

Why do academics and journalists lend legitimacy to the National Marriage Project?

The Centers for Disease Control: You bought that.

I today’s New York Times Week in Review, Andrew Cherlin offers this:

Having a child outside of marriage has also become common. According to a report by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, 47 percent of American women who give birth in their 20s are unmarried at the time.

It took me 3 minutes to find the the 2010 report on birth data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control, and another 1/2 minute to locate the table with this information, which is table 15. Because of my weakness in algebra, it took me another 5 minutes to turn the number of babies born to unmarried women in the age range 20-24 (600,833) and in the age range 25-29 (384,865) and the percent unmarried that those represented (63.1% and 33.9%, respectively), into the total births to women in their 20s (2,087,487) and the percentage of all those to unmarried women (47.2%).

The New York Times paid for that statistic through taxes, which its government has provided. So why publish an essay by a sociologist with a named chair crediting the National Marriage Project, a right-wing front run by the discredited Brad Wilcox on behalf of big-money Christian conservatives? (In other news, the Heritage Foundation reported that the unemployment rate in February was 7.7%).

Maybe the media establishment simply doesn’t know a simple government statistic when they see one. But they see the university label and fancy website, and guy with the (implied) elbow patches, and they think the number is more complicated than it looks. Rather than hire a qualified unpaid intern to check facts and credit them to their actual sources, maybe they just trust the experts they rely on. (This is the David Brooks strategy.)

With resources for journalism and social science research on the decline, and foundation money playing a growing role in providing information to the media, this is predictable – but still lamentable.

What victory looks like, or not

Two columns in today’s NYTimes on what victory looks like, or not.

Maureen Dowd is outraged that Chief Justice John Roberts thinks the gays have already won. She points out that homosexuality is still not a protected category federally (that is, you can legally fire someone because they’re ugly, gay, or underperforming; but not because they’re Black, female, or disabled). It was an outrageous moment in the oral arguments when Roberts told Edie Windsor’s lawyer that “political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.”

This was not idle mean-spiritedness, however. Roberts is arguing against the crucial point that policies against gays and lesbians should be considered under “heightened scrutiny” by the law because they are a systematically oppressed “class.” Here is the exchange (at p. 106 of the transcript):

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same sex-marriage laws in different States is politically powerful, do you?

MS. KAPLAN: With respect to that category, that categorization of the term for purposes of heightened scrutiny, I would, Your Honor. I don’t -

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Really?

MS. KAPLAN: Yes.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.

Besides deciding on marriage equality, the Supreme Court has a chance to establish heightened scrutiny as the principle protecting people from persecution on the basis of sexual orientation. Roberts raises the possibility that the electoral shift on this issue — which is just one aspect of anti-gay oppression, after all — makes that unnecessary.

Ross Douthat, writing on the same page, might agree.

Douthat goes actually further, arguing that the victory of gay marriage actually is destroying the “older marital ideal,” just as its defenders feared. My jaw actually dropped a little when I read this:

Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few, the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power. As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward, the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before. As the public’s shift on the issue has accelerated, so has marriage’s overall decline.

Of course he adds: “Correlations do not, of course, establish causation.” But you can’t unring that bell.

Not only are the gays doing the victory dance over the corpse of traditional marriage, but them and their liberal allies are actually persecuting religion.

A more honest, less triumphalist case for gay marriage would be willing to concede that, yes, there might be some social costs to redefining marriage. It would simply argue that those costs are too diffuse and hard to quantify to outweigh the immediate benefits of recognizing gay couples’ love and commitment.

Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.

I guess we might need special protection for the beleaguered religious minority who are just trying to live their lives in traditional peace. Maybe they could use some of the billions of dollars they save from their tax-exempt status to inform us about the benefits of this older marriage ideal, or use their political clout to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from welfare to promoting marriage among the poor.

What are we becoming a nation of now?

In Jonathan Haidt’s TED talk, “How common threats can make common political ground,” he mentions an influential New York Times article about how people with college degrees are more likely to get and stay married compared with those without college degrees.

At about 15:20 in the talk, Haidt says: “We are becoming a nation of just two classes.”

And I got to thinking about that phrase, “become a nation of…” It puts the reader at the moment of a transition from an assumed past to a specified future. A Google Books search reveals that we have become a nation of many things over the years:

1805: Becoming a nation of free men.

1815: becoming a nation of drunkards.

1822: becoming a nation of castes.

1840: becoming a nation of bull-dogs.

1856: becoming a nation of music lovers in the legitimate sense of the term.

1905: becoming a nation of dreamers, and then, in the next sentence, becoming a nation of money lovers and materialists.

1905: becoming a nation of physicians or even of lawyers.

1944:  fast becoming a nation of neurotics.

1953: becoming a nation of coffee drinkers instead of one of tea drinkers, like England.

1969: becoming a nation of two societies— one white and one black— separate and unequal. (from this awesome issue of Ebony:)

1977: becoming a nation of the elderly.

1985: Becoming a Nation of Readers.

1987: becoming a NATION OF ILLITERATES.

1988: becoming a nation of hamburger stands, and, in the same sentence, becoming a nation of management consultants, doctors, software designers, and international bankers.

1989: Becoming a Nation of Burger Flippers?

2008: becoming a nation of joiners.

2008: becoming a nation of orthorexics (people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating)

Is low fertility America’s problem?

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

An essay by Jonathan Last in the Wall Street Journal is getting some people talking about fertility. He writes about the United States, “The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.”

The essay doesn’t actually provide any specific problems caused by low fertility. Supporting retired people is the most obvious challenge. But the closest Last comes to describing the actual consequences of low fertility for the U.S. is this, which is based on the experiences of other countries:

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

I wouldn’t put these vague issues at the top of the list of America’s problems, but they are worth considering. Rather than try to increase birth rates, I would rather focus on making things work with fewer children, which might have the positive side effect of improving the lives of children. It’s a good conversation to have.

But there are three problems with the piece I’ll mention:

1. Fertility in the U.S. isn’t falling much.

The total fertility rate (births per average woman in her lifetime) is about what it was three decades ago. The scary drop over the last several years is apparently due to the recession and looks like it’s bottoming out. (In fact, as recently as 2009 I could write, quite reasonably, of the “unmistakable trend” toward higher fertility — look at the increase from 1976 to 2008.)

2. U.S. fertility is still pretty high

The U.S. has the highest fertility among major rich countries. Many of the countries above the U.S. on the following list have tried hard to get their populations to have more children, for some of the reasons Land suggests. It mostly doesn’t work. Here are the 2012 total fertility rates for a range of countries, from CIA estimates. I don’t think I missed any rich countries with higher fertility than the U.S.

3. The one-child policy didn’t cause China’s low fertility rate

This is Last’s dramatic introduction:

For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country’s brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women—a good proxy for the middle class—have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.

But this contributes to the unfortunate impression that birth rates primarily respond to government policies. Except in draconian cases (which does include many aspects of the one-child policy), that’s not the issue: Fertility is mostly about economics and culture.

Here’s China’s total fertility rate, as estimated by the World Bank:

China’s fertility dropped in the 1960s and 1970s mostly because child mortality plummeted, women’s educational and employment opportunities improved, children’s labor became less important for survival, and because of urbanization. It is true that fertility has continued to fall under the one-child policy — and the drop from 2.5 to 1.5 is in some ways more dramatic than falling from 4.5 to 2.5. But as UNC demographer Yong Cai has shown, today, even when fertility restrictions are lifted fertility rates don’t rise. People have few children in China today because children have become too expensive — good schools especially cost too much, and the health care burdens of children outweigh the hoped-for future return of a child to care for parents when they’re retired.

With all that said, I like a few of Last’s policy suggestions, which include reducing tax burden for people who have children; and improving transportation infrastructure (he says highways specifically, but this is the Wall St. Journal) and telecommuting options so that people can live in lower-cost areas while working in expensive cities. I don’t think this would have much impact on fertility, though.

The couple-height story

My post the other day on height differences between married men and women, which appeared here and on The Atlantic site, drew record clicks to the blog. They mostly originated from this Jezel post by Tracy Moore, which reports about 100,000 readers and more than 1,000 comments on their post.

The UK’s Daily Mail Online also picked up the story, which is understandable since the original research came from a British sample. But I was most impressed by their re-purposing of the figures I made — until I realized they botched it. I don’t know how they made these, since I didn’t include the numbers behind the charts. Here is my figure (on the left), with their adaptation.

I like the bathroom icons showing which spouse is taller. Anyway, that’s the actual distribution, and it seems right. They did the same thing with the randomized height distribution:

And that seems OK, too. But then for superimposing them, they shrunk the actual distribution down to the scale of the randomized one — I guess not realizing that the y-axis went higher on the actual distribution. As a result, the point was totally lost:

It’s a lot of trouble to go through in order to get it wrong in the end. I wonder why they didn’t just rip off the original figures, like they did with the text, re-writing most of the post like this:

I said: I made 10 copies of all the men and women in the data, scrambled them up, and paired them at random. Most couples are still husband taller, but now 7.8 percent have a taller wife – more than twice as many.

They said: To do this he made 10 copies of all the men and women in the data, scrambled them up, and paired them at random. Most couples still had a taller husband, but 7.8 per cent had a taller wife – nearly twice as many…

And so on through most of the post. (I also don’t know why they changed my “more than twice as many” to “nearly twice as many,” since I was comparing 3.8 with 7.8. I have checked this a couple of times now and I’m pretty sure 3.8 * 2 = 7.6.)

It’s an interesting (unimportant) case of the blogosphere’s frequently-encountered overlap between free publicity (they publicized the post), plagiarism (they claimed words written by others as their own) and copyright infringement (they republished someone else’s work without permission).

All hands dimorphic: Gnomeo and Juliet edition

I previously complained about Tangled‘s 75%-male cast and extreme sex dimorphism in the romantic leads, as seen in this hand shot:

Keeping to my policy of two-year delays in movie reviews, let me add the same complaint about Gnomeo and Juliet, the charming adaptation from Disney’s Touchstone imprint. Here, a writing team of 8 men and 2 women (including Shakespeare) gives us a named cast of 14 men and 7 women, in a love story featuring these two adorable garden gnomes:

He’s only a little taller, and (judging by the gray beard) a little older. And in the movie she demonstrates bravery and feats of strength, as is now the norm. But look at those hands! Take a closer look:

What is it about hands that makes it so essential for men and women to have such differences? In the “man hands” episode of Seinfeld we learned how distressing it can be for a man to find out the woman to whom he was attracted has large hands.

That scene required a hand double. In real life, men’s and women’s hands differ on average but with a lot of overlap in the distributions — lots of men have hands smaller than lots of women. But in animation the gloves are off — and Disney is free to pair up couples who are many standard deviations apart in hand size. If real people commonly had this range of hand sizes, would such an extreme difference be considered desirable?

When regular old mothers aren’t old-enough looking

As I wrote about the older-birth-mothers issue recently (first, and then), I didn’t comment on the photo illustrations people are using with the stories. But when an alert reader sent this one to me, from Katie Roiphe’s post in Slate, I couldn’t help it:

Something about that picture and “women in their late 30s or 40s” rubbed my correspondent the wrong way, or rather, led her to write, “Late 30s or early 40s?!?”

Since this was from a legit website that credits its stock agency, I was able to visit Thinkstock and search for the photo. Sure enough:

Of course, it’s not news, so the title “Middle-aged woman holding her newborn grandson” doesn’t make it a less true illustration of the older-mother phenomenon than one captioned “Desperate aging woman clings to feminist myth that it’s OK to delay childbearing.” But it gives you an idea of what the Slate editor was looking for in the stock photo.

I looked around a little, and found one other funny one. Another Slate essay, this one by Allison Benedikt, was reprinted in Canada’s National Post, and they laid it out like this:

When I visited the Getty Images site, I discovered this picture was taken in China. Here’s how it’s presented:

This one, which is a picture of real people, looks like it could be a grandmother, or maybe more likely a caretaker. Regardless, it’s sold as an illustration of a story about China’s elderly having too few grandchildren to take care of them, which is vaguely related to the content of the story, but that’s not what the Post’s caption points to:

It’s true that older parents are more established and experienced but many of those experiences are, from a genetic point of view, negative, says Allison Benedikt.

Anyway, there were others where the women looked pretty old for the story, but I couldn’t find them in the catalogs, so I stopped.

This is all relevant to one of my critiques of these stories, which is that they make it seem like having children at older ages has become more common than it was in the past. That’s true compared with 1980, but not 1960. The difference is it’s more likely to be their first child nowadays. So Benedikt is way off when she writes,

Remember how there was that one kid in your high school class whose parents weresooooo old that it was weird and creepy? That’s all of us now. Oops.

As I showed, 40-year-old women are less likely to have children now than they were when she was a kid. And when Roiphe writes of the “50-year-old mother in the kindergarten class [who] attracts a certain amount of catty interest and disapproval,” she should be aware that the disapproval – which I don’t doubt exists – is not about the increased frequency of older mothers, but about how people think about them.

I guess any of these stories could also have been illustrated with my own photo, from Taiwan, which I used to illustrate a post about low fertility rates — implying this presumed grandmother was happy because she at least has a grandchild. (You’re welcome to use the picture for that purpose, free clip-art searchers of the future, but please don’t describe it was a birth mother and her child.)

More Women Are Doctors and Lawyers Than Ever—but Progress Is Stalling

Originally posted on The Atlantic.

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Josh Mitchell reported that “Women account for a third of the nation’s lawyers and doctors, a major shift from a generation ago.” The report was triggered by anew analysis of occupations from the Census Bureau, which showed women increased their share of doctor and lawyer by four percent and six percent, respectively, from a decade earlier.

These professional advances mark “very significant progress,” according to feminist economist Heidi Hartmann, and I don’t disagree. Still, when I spoke to Mitchell I suggested he consider a glass-half-empty perspective, which somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor.

My question is, will progress continue? It doesn’t look good. I happen to be a demographer, but you don’t need to be one to see that progress for women in these fields is stalling.

First, look at the degrees earned. This figure uses statistics from the Department of Education and breaks the gender trend in law and medical degrees up by decades. Both trends show slowing progress—a smaller increase in women’s representation each decade—and both peaked (for now) at just under 50 percent female.

If half of new doctors and lawyers are women, eventually it should be possible to have professions that are gender-balanced. But don’t hold your breath.

I looked at today’s doctors and lawyers using the 2008-2010 American Community Survey (you can get the data here). Here is the representation of women among full-time and year-round working doctors and lawyers by age. Half of the youngest doctors and lawyers are women, while only one in eight of the oldest are. So as they all age, equal representation should be on the way.

But women are much more likely to drop out of these professions (and others). Among early-career professionals—people ages 25 to 44—who list their most recent jobs as doctor or lawyer, you can see that women are much more likely to be out of the labor force:

With the kind of dropout rates that produce these disparities, we would need much more than 50 percent female in the graduating classes to reach equal representation in these professions.

In Mitchell’s report, the economist Claudia Goldin, who has recently investigated women’s success as pharmacists, argues that the corporatization of medicine has helped women by introducing the concept of work-family balance, and reducing the gender earnings gap—all changes that helped women in pharmacies as well. But I don’t see the evidence that such practices have yet changed the medical industry enough to reduce the gender differences in drop-out rates. And the research evidence shows that explicit diversity policies—with teeth—often are necessary to break the logjam.

And Mitchell’s story did not mention any efforts to reduce the segregation of men and women—especially in medicine—into different specialties. That segregation is a big part of what drives the earnings gap among doctors and lawyers. Here are the median earnings by age for doctors and lawyers, from the same source:

At the peak of that curve—ages 45 to 50—female doctors are earning just 62 percent of men’s median earnings. As they make their decisions about whether to enter the field, and how to specialize, and how to handle their family demands and opportunities, these disparities in representation and rewards come into play. The decisions men and women in these professions make should never be seen as free choices unconstrained or unaffected by the institutional environment.

Big name drops in the news

A few more suggestions have come in for cultural events upending name trends.

The story behind these name shocks seem self-apparent. Both Monica and Ellen were mildly popular, though trending downward, before their names were associated with sex in a bad way, apparently leading to their collapse. Forrest was enjoying a run-up in popularity, tragically cut short by the movie Forrest Gump.

My series of posts on names is here.

The names database is here.

Conservatives doubling down on single mothers and crime

The reaction from the right-wing family folks to my post about single mothers and crime.

In a post that appeared here and on TheAtlantic.com — but got extra attention when the figure appeared on Jezebel, Mother Jones, Slate, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, Family Scholars, and Alas! — my point was that conservatives had been quick to attribute the rise in crime in the 1980s to the “breakdown of the family” and single parents. But then they didn’t revise their stories when crime dropped drastically without a reversal of the family structure trends. I thought single mothers deserved an apology.

They’ll have to keep waiting, I guess.

Within a few hours on Tuesday, we heard from some of the leading lights on the issue. Their conclusion was that if I don’t want more marriage then I must want more incarceration.

Maggie (let’s “drive a wedge between blacks and gays!”) Gallagher, on Family Scholars:

The ending of the violent crime wave was a great policy achievement. It seems however to involve massively incarcerating millions of young men we have not succeeded in civilizing. There is never only one way to skin a cat. But I’m not sure our souls should rest too comfortably on the solution we found.

Ross (Charles Murray is “brilliant!”) Douthat tweeted:

Fortunately, family breakdown doesn’t create any problems that mass incarceration of young men can’t solve.

(One good turn deserves another, I guess: Murray himself tweeted back: “Lovely. Menckenesque. Maybe even Wildeian (if Oscar had been a social scientist).”

Soon Elizabeth Marquardt, who is always committed to “excellent arguments and accurate data,” chimed in:

Well for pete’s sake, one thing we now do is lock up a lot more of those fatherless boys and throw away the key. Which means less crime.

Then Brad (recession is good news for marriage!) Wilcox produced a 10-year old graph of incarceration rates under the title, “Who Needs An Intact Family? Jail Will Do Just Fine,” suggesting that we might be “forced to choose between a stronger marriage culture and mass incarceration.”

What followed on all these blogs was a debate about all the interesting possible explanations for the decline of crime in America. Lost in all of it was that none of the old “family values” folks backed off the original story that crime rose in the first place because of family “breakdown.” Just to clarify: It is one thing to say that children who grow up with one parent present are more likely to commit violent crime. As a statistical association that is true, though the causal story is muddied by important confounds. But it is another — unjustified — thing to say that the crime wave of the 1980s and 1990s was substantially driven by the rise of single parents, which was a common claim, as I illustrated in the post.

Ballpark-acts of violence

(Here is the part where I spend more time thinking about the actual evidence than the pundits I’m complaining about. What follows isn’t scientific analysis: this is data ballparking and rumination.)

As Stephen Demuth and Susan Brown wrote in a 2004 article, identifying the causal effect of family structure itself on whether kids become violent is very difficult. You need to consider parental monitoring and supervision, the quality of the relationship between parents and children, the level of conflict in the home, as well as poverty, education, family transitions, housing, neighborhood factors, and so on.

In that article, however, they offered some numbers we can look at to ballpark the relationship between single-parents and violent crime.

Using the National Adolescent Survey of Adolescent Health, they added up the self-reported violent acts of students in grades 7 to 12 in 1995. The kids were asked how many times in the last year they (1) “hurt someone badly enough to need bandages or care from a doctor or nurse,” (2) “use or threaten to use a weapon to get something from someone,” and (3) “take part in a fight where a group of your friends is against another group.” They didn’t ask the specific number of times, but rather asked kids to report “0 (never), 1 (once or twice), 2 (three or four times), or 3 (five or more times).”

That’s enough to get a sense of what was going on in 1995, when the survey was done. If you take the scores on the three items added together, and take the mean of that sum for kids in different family structures, you can ballpark how many of these acts of violence kids in each family type committed. The idea is just to get a sense of the magnitude of the family structure difference and the relative contribution of kids in each group.

I’ve turned the scale into the average number of acts to make the figure below. For example, the mean for children living with single mothers was 1.2 on the scale. I gave them 1.5 (for “once or twice”), and then, for the additional 0.2, added 0.2*2 (with 2 representing the difference between 1.5 and 3.5 for “three or four times”). That’s a total of 1.9 “ballpark-acts”:

To show the relative contribution of the different groups of kids, I set the width of the bars to their share of the sample, in which 26% were living with either a single mother or single father, which is about right for that period. You can see from the estimate, for example, that kids living with single mothers admitted to 0.7 more ballpark-acts of violence per year, and those with single fathers admitted to 1.1 more.

With the amount of violence committed by each kid, and the relative size of the groups, it’s easy to calculate that those 26% of kids living with single parents committed 35% of the violent acts — more than their share, but not most of the total.

Remember, there are no controls in that analysis – it’s just compositional. There are a host of real reasons children with single parents commit more violence. This is just to see how big is the difference we are trying to understand.

Still, I have no trouble believing the decline of married-couple living arrangements contributed to the rise in violent crime rates since the 1960s, especially if you set aside the huge spike in violence from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Single-parent families have lots of challenges and shortages — mostly of money and time — that make it harder on average to keep their kids in line. (And, of course, one of the causes of single-parenthood is the rise of incarceration.) In the absence of sufficient big-government nanny-state infrastructure to help them get by, it’s not surprising that the problems they experience include a higher risk of violence.

But I see nothing to justify the apocalyptic end-of-civilization associations that were commonly served up then — and which apparently are still palatable to many of today’s family conservatives.

Aside: scale

In that Demuth and Brown article, they have multivariate models that allow us to compare effect sizes on violence. They show, for example, that having a parent who graduated college is associated with odds of committing violent acts 3.5-times as much as living with a single mother, once other factors are controlled (-.42 versus .12). It’s always easier to say there is an association than to ascertain how important it is relative to other things — and especially for how it contributes to a trend over time.

Consider some other findings in this literature that allow us to compare the scale of effects:

• A study of religion and family structure effects on delinquency (an amalgamated concept) reported that living with a single parent increased the odds of delinquency about as much as 6 years of education reduced the odds.
• A study from one school district found that, for boys (but not girls), having a single mother increased the odds of being referred for delinquency by 13%, compared with 9% for being poor.
• Many studies — like this, this, and this, find no effect of family structure on delinquency once aspects of the parent-child relationship are controlled.

A common finding is that the level of attachment children feel with their mothers swamps the family structure effect, as was found in this study, in which there was no effect of family structure on serious or non-serious delinquency. Some, like this one, find that living with a single mother has a significant effect on delinquency, but it is smaller than the effect of maternal closeness.

Given the importance of factors such as poverty level, parents’ education, and peer and network effects – as well as family relationships – the more important and useful questions have to do with how we can improve the environment and outcomes for children with single parents (and for their parents). The causal impact of family structure itself is less pressing.