How about using half the Bezos fortune to stop US child poverty for one year?

With everyone arguing about how much money MacKenzie Bezos should get in her divorce from Jeff Bezos, CNN asked me to write an op-ed. In it I argued that they are too rich and we could make divorce easier for everyone if we taxed away more of their money. I wrote:

There is a serious fairness issue here, but it doesn’t have to do with whether MacKenzie ends up with $1 billion or $68 billion. It’s that too many people can’t realistically exercise the same individual freedom that the Bezoses have — to choose to leave a failing or abusive marriage without facing crushing economic stress or hardship.

I called it, “There is a fairness issue with in the Bezos divorce (and it’s not about how much money MacKenzie Bezos will end up with),” which they changed to “The divorce issue that Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos don’t have to worry about.”

I agreed not to post the full text here. You can read it at CNN.

Family estrangement and modern parenting

Photo: The Guardian

I caught 1A with Joshua Johnson the other day, and was happy to hear my friend Joshua Coleman featured. The discussion was about family estrangement, which is Joshua’s clinical specialty (he’s a psychologist), and the subject of his book, When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along. Joshua works with a lot of parents who have been estranged by their adult children, which in the social media era doesn’t necessarily mean being cut off, like it might have once upon a time — now it might mean being subjected to constant reminders of children’s social and family lives that deliberately exclude parents.

Of course, the freedom to estrange oneself from a family is very important, and a great thing about modern family life. But it’s also often awful. And it highlights the intense and rapid generational changes we’re going through as well. So this is something to wrestle with, which is what the show did.

I took the liberty of transcribing a few of Joshua’s comments, which I then ran by him for permission and a quick edit, and present here more or less in their original form. Joshua said:

One of the things that’s confusing for so many of the estranged parents I work with is that what gets called abusive or traumatizing behavior today would not have been considered abusive or traumatizing in their generation. This relates to what [Nick] Haslam refers to as “concept creep”: the process of expanding the definition of what is considered harmful behavior. From my perspective as a psychologist this causes some adult children to justify their estrangements or negative evaluations of their parents’ actions.

…

Much of what gets labeled as abusive or traumatizing today on the part of the parent, does not strike me as genuine abuse or trauma. For example, being controlling, manipulative, intrusive, even critical at times is not necessarily abuse. At the very least, not abusive enough to alter the trajectory of a life in the way that it’s commonly portrayed. But part of the problem is that we live in a culture that’s very much dominated by a kind of  psychological narrative where people are led to believe that the way that their lives turn out are almost exclusively explained by their childhoods, while contemporary research doesn’t really show that to be case. In fact, parents play a relatively small role in adult outcome while genetics, social class, economics, peer group, and random good or bad luck can all be considered equal if not more powerful determinants of outcome. [Post-show addition: As Jennifer Silva wrote in her book Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty: “Family pathology is invoked both to explain (to themselves and to others) why they have not achieved traditional adult milestones and to map meaning, order, and progress onto their experiences of stagnation in the present.”]

We also live in a society, and at a time where so much is being put onto parents’ shoulders, that other cultures have the wisdom to not put onto the parents’ shoulders. For example, in most Western industrialized nations there is free or highly subsidized childcare, free or highly subsidized college, free or highly subsidized insurance – while in America this is all up to the parent. So there’s a reason that today’s parents are deeply worried and over-involved and concerned about their children’s safety and well-being because it’s all on them. Not only are their adult children sometimes accusing them of not doing enough or doing it well, but so is everyone else including self-help authors and politicians.

When host Joshua Johnson asked for clarification, Joshua Coleman added:

There is of course real abuse and trauma that occurs at the hands of parents; I’m not saying it never occurs, I’m just saying the concept has been so greatly expanded that it’s becoming more of a problem than an asset.

The rise of Jewish boys’ names in the US

Names are cultural as the personal is political for marginalized groups.

I’ve had these numbers sitting around for a while, since I noticed Nazis on Twitter calling me “Shlomo” as an insult, and was just spurred to write them up by a fascinating Twitter thread from someone who goes by Benjamin (בנימן טבלוב). He writes in response to criticism of Jews who change their names from their “real” European names to Hebrew names, specifically Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father changed the family name from Mileikowsky after they moved from Europe to Palestine in 1920. (Netanyahu is terrible in every way, that’s not the point.)

Benjamin explained that the Jews of northern and eastern Europe historically practiced patronymic naming exclusively, naming children after their fathers, as in: Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. (The most famous contemporary patronymic society is Iceland, although they sometimes use matronyms now, too.) It was only with the bureaucratization of modern citizenship in eighteenth and nineteenth century Austria, Prussia, Russia, France, and Bavaria, that Jews were forced to take permanent surnames, and these were often not of their choosing, based things like on places, occupations, or even insults. Besides being generally dehumanizing, this system of Jewish surnames also eventually made it easy to round Jews up for the Holocaust (see the Kaplan and Bernays’ The Language of Names, and this paper, for some history). An exception, incidentally, is the use of the priestly honorific terms Cohen and Levy, which were already in place (e.g., Philip, son of Marshall the Cohen) and then became permanent surnames. I assume Israeli politicians aren’t ditching the name Cohen for something more Hebrew sounding.

So when Jews went to Palestine, they often took new Hebrew names; but when they came to America they took more English names, and then gave their kids mainstream American names. The history of coercive naming in Europe makes it easier to see why this might not have been so objectionable to the Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. Kaplan and Bernays quote an immigrant to New York who said, “Nothing good ever came to us while we bore them [old names]; possibly we’ll have more luck with the new names.” (My grandmother was born Tzivya (צִבְיָה), which became Cywja when she boarded a ship from Poland in 1921, and then eventually Sylvia.)

Jewish names today

Today it’s probably safe to say most Jewish children in the U.S. don’t have Jewish first names per se (although they sometimes have a Hebrew name they use just for religious occasions). Here I look at the trends for seven Jewish boys’ names I found on various naming websites: Shlomo, Chaim, Eliezer, Mordechai, Moshe, Yosef, and Zev. These were the most popular ones I could think of (feel free to suggest others).

First a little data on Yiddish and Hebrew in America. This is all from the Decennial Census and then, after 2000, the American Community Survey, which asked about “mother tongue” (language spoken at home as a child) from 1910 to 1970 (except 1950), and language spoken at home after that. The Census doesn’t ask about religion.

Yiddish was the language spoken by the big wave of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. Hebrew is the primary official language of Israel, and the religious language of Judaism. This shows the percentage of people in the U.S. who spoke Yiddish or Hebrew from 1910 to 2017.* The peak in 1930 is 1.1 percent, during the immigration boom. The 1970 peak reflects the only year “mother tongue” was asked of non-immigrants as well as immigrants. By 1980 only one-in-500 Americans spoke Yiddish or Hebrew at home.

The second thing about Yiddish and Hebrew is children. There are a declining number of old immigrants speaking Yiddish, and no new immigrants speaking Yiddish. So most people speaking Yiddish as their language today are probably the descendants of those immigrants, orthodox Jews participating in ethnic revival or preservation. The same goes for people speaking Hebrew at home, except by now some of these could be immigrants from Israel and their children. (By 2000 Hebrew speakers outnumbered those speaking Yiddish.) Here’s the percentage of Yiddish and Hebrew speakers that were under 18 for the same years.

It was low in 1930, when they were mostly working-age immigrants, and then in 1960 when their kids were grown. The percentage under age 18 increased after 1960, and now 40 percent of Yiddish speakers are children (which is not the case for Hebrew). And, this is key: the proportion of all U.S. children speaking Yiddish at home has more than doubled since 1980, from 5 to 11 per 10,000. If these numbers are to be believed.

Names

The sample numbers here are small, but the ACS sample is also picking up about 150 Yiddish or Hebrew speaking women per year having babies, which implies that population is having about 10,000 babies per year, or about 26 out of every 10,000 babies born in the country.

So, who’s naming their sons Shlomo, Chaim, Eliezer, Mordechai, Moshe, Yosef, and Zev? Now switching to the Social Security names database, I find that these names together accounted for 1,943 boys born in 2017 (that’s 9.9 out of every 10,000 US boys born). What’s interesting is that none of these boys’ names reached the threshold for reporting in the database — five children — until 1942. This is remarkable given that Yiddish was in decline by then. And they’ve all been growing more common since that time. So all those Yiddish immigrants in 1920 weren’t naming their sons Moshe, or at least not legally, but now a growing (though small) proportion of their descendants are.

I can’t tell if Yiddish or Hebrew speakers are giving their sons these names. But there must be some connection between the rise of these names and the increase in the proportion of children speaking Yiddish at home. It might not be same people teaching their kids Yiddish, but they may be part of the same (highly localized) revival.

I’ve put the Social Security names data, and my SAS code for extracting name trends, on the Open Science Framework here.

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* An earlier version had much higher prevalence of Yiddish and Hebrew before 1980 because I was accidentally just showing the percentages among immigrants.

Fox News took my quotes out of context and added wrong information

Following up on Part 1, discussed here, Parts 2 and 3 of the Fox News series on demography and social change also featured quotes from me. Part 2 used a reasonable quote in a reasonable way, but Part 3 did not.

Part 2 is a good teaching lesson in sky-is-fallingism, a Fox News signature. As they’ve done before, they literally start with a 1950s TV show as if it were historical footage, and then proceed to the chaotic now.

“If Tommy suddenly woke up today, he’d be an aging Baby Boomer, receiving benefits from a Social Security trust fund that is more than 2 trillion dollars in debt. He might be tending to his aches and pains with medical marijuana, now legal in 33 states. He might see his childhood friends are legally married [showing gay male weddings] while almost half the mommies in the U.S. are not.”

Cut to racial minority students in UCLA gear. Etc. The most extreme cut is between the Heritage Foundation person saying, of Democrats, “We’re the party of government, and that way if we have voters attached to government programs they’re going to stick with us,” before, literally, cutting to archival Mao and Stalin footage, with the voice-over:

“That, while the hard lessons of socialism — 70 million dead in China, 20 million dead in the Soviet Union — that happened during Communism, are often neglected in colleges, now focused on social justice curricula.”

Great stuff, good for teaching. Anyway, my quote in the piece is just saying young people nowadays don’t like to be lectured about traditional values. They just frame it like that’s a bad thing. Here it is:

Part 3 is where they misused my quotes, in two places. The episode is about how low fertility leads to immigration, which creates chaos and causes populism. Plenty wrong in here, but I’m just focusing on my beefs. First, on immigration, they say:

“Europe’s accommodation of refugees fleeing ISIS and the civil war in Syria, has proved a bridge too far.”

Philip Cohen: “Immigration poses challenges to the dominant culture. It’s obviously politically fraught.”

Cut to rioting footage. Narrator: “From Greece to Italy, Germany, France, and the Nordic countries, clashes have erupted. Nationalist politicians are forcing a reckoning with multiculturalism.”

According to my own recording of the interview, however, what I said immediate after, “It’s obviously politically fraught,” was this:

“On the other hand, there’s a great pent-up demand for immigration. There are plenty of people who want to come here. The immigrants who come here tend to be the better off, more highly skilled and educated people from the countries that they’re coming from, contrary to some stereotypes, so they end up strengthening the U.S. economy even as they improve their own wellbeing. So if you can get over all the challenges and conflict that sometimes comes along with rapid immigration, what you end up with is an answer to the population [problem].”

Lesson learned. Not surprising they didn’t use my pro-immigration other hand. I should have anticipated that better and made the other hand the only hand in my comment. However, they had invited me to discuss Millennials and marriage, so I wasn’t prepared for immigration.

The piece has distracted tangents into robots in Japan and the one-child policy in China. I also wasn’t prepared for the one-child policy on that day, but I always have a take ready on that. Here’s what I said, according to my recording:

“One thing to know about China is the birthrate had fallen a lot before the one-child policy. So even if you like the idea … [they interrupted to say they had bumped the focus, so I should start my answer again] …One thing that’s important to realize about China is that population growth had already slowed a lot before the one-child policy started, so they really didn’t need the one-child policy to slow down population growth. And it was quite draconian. It went against what most people wanted for their families. The implementation of it was very repressive. It included forced sterilization, and abortion, and very harsh penalties for people who had extra children. So it was really a human rights disaster.”

In the piece, however, they used the part about forced sterilization and the human rights disaster, but didn’t use where I said, “they really didn’t need the one-child policy to slow down population growth” — and replaced it with voice-over that said, “overpopulation compelled the Communist government to force a one-child policy on the populous.” So they took out something true and added something false.

To see how wrong that it, here is the trend in total fertility rate (births per woman) from 1960 to 2016. This shows how much birth rates had come down in China under policies that promoted smaller families along with women’s healthcare, education, and employment, by the time China implemented the one-child policy in 1980:

I put India and Nigeria on the chart to show how successful China already was relative to other large, poor countries with high fertility in the 1960s. There was no demographic justification for the one-child policy, and the fact that it became draconian and repressive is a clue to how out of step it was with the family lives of the Chinese people.

The reason this matters is not particularly important for the Fox News piece, but it’s very important to understand that progress on reducing fertility is better achieved through empowerment and development than through command and repression. Now that we’re seeing countries interested in increasing fertility, this is important historical context. (Here’s a good review article by Wang Feng, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai [paywalled | bootlegged])

Anyway, regardless of the implications, it just goes against accuracy and honesty to remove true information for false information.

Anyway anyway, here’s Part 3:

 

Appearance on Fox News Channel explained

Recently I was invited to be interviewed by Fox News Channel for “a series of stories about changing demographics and how they’re impacting politics, policy, and our culture.” Specifically, the producer said they wanted to interview me about “your recent research on millennials and marriage and divorce rates.”

This raised the recurring question faced by responsible academics: Should I appear on Fox News? For those of us who love attention, it’s hard to say no, but I did consider saying no. I figured the segment would be a right-slanted take, but also hoped that since it was for a news program, rather than an opinion program, it might be moored to reality, and I thought I might have a chance to interject something useful, or at least true. (This differs from my previous appearance, with Tucker Carlson.) Whether to differentiate at all between news and opinion on FNC is an interesting question in itself.

So I did it, and it aired yesterday. Since I lent it legitimacy I should also correct the errors they made. Comments below the video:

Here are some comments and corrections. First, the beginning is just a fear-of-change narrative:

“As we head into 2019 you may look back and think about how much has changed, not just in the past year, but in your life. And it’s not just you. America’s population, our culture, it is all changing.”

It’s setting viewers up for doom, where change is ominous out of control, the audience tearing down that precedes the build up of the authoritarian leader. Anyway, that’s to be expected, along with the boilerplate right-wing statements about marriage, women, welfare, and single mothers, which I won’t detail here.

They never did ask me about my research on marriage and divorce, but we did talk about fertility. So then he says:

“The US is facing a demographic crisis that JFK could not have imagined: A fertility rate of 1.8 percent. That means the US is not producing enough to sustain its population.”

Don’t ask what JFK has to do with this. But the fertility rate is not “1.8 percent,” it’s 1.8 projected births per woman, and it’s not a demographic crisis.

In the interview, I tried to focus on inequality and insecurity in every answer, figuring that was the angle they might let into the piece. This is what they ended up using:

“The reasons behind these demographic changes are complicated. [Philip Cohen:] One of the reasons people have fewer children is because they’re unsure about the future. They’re unsure about the costs of raising those children, especially the costs of education. And the student loan debt is a huge crisis that everybody knows about.”

I’m happy with this, a true statement, not distorted or taken out of context. The chyron they put below me is bad, however: “Lower U.S. Fertility Rates Creating Society Upheaval.” “Upheaval” is a strong word, but in any event the causality is reversed: social instability is driving lower U.S. fertility rates. Whatever effects falling fertility will have on society, they’re not here yet anyway.

Then immigration:

“The US is compensating for lower fertility rates with another demographic change: an increased reliance on immigration.”

The US doesn’t exactly have a policy of responding to falling fertility by welcoming immigrants. But it’s true that immigration is buttressing the US from the potential effects of slower population growth. In the last 25 years the immigrant share of the labor force has increased from 12 percent to 19 percent. That is pretty clearly the solution — if we need one — to falling population growth. But this quote from Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institution is ridiculous:

“In the case of the right, they want people to work more cheaply than native-born citizens. And on the left they want a further argument, or an agenda for big government.”

It’s true the right wants immigrants to help keep labor costs down. The idea that the left wants immigrants to bolster the argument for big government is just idiotic. This is creating a narrative where the system/swamp/Washington is destroying the culture.

Finally, the conclusion brings it back to fear of change:

“These demographic changes help to partly explain the resurgence of socialism in the United States. A Gallup poll from August found that young adult Americans are more positive about socialism – 51 percent – than they are about capitalism – 45 percent. That’s a 12-point swing in only two years.”

I have no idea how you connect “these demographic changes” to the (excellent) rise in positive perceptions about socialism. But the 12-point change in two years was only in young adults’ (age 18-29) attitudes toward capitalism. During that time their attitude toward socialism declined as well, so the gap went from -2 to +6, or an eight-point swing. Here’s the trend from Gallup:

In conclusion, I got to say something I wanted to say, and it added something to the piece they wouldn’t otherwise have included. Whether that makes it worth participating in this I can’t say.

The segment above was the first of three. I discuss the other two here.

Breaking: 2018 is almost over (year-end report)

Thank you to everyone who read and responded this year.

These are some of the good things that happened in 2018 that may be of interest to blog readers. I was on sabbatical. A new edition of my textbook, a book of essays, and some papers came out. President Trump was compelled by a Federal court to unblock me on Twitter. The excellent Joanna Pepin finished her PhD, and other students made great progress. I was elected to ASA’s Committee on Publications.

On the blog, productivity was good this year, with visits up 14% to 330,000, on traffic to 49 new posts. Blogging lives. In the longer-format genre, I posted a number of working papers and preprints, and two had stand-out performances: One on divorce trends and one a review of Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West (3100 downloads between them).

In the shorter-format genre, Twitter impressions were down 10% this year, to 23 million. After a surge in June following the President unblocking me, my impressions declined over the remainder of the year. Maybe the Twitter algorithm isn’t serving my tweets to as many people, or my tweets aren’t as good, or maybe I spent less time on Twitter.

On the blog, these were the top ten posts written in 2018:

1. Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t (and other tales of BAs and marriage). Some data and a a suggestion for further research using college major and marital events data in the American Community Survey.

2. Mark Regnerus to be promoted to full professor at UT Austin. The University of Texas central administration overrode negative recommendations from both the Department of Sociology faculty and the College of Liberal Arts, to commit millions of dollars to Regnerus over the rest of his career. Bad decision.

3. Visiting Israel, with demography (this is not sustainable edition). Little-known fact about Israel: it’s population growth is unsustainable, in addition to everything else. I visited, got data, and took pictures.

Mahane Yehudah Shuk, Jerusalem, on Friday afternoon (photo pnc: https://flic.kr/p/23AxGdJ)

4. Campus sexual harassment coverage, UMD circa 2003. Revisiting an old story about a sexual harassment charge against David Segal, one of my sociology department colleagues. I’d like to think things would be reported differently now.

5. Michael Kimmel’s American Sociological Association Award. In which I urged the American Sociological Association not to give the prominent sociologist its award for feminism after he was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. (They didn’t follow my advice.)

6. Trump Twitter suit argued in federal court. With the Knight First Amendment Institute and six other plaintiffs, I sued President Trump for blocking me on Twitter. After oral arguments in New York, I got to speak to reporters literally on the courthouse steps. (We won the case, he unblocked us, and the case is now under appeal.)

Photo by Scott Matthews.

7. Notes for a review of “Cheap Sex,” by Mark Regnerus. A terrible book by an objectionable sociologist. The long version of my review.

8. Fertility trends explained, 2017 edition. Putting a marked US fertility decline in context, with figures and code. Conclusions: the economy is probably about to tank, and the U.S. fertility rate is still relatively high for our income level, especially for racial-ethnic minorities. I hope you listened to me and sold your stock back in May.

9. Breaking: In 2017 names, Donald, Alexa, and Mary plummet; Malia booms. Taking the collective cultural temperature with name trends.

10. Demographic facts your students should know cold in 2018. The annual appeal to teach basic demographic facts. I love the attention this gets.

Equal-education and wife-more-education married couples don’t have sex less often

In my review of Mark Regnerus’s book, Cheap Sex, I wrote: “The book is an extended rant on the theme, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ wrapped in a misogynist theory about sexual exchange masquerading as economics, and motivated by the author’s misogynist religious and political views.”

Someone just reposted an old book-rehash essay of Regnerus’s called, “The Death of Eros.” In it he links to my post documenting the decline in sexual frequency among married couples in the General Social Survey. In marriage, Regnerus writes, “equality is the enemy of eros,” before selectively characterizing some research about the relationship between housework and sex. (Here’s a recent analysis finding egalitarian couples don’t have sex less.)

But I realized I never looked at sexual frequency in married couples by the relative education of the spouses, which is available in the GSS. So here’s a quick take: Married man-woman couples in which the wife has equal or more education don’t have sex less frequently.

I modeled sexual frequency (an interval scale from “not at all” = 0 to “4+ times per week” = 6 as a function of age, age-squared, respondent education, respondent sex, decade, and relative education (wife has lower degree, wife has same degree, wife has higher degree). The result is in this figure. Note the means are between 3 (“2-3 times per month”) and 4 (“weekly”). Stata code for GSS below.

OK, that’s it. Here’s the code (I prettied the figure a little by hand afterwards):

*keep married people
keep if marital==1

* with non-missing own and spouse education
keep if spdeg<4 & degree<4
recode age (18/29=18) (30/39=30) (40/49=40) (50/59=50) (60/109=60), gen(agecat)
recode year (1970/1979=1970) (1980/1989=1980) (1990/1999=1990) (2000/2008=2000) (2010/2016=2010), gen(decade)
gen erosdead = spdeg>degree
gen equal=spdeg==degree

gen eros=0
replace eros=1 if spdeg<degree & sex==1
replace eros=2 if spdeg==degree
replace eros=3 if spdeg>degree & sex==1

replace eros=1 if spdeg>degree & sex==2
replace eros=3 if spdeg<degree & sex==2

label define de 1 "wife less"
label define de 2 "equal", add
label define de 3 "wife more", add
label values eros de

reg sexfreq i.sex i.agecat i.decade i.degree i.eros [weight=wtssall]
reg sexfreq i.sex c.age##c.age i.degree i.eros##i.decade [weight=wtssall]
margins i.eros##i.decade
marginsplot, recast(bar) by(decade)

Note: On 25 Dec 2018 I fixed a coding error and replaced the figure; the results are the same.