A short paper on the decline of all things marriage in the U.S.

A higher status marriage system is a smaller, slower, and more stable marriage system.

Who wants to be Adele, filling the void with an endless emptiness unchained?

The Adele in the video has no relationships other than her "team" at work and her financial advisor. She fills the void with the endless emptiness of a self unchained.

Inequality work product: Visualizing unequal

I'm working on the fourth edition of The Family, and since it's an "accessible, data-driven introduction to contemporary sociological thinking on families," I figured I'd share a few figures I worked on for the chapter on social class and poverty. 1. Parents' education and educational attainment. The General Social Survey asks people what their parents'…

These are the datasets of our lives (43 of them, anyway)

43 current or ongoing surveys, with microdata from individual/household/family units of analysis, with US samples, publicly available data (some with permission required). More or less.

Demographic facts for students: 2022

Updating a series I started in 2013. Despite what people in my generation were told, it's not true that, "facts are useless in an emergency." Knowing basic facts is the key to detecting bullshit, which thrives in conditions of basic ignorance. In this post I suggest you and your students memorize a small number of…

Trigger warnings don’t work (in experimental settings)

The movement toward universal content warnings in college courses does not seem to have been justified by evidence of their effectiveness, especially in light of possible downsides.

Journal peer review times, crowdsourced edition (with your help)

How many times have you asked a friend, colleague, mentor, or random social media crowd how long it took to get reviews from a particular journal? Lets expand and deepen that circle a little.

What’s the story? Family demography at the end of progress

Against a perception of normal modernity that is on some kind of track that we can try to get a handle on while we work around distractions like a pandemic, climate change, diverging and growing inequality, the centrifugal tendency of identities to be fragmenting, and policy incoherence.

The Takeaway on Gen-Z, rest of the interview edition

The parts that made it into the show, and the parts that didn't.

The median mother is 30, TV interview edition

When you look at what has happened since the recession in 2008, the decline in birth was pretty dramatic, but it was all among women under age 35.