How broken is our system (hit me with that figure again edition)

Why do sociologists publish in academic journals? Sometimes it seems improbable that the main goal is sharing information and advancing scientific knowledge. Today’s example of our broken system, brought to my attention by Neal Caren, concerns three papers by Eran Shor, Arnout van de Rijt, Charles Ward, Aharon Blank-Gomel, and Steven Skiena (Shor et al).

May 13, 2016 update: Eran Shor has sent me a response, which I posted here.

In a paywalled 2013 paper in Journalism Studies, the team used an analysis of names appearing in newspapers to report the gender composition of people mentioned. They analyzed the New York Times back to 1880, and then a larger sample of 13 newspapers from 1982 through 2005. Here’s one of their figures:

The 2013 paper was a descriptive analysis, establishing that men are mentioned more than women over time.

In a paywalled 2014 article in Social Science Quarterly (SSQ) the team followed up. Except for a string-cite mention in the methods section, the second paper makes no reference to the first, giving no indication that the two are part of a developing project. They use this figure to motivate the analysis in the second paper, with no acknowledgment that it also appeared in the first:

Shor et al. 2014 asked,

How can we account for the consistency of these disparities? One possible factor that may explain at least some of these consistent gaps may be the political agendas and choices of specific newspapers.

Their hypothesis was:

H1: Newspapers that are typically classified as more liberal will exhibit a higher rate of female-subjects’ coverage than newspapers typically classified as conservative.

After analyzing the data, they concluded:

The proposition that liberal newspapers will be more likely to cover female subjects was not supported by our findings. In fact, we found a weak to moderate relationship between the two variables, but this relationship is in the opposite direction: Newspapers recognized (or ranked) as more “conservative” were more likely to cover female subjects than their more “liberal” counterparts, especially in articles reporting on sports.

They offered several caveats about this finding, including that the measure of political slant used is “somewhat crude.”

Clearly, much more work to be done. The next piece of the project was a 2015 article in American Sociological Review (which, as the featured article of the issue, was not paywalled by Sage). Again, without mentioning that the figure has been previously published, and with one passing reference to each of the previous papers, they motivated the analysis with the figure:

Besides not getting the figure in color, ASR readers for some reason also don’t get 1982 in the data. (The paper makes no mention of the difference in period covered, which makes sense because it never mentions any connection to the analysis in the previous paper). The ASR paper asks of this figure, “How can we account for the persistence of this disparity?”

By now I bet you’re thinking, “One way to account for this disparity is to consider the effects of political slant.” Good idea. In fact, in the depiction of the ASR paper, the rationale for this question has hardly changed at all since the SSQ paper. Here are the two passages justifying the question.

From SSQ:

Former anecdotal evidence on the relationship between newspapers’ political slant and their rate of female-subjects coverage has been inconclusive. … [describing studies by Potter (1985) and Adkins Covert and Wasburn (2007)]…

Notwithstanding these anecdotal findings, there are a number of reasons to believe that more conservative outlets would be less likely to cover female subjects and women’s issues compared with their more liberal counterparts. First, conservative media often view feminism and women’s rights issues in a relatively negative light (Baker Beck, 1998; Brescoll and LaFrance, 2004). Therefore, they may be less likely to devote coverage to these issues. Second, and related to the first point, conservative media may also be less likely to employ female reporters and female editors […]. Finally, conservative papers may be more likely to cover “hard” topics that are traditionally (that is, conservatively) considered to be more important or interesting, such as politics, business, and sports, and less likely to report on issues such as social welfare, education, or fashion, where according to research women have a stronger presence (Holland, 1998; Ross, 2007, 2009; Ross and Carter, 2011).

From ASR:

Some work suggests that conservative newspapers may cover women less (Potter 1985), but other studies report the opposite tendency (Adkins Covert and Wasburn 2007; Shor et al. 2014a).

Notwithstanding these inconclusive findings, there are several reasons to believe that more conservative outlets will be less likely to cover women and women’s issues compared with their more liberal counterparts. First, conservative media often view feminism and women’s issues in a relatively negative light (Baker Beck 1998; Brescoll and LaFrance 2004), making them potentially less likely to cover these issues. Second, and related to the first point, conservative media may also be less likely to employ female reporters and female editors. Finally, conservative papers may be more likely to cover “hard” topics that are traditionally considered more important or interesting, such as politics, business, and sports, rather than reporting on issues such as social welfare, education, or fashion, where women have a stronger presence.

Except for a passing mention among the “other studies,” there is no connection to the previous analysis. The ASR hypothesis is:

Conservative newspapers will dedicate a smaller portion of their coverage to females.

On this question in the ASR paper, they conclude:

our analysis shows no significant relationship between newspaper coverage patterns and … a newspaper’s political tendencies.

It looks to me like the SSQ and ASR they used the same data to test the same hypothesis (in addition to whatever else is new in the third paper). Given that they are using the same data, how they got from a “weak to moderate relationship” to “no significant relationship” seems important. Should we no longer rely on the previous analysis? Or do these two papers just go into the giant heap of studies in which “some say this, some say that”? What kind of way is this to figure out what’s going on?

Still love your system?

It’s fine to report the same findings in different venues and formats. It’s fine, that is, as long as it’s clear they’re not original in the subsequent tellings. (I personally have been known to regale my students, and family members, with the same stories over and over, but I try to remember to say, “Stop me if I already told you this one” first.)

I’m not judging Shor et al. for any particular violation of specific rules or norms. And I’m not judging the quality of the work overall. But I will just make the obvious observation that this way of presenting ongoing research is wasteful of resources, misleading to readers, and hinders the development of research.

• Wasteful because reviewers, editors, and publishers, are essentially duplicating their efforts to try to figure out what is actually to be learned from these overlapping papers — and then to repackage and sell the duplicative information as new.
• Misleading to readers because we now have “many studies” that show the same thing (or different things), without the clear acknowledgment that they use the same data.
• And hindering research because of the wasteful delays and duplicative expenses involved in publishing research that should be clearly presented in cumulative, transparent fashion, in a timely way — which is what we need to move science forward.

Open science

When making (or hearing) arguments against open science as impractical or unreasonable, just weigh the wastefulness, misleadingness, and obstacles to science so prevalent in the current system against whatever advantages you think it holds. We can’t have a reasonable conversation about our publishing system based on the presumption that it’s working well now.

In an open science system researchers publish their work openly (and free) with open links between different parts of the project. For example, researchers might publish one good justification for a hypothesis, with several separate analyses testing it, making clear what’s different in each test. Reviewers and readers could see the whole series. Other researchers would have access to the materials necessary for replication and extension of the work. People are judged for hiring and promotion according to the actual quality and quantity of their work and the contribution it makes to advancing knowledge, rather than through arbitrary counts of “publications” in private, paywalled journals. (The non-profit Center for Open Science is building a system like this now, and offers a free Open Science Framework, “A scholarly commons to connect the entire research cycle.”)

There are challenges to building this new system, of course, but any assessment of those challenges needs to be clear-eyed about the ridiculousness of the system we’re working under now.

Previous related posts have covered very similar publications, the opposition to open access, journal self-citation practices, and one publication’s saga.

Delayed parenting and anti-poverty policy

Here’s a preview of talk today at Brown University’s population center.

My basic argument is that policies intended to prevent poverty by delaying parenthood are mostly misplaced, especially with regard to Black women. Not that delaying parenthood is bad per se, but delaying parenthood in the absence of other improvements in people’s conditions is ineffectual in the aggregate, and actually harmful for some populations.

The delayed childbearing argument features prominently in the recent “consensus” on anti-poverty strategy reached by the American Enterprise Institute / Brookings working group I wrote about here. They say:

It would be better for couples, for children, and for society if prospective parents plan their births and have children only when they are financially stable, are in a committed relationship (preferably marriage), and can provide a stable environment for their child.

Isabel Sawhill, a leading proponent of delayed childbearing as anti-poverty strategy, says in her book Generation Unbound, that she is not telling poor people not to have children, but she sort of is. She writes:

It is only fair to expect parents to limit the number of children they have to something they can afford.

The evidence I offer to help argue that this approach is unhelpful includes this paper (the actual new research for the talk), which shows the risk of infant mortality rising with parent age for Black mothers, a pattern strikingly different from White and Hispanic mothers’ (see a discussion here). Here’s that result:

Adjusted Probability of Infant Death, by Maternal Age: White, Black, and Mexican Mothers, U.S., 2013. Predicted probabilities of infant death generated by Stata margins command, adjusted for plurality, birth order, maternal education, prenatal care, payment source, and cigarette smoking during pregnancy. Data source: 2013 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Public Use File, Centers for Disease Control.

Of course, infant mortality is thankfully very rare, but it’s the extreme measure for the underlying pattern of women’s health. When infant mortality in a group is higher, their average health is usually worse.

I’m adding to that the following descriptive figures on children’s poverty rates according to how old their mothers were when they were born. This is by necessity limited to children who are still living with their mothers, because I used the Current Population Survey. I show this for all children (black lines), and then for those whose mothers have never married (red lines). The solid lines are official poverty-line rates, and the dotted lines use the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The latter shows lower poverty rates for children whose mothers were younger, because it reflects transfer income and welfare support as well as income from unmarried cohabiting partners.

For children overall (black lines), being born to an older mother appears beneficial in terms of poverty rates. This fits the standard story, in which delaying births allows women to go further in school and their careers, and get married, as well as being more mature and so on. However, for those whose mothers remain unmarried the relationship is much weaker, and there is no relationship to the SPM. To me this undermines the policy of delay with regard to women who have low probability of marriage during their child-bearing years. Which brings me back to Black women.

I estimated the same pattern by race/ethnicity, this time just using the SPM, in a model that controls for child age, sex, nativity, geography, and mother’s marital status (ever- versus never-married). I didn’t control for education, because schooling is also an outcome of birth timing (so if young mothers don’t go to college for that reason, this would show them more likely to be poor as a result). Here’s the result:

For White women there is a strong relationship, with lowest poverty rates for children whose mothers were in their 30s when they were born. For Black and Hispanic women the relationship is much weaker (it actually looks very similar when you control for education as well, and if you use the continuous income-to-needs ration instead of the poverty-line cutoff).

My conclusion is that I’m all for policies that make family planning available, and U.S. women should have better access to IUDs in particular (which are much more common in other rich countries) — these need to be part of better medical care for poor people in general. But I don’t favor this as a poverty-reduction strategy, and I reject the “responsibility” frame for anti-poverty policy evident in the quotes above. I prefer education, jobs, and income support (which Sawhill also supports, to her credit). See Matt Bruenig on the Brookings “Success Sequence” and my op-ed on income support.

Ideals and intentions

Consider this from Sawhill. In her book Generation Unbound, she writes:

‘poor and minority women … themselves do not want to have as many children as they are currently having. Unintended pregnancy rates are much higher among the poor, minority groups, and the less-educated … [free, better contraception] can help poorer and less-educated women align their behavior with their intentions.’ (p. 138)

I think we need to take a little more complicated view of intentions here. She is referring to what demographers call “unintended” births, which means the woman recalls that she was not intending to get pregnant at the time — she either wanted to get pregnant some time in the future, or never. As you can see, such unintended pregnancies are very common:

However, most poor women think the ideal family size is large. Among young women, 65% of women who didn’t finish high school, and 48% of those with high school degrees but no BA, believe 3 or more children is the ideal for a family:

For lots of their births, poor women were not ready, or not planning to get pregnant. But it’s also common for poor people to never achieve their ideal conditions for having children — good job, marriage, housing, education, and so on. In that case, with the clock running on their (and their mothers’) health, unintended childbearing is more complicated than just a behavior problem to be solved. It may reflect a compromise between unachievable goals.

In addition to making sure everyone has the reproductive healthcare they need (including more effective contraception), I think we should also help people achieve their long-term ideals — including having the children they want to have — rather than (just) help them realize their short-term intentions.

Maternal age and infant mortality paper forthcoming

Update: The paper is now published here. 

The working paper I wrote about here has now been accepted for publication in Sociological Science. Although the results haven’t changed substantially, I revised it since the last post, so you should use this copy instead. Here’s the abstract:

Maternal Age and Infant Mortality for White, Black, and Mexican Mothers in the United States

This paper assesses the pattern of infant mortality by maternal age for White, Black, and Mexican mothers, using 2013 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Public Use File from the Centers for Disease Control. The results are consistent with the “weathering” hypothesis, which suggests that White women benefit from delayed childbearing while for Black women early childbearing is adaptive because of deteriorating health status through the childbearing years. For White women, the risk (adjusted for covariates) of infant death is U-shaped – lowest in the early thirties – while for Black women the risk increases linearly with age. Mexican-origin women show a J-shape, with highest risk at the oldest ages. The results underscore the need for understanding the relationship between maternal age and infant mortality in the context of unequal health unequal health experiences across race/ethnic groups in the U.S.

Book review: Labor’s Love Lost by Andrew Cherlin

I previously wrote some comments about Andrew Cherlin’s most recent book here, in preparation for a launch event I attended. Here is a full review for submission to Contemporary Sociology.

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Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America, by Andrew J. Cherlin. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014. 258 paper. ISBN: 9780871540300.

Andrew Cherlin’s latest book is a concise history of U.S. family trends since the late 19^th Century. The history builds a well-argued case for policies to improve family stability, to address the problems of children facing “the chaos of postmodern culture and the constraints of the hourglass economy” (p. 195). The book should serve as a staple in the debate over the causes and consequences family change, offering the most reasonable case for the downside of contemporary trends.

Cherlin frames the history around the post-War 1950s-1960s as a period of peak stability and conformity among working-class families, surrounded by periods of greater instability and inequality in the decades before and after. Peak conformity meant the smallest social-class gap in marriage rates between rich and working-class families, compared with the turn of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, when rich people were much more likely to be married than those in working-class occupations. Cherlin sees the trend in the current period as perilous for children because family instability – concentrated among working-class families – is accompanied by high levels of income inequality and poor support for social mobility from institutions outside the family.

Thus, Cherlin argues, we should consider policies to “lessen the effects of the fall of the working-class family on children” by finding ways to “support stable partnerships without returning to the gender imbalances of the past” (p. 176). He favors policies that would disseminate cultural messages in favor of delaying childbearing, bolster education and training for working-class children and young adults, and raise incomes for those with less than a four-year college degree.

This book should be widely read and taught. It is compellingly written, making a sophisticated set of arguments with original evidence; I recommend it for undergraduate as well as graduate courses. Cherlin’s treatment of the “rise of the working-class family” in the industrial era is well-crafted and original. Especially welcome is the extensive discussion of gender norms and the “masculinity imperative” (p. 30) in the construction of the working-class family ideal. He has a non-superficial view of culture, and incorporates evidence from qualitative research and linguistic trends as well as Census data and economic trends. He also pays considerable attention to Black workers, from their historical emergence from slavery to the effect of declining blue-collar opportunities on their families after the post-War economic peak.

Cherlin’s treatment of the era of peak family conformity addresses the abuse, alcoholism, and women’s alienation that are too-often swept under the rug in accounts that privilege family stability and draw not just from historical nostalgia but “male nostalgia” (p. 92). That includes a revealing and enlightening description of his own family upbringing (he was born to White, working-class parents in 1948), in which his father was happy but his mother – whose abilities were underutilized during her time out of the labor market, and who was prescribed opiates to treat allergies – probably was not. But in the end he had a “happy childhood” (p. 99), and his conclusion about the era returns to the privileging of stability: “All things considered, children received good upbringings in these [1950s] families and experienced stable, two-parent environments while growing up” (p. 100). In the decades that followed, marriage become less common, and less stable, for people with less than a four-year college education, in what Cherlin calls the “fall of the working-class family” (which, as he notes, undermined the very notion of social-class identity for families as opposed to individuals).

Cherlin concludes that the 1950s “was a good era for children,” who “benefited from this familistic culture” (pp. 115-116). But the evidence we have for this is based on the fortunes of a generation which, although born to those families, turned against their norms as adults, riding a wave of prosperity into the women’s movement and abandoning universal early marriage, shotgun weddings, and enforced domesticity. It is ironic that so many people (Cherlin is certainly not alone here) attribute the success of the Baby Boom children to a style of upbringing that they themselves largely rejected at the first opportunity.

Cherlin ably represents the growing chorus of social scientists concerned that poor and working-class parents today are “creating complex and unstable family lives that are not good for children” (p. 5). To his credit, Cherlin’s prescriptions for improving family stability mostly focus on education and the labor market, but the stated goal is the promotion of family stability. Why? For all the research into effects of family instability on children, we know that this factor is not more decisive than its economic precursors; that is, it’s more valuable to have one or more parents with adequate education and income (regardless of their marital status) than it is to have stably married parents, many of whom are time-and resource-poor in our economic and policy environment. This point of contention is important because Cherlin’s case for aiming interventions at family stability – which have, as he acknowledges, no record of success – assumes that the parameters of our stingy and ineffective welfare system are constant.

Cherlin makes a strong case for economic policy to promote employment and wage growth, expanded access to education at all levels, and institutional reforms such as financial regulation and a higher minimum wage. Absent from this discussion, however, is any consideration of our welfare system, including any treatment of family leave policy, child tax credits, guaranteed basic income, or access to health care – all part of the current (albeit lopsided) policy debate. There are a lot of proven policy levers to mitigate the effects of family change. Given this range of options, it is unclear why, even as Cherlin records the abject failure of marriage promotion programs, he nevertheless believes “the message of pregnancy postponement may be worth trying,” in conjunction with efforts to improve the labor market at the low end (p. 183).

In conclusion, Labor’s Love Lost is an important, valuable book, from which many sociologists and their students can learn, and over which many fruitful arguments should emerge.

Sociology: “I love you.” Economics: “I know.”

Sour grapes, by Sy Clark. https://flic.kr/p/yFT3a

A sociologist who knows how to use python or something could do this right, but here’s a pilot study (N=4) on the oft-repeated claim that economists don’t cite sociology while sociologists cite economics.

I previously wrote about the many sociologists citing economist Gary Becker (thousands), compared with, for example, the 0 economists citing the most prominent article on the gender division of housework by a sociologist (Julie Brines). Here’s a little more.

It’s hard to frame the general question in terms of numerators and denominators — which articles should cite which, and what is the universe? To simplify it I took four highly-cited papers that all address the gender gap in earnings: one economics and one sociology paper from the early 1990s, and one of each from the early 2000s. These are all among the most-cited papers with “gender” and “earnings OR wages” in the title from journals listed as sociology or economics by Web of Science.

From the early 1990s:

• O’Neill, J., and S. Polachek. 1993. “Why the Gender-gap in Wages Narrowed in the 1980s.” Journal of Labor Economics 11 (1): 205–28. doi:10.1086/298323. Total cites: 168.
• Petersen, T., and L.A. Morgan. 1995. “Separate and Unequal: Occupation Establishment Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap.” American Journal of Sociology 101 (2): 329–65. doi:10.1086/230727. Total cites: 196.

From the early 2000s:

• O’Neill, J. 2003. “The Gender Gap in Wages, circa 2000.” American Economic Review 93 (2): 309–14. doi:10.1257/000282803321947254. Total cites: 52.
• Tomaskovic-Devey, D., and S. Skaggs. 2002. “Sex Segregation, Labor Process Organization, and Gender Earnings Inequality.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (1): 102–28. Total cites: 81.

A smart way to do it would be to look at the degrees or appointments of the citing authors, but that’s a lot more work than just looking at the journal titles. So I just counted journals as sociology or economics according to my own knowledge or the titles.* I excluded interdisciplinary journals unless I know they are strongly associated with sociology, and I excluded management and labor relations journals. In both of these types of cases you could look at the people writing the articles for more fidelity. In the meantime, you may choose to take my word for it that excluding these journals didn’t change the basic outcome much. For example, although there are some economists writing in the excluded management and labor relations journals (like Industrial Labor Relations), there are a lot of sociologists writing in the interdisciplinary journals (like Demography and Social Science Quarterly), and also in the ILR journals.

Results

Citations to the economics articles from sociology journals:

• O’Neill and Polachek (1993): 37 / 168 = 22%
• O’Neill (2003): 4 / 52 = 8%

Citations to the sociology articles from economics journals:

• Petersen and Morgan (1995): 6 / 196: 3%
• Tomaskovic-Devey and Skaggs (2002): 0 / 81: 0%

So, there are 41 sociology papers citing the economics papers, and 6 economics papers citing the sociology papers.

Worth noting also that the sociology journals citing these economics papers are the most prominent and visible in the discipline: American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, and others. On the other hand, there are no citations to the sociology articles in top economics journals, with the exception of an article in Journal of Economic Perspectives that cited Peterson and Morgan — but it was written by sociologists Barbara Reskin and Denise Bielby. Another, in Feminist Economics, was written by sociologist Harriet Presser. (I included these in the count of economics journals citing the sociology papers.)

These four articles are core work in the study of labor market gender inequality, they all use similar data, and they are all highly cited. Some of the sociology cites of these economics articles are critical, surely, but there’s (almost) no such thing as bad publicity in this business. Also, the pattern does not reflect a simple theoretical difference, with sociologists focused more on occupational segregation (although that is part of the story), as the economics articles use occupational segregation as one of the explanatory factors in the gender gap story (though they interpret it differently).

Anyways.

Previous sour-grapes stuff about economics and sociology:

• Sociology unfound (on the Contexts blog)
• My answer to, “Are Economists Overrated?” in the New York Times Room for Debate.
• Sociology citing Becker.

Note:

* The Web of Science categories are much too imprecise with, for example, Work & Occupations — almost entirely a sociology journal –classified as both sociology and economics.

Book review: One Marriage Under God

The following are notes for my remarks at an author-meets-critics session at the Social Science History Association yesterday in Baltimore. The book is One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America, by Melanie Heath.

  

The book is well researched, elegantly argued, easily read, and deeply thought-provoking. I highly recommend it.In the study, Heath analyzes many aspects of the marriage promotion movement, including marriage classes and training and organizing, using participant observation, and interviews and focus groups, in Oklahoma.

I have forgotten that it was from this book that I learned that the welfare reform law of 1996 begins with the sentence, “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” This explains so much about why marriage promotion and welfare reform are one project, how futile they both are, and how reactionary, in my opinion. Heath makes this very clear when she describes the use of welfare money to teach marriage education to white, middle-class couples, ultimately probably widening the “marriage gap between lower and middle-class families.”

I usually criticize marriage promotion for spending poor peoples money on convincing them to get married, but it’s actually often spent helping middle-class people with their marriages altogether. But that makes perfect sense: welfare, just like welfare reform, is made to build up the normative white middle-class family. Thus, when, as Heath observes, poor single mothers resented their useless workshops on the importance of marriage, the program was actually serving its purpose.

Instead of a safety net, in the United States we have marriage – but we have less and less of it. That means it is a privilege and a necessity, and excluding people from it is a form of inequality.

And driving people toward marriage is what we substitute for welfare – how we give people a choice between conformity and destitution for them and their children – and justify that forced choice with Christian morality. 

The passages describing the presence of same-sex couples in marriage education classes are excruciating and extremely revealing. And yet she discovers that even the conservatives in these situations recognize the lesbian couples “have needs too” — a reality that necessitated additional boundary work to protect the core concept at hand. The lesbians literally had to play the roles of heterosexuals in class exercises.

Marriage promotion uses marriage to bolster the gender difference and its hierarchy simultaneously. And it elevates marriage through the contrast with welfare dependency which it sees as “an assault on freedom and responsible citizenship.” Both positions reinforce the gender hierarchy. And this helps to answer why the marriage promotion movement has never embraced same-sex marriage rights (despite a halfhearted and ultimately unsuccessful rearguard effort by David Blankenhorn and a few other washed up marriage promoters).

She presciently includes the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in the research. This is entirely fitting because these two movements have been united from the start — but that connection blossomed in the years since she wrote this book (published in 2012). We see this in the political history and the interlocking organizational leadership networks between marriage promotion and the movement against marriage equality: David Blankenhorn, Maggie Gallagher, Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus, the National Marriage Project, the National Organization for Marriage, the Institute for American Values, the Heritage Foundation, The National Fatherhood Initiative, the Family Research Council. (This movement, incidentally, and especially its research and public relations arms, formed the context in which the Council on Contemporary Families, of which I am now a board member, was organized.) Add William Galston, also Ron Haskins, Marco Rubio, now and the GOP debate over the larger child tax credit (and debate over its refundability).

Heath puts it well when she writes of their “shared ideology that relies on an ideal heterosexual family as a way to manage and organize the diverse and often contradictory threads of market fundamentalism, religion, and morality.”
An important original contribution of this book is Heath’s description of the nationalist and patriotic underpinnings of the marriage promotion movement, which I had not fully appreciated (something also seen in the marriage promotion efforts among American Indians in Oklahoma and the so-called Native American Healthy Marriage Initiative.) Fighting same-sex marriage, and fighting the culture of poverty, are both efforts to shore up the family bulwark of American citizenship.

Marriage promotion, as embodied in the trainings and educational materials that she studies, was built on the program to enhance inherent differences between men and women, which are of course also the pillars upon which opposition to marriage equality stands. And a basis for Christian morality and traditional nostalgic American patriotism — as well as capitalism, or more properly market fundamentalism, because this marriage structure stands in opposition to dependence on the welfare state and in support of the family wage and the patriarchal family economy.

She writes: “this punitive individualism, and the lack of an alternative narrative in the American ethos, enables coalitions of various stripes (conservative Christians, economic conservatives, and centrist liberals) to join together in promoting marriage. In this way marriage ideology connects Americas market fundamentalist corporate culture with moral/religious traditions.”

Marriage promotion — true to the long history of the American welfare system — becomes an inequality reproduction machine, serving race, gender and sexuality divides, and building the ideological supports for widening economic inequality. In the end they don’t increase the amount of marriage, or decrease the amount of poverty, and that does not mean they have failed.

One Marriage Under God belongs in the pantheon of classic historical work on marriage in the United States, including works by Nancy Cott and Stephanie Coontz, as well as Gwendolyn Mink, Linda Gordon, and Ruth Sidel — just off the top of my head. Now that marriage promotion has been demonstrated to be a failure on its own formal terms by the extensive and well-funded and well-conducted studies paid for by the welfare program, and now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended the movement against marriage equality, the book is thankfully more historical then it was just three years ago. But, as a reading of those historical works I just mentioned clearly shows, this thing just will not die. So this book remains essential.

Age composition change accounts for about half of the Case and Deaton mortality finding

This paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, one of whom just won a Nobel prize in economics, reports that mortality rates are rising for middle-aged non-Hispanic Whites. It’s gotten tons of attention (see e.g., “Why poor whites are dying of despair” in The Week, and this in NY Times).

It’s an odd paper, though, in its focus on just one narrow age group over time. The coverage mostly describes the result as if conditions are changing for a group of people, but the group of people changes every year as new 45-year-olds enter and 54-year-olds leave. That means the population studied is subject to change in its composition. This is especially important because the Baby Boom wave was moving through this group part of that time. The 1999-2013 time frame included Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964) from age 35 to age 68.

My concern is that changes in the age and sex composition of the population studied could account for a non-trivial amount of the trends they report.

For example, they report that the increased mortality is entirely concentrated among those non-Hispanic White men and women who have high school education or less. But this population changed from 1999 to 2013. Using the Current Population Survey — which is not the authority on population trends, but is weighted to reflect Census Bureau estimates of population trends — I see that this group became more male, and older, over the period studied. That’s because the Baby Boomers moved in, causing aging, the population reflects women’s advances in education, relative to men, circa the 1970s. Here are those trends:

It’s odd for a paper on mortality trends not to account for account for sex and age composition changes in the population over time. Even if the effects aren’t huge, I think that’s just good demography hygiene. Now, I don’t know exactly how much difference these changes in population composition would make on mortality rates, because I don’t have the mortality data by education. That would only make a difference if the mortality rates differed a lot by sex and age.

However, setting aside the education issue, we can tell something just looking at the whole non-Hispanic White population, and it’s enough tor raise concerns. In the overall 45-54 non-Hispanic White population, there wasn’t any change in sex composition. But there was a distinct age shift. For this I used the 2000 Census and 2013 American Community Survey. I could get 1999 estimates to match Case and Deaton, but 2000 seems close enough and the Census numbers are easier to get. (That makes my little analysis conservative because I’m lopping off one year of change.)

Look at the change in the age distribution between 2000 and 2013 among non-Hispanic Whites ages 45-54. In this figure I’ve added the birth year range for those included in 2000 and 2013.

That shocking drop at age 54 in 2000 reflects the beginning of the Baby Boom. In 2000 there were a lot more 53-year-olds than there were 54-year-olds, because the Baby Boom started in 1946. (Remember, unlike today’s marketing-term “generations,” the Baby Boom was a real demographic event.) So there was a general aging, but also a big increase in 54-year-olds, between 2000 and 2013, which will naturally increase the mortality rate for that year.

So, to see whether the age shift had a non-trivial impact on the number of deaths in this population, I used one set of mortality rates: 2010 rates for non-Hispanic Whites by single year of age, published here. And I used the age and sex compositions as described above (even though the sex composition barely changed I did it separately by sex and summed them).

The 2010 age-specific mortality rates applied to the 2000 population produce a death rate of 3.939 per 1,000. When applied to the 2013 population they produce a death rate of 4.057 per 1,000. That’s the increase associated with the change in age and sex composition. How big is that difference? The 2013 death rate implies 118,313 deaths in 2013. The 2000 death rate implies 114,869 deaths in 2013. The difference is 3,443 deaths. Remember, this assumes age-specific death rates didn’t change, which is what you want to assess effects of composition change.

So I can say this: if age and sex composition had stayed the same between 2000 and 2013, there would have been 3,443 fewer deaths among non-Hispanic Whites in the ages 45-54.

Here is what Case and Deacon say:

If the white mortality rate for ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone.

So, it looks to me like age composition change accounts for about half of the rise in mortality they report. They really should have adjusted for age.

Here is my spreadsheet table (you can download the file here):

As always, happy to be credited if I’m right, and told if I’m wrong. But if you just have suggestions for more work I could do, that might not work.

Follow up: Andrew Gelman has three excellent posts about this. Here’s the last.