Overturning Roe and the modern family

Conservatives get one thing right: Abortion rights are a fundamental, clash-of-civilization-level battle. What is at stake, in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is a woman’s autonomy over her own body, yes, but with it the foundation of modern family life.

Mexico City’s program to distribute ivermectin to 200,000 COVID-19 patients, and the bad science that propped it up

They gave ivermectin to thousands of people outside of a controlled experiment. Was that unethical and bad medicine given the state of knowledge in late 2020? Yes.

Talking about generations with Jean Twenge

A good conversation. With transcript and audio.

Genetics is the truther conspiracy of racial inequality

Genetic explanation for race differences is like a truther conspiracy theory for people like Sam Harris and Charles Murray.

Alexa devaluation, cutting room floor edition

Not only named after a robot, but a subservient female one.

Pew response and attempted clarification

46% of people both "correctly" identified their generation title, and said the term describes them "well."

Now in the Washington Post: The generation labels mean nothing. It’s time to retire them

The Washington Post has published my Opinion piece on generation labels, "The generation labels mean nothing. It's time we retired them." They even commissioned art, which moves! by Tara Jacoby, for The Washington Post This follows the series of posts on this blog, going back a few years, you can read under the generations tag.…

Hard times and falling fertility in the United States

The text and figures of this short paper are below, and it's also available as a PDF on SocArXiv, in more citable form. The Stata code and other materials are up as well, here. It's pretty drafty -- very happy to hear any feedback. Preamble: When Sabrina Tavernise, Claire Cain Miller, Quoctrung Bui and Robert…

Why you’ll never establish the existence of distinct “generations” in American society

We're not going to find a set of fixed divisions that works across arenas -- such as social attitudes, family behavior, and economic status.

Open letter to the Pew Research Center on generation labels

I posted a draft of this, with a discursive preamble, yesterday. To see all the posts on generations, here's the tag. Sign the letter here. We are demographers and other social scientists, writing to urge the Pew Research Center to stop using its generation labels (currently: Silent, Baby Boom, X, Millennial, Z). We appreciate Pew’s…