Inductivist

A reader claimed in the comments of the last post that liberals live very traditional lifestyles. This is simply not true.

From the General Social Survey (years 2000-2010):


Percent Married

Extremely liberal 29.5
Liberal 36.5
Slightly liberal 43.0
Moderate 46.2
Slightly conservative 50.6
Conservative 58.1
Extremely conservative 57.1

And even though there are fewer liberals who have ever been married and who therefore can get divorced, their rate of divorce is higher:

Percent Divorced

Extremely liberal 17.6
Liberal 17.1
Slightly liberal 15.5
Moderate 14.8
Slightly conservative 14.2
Conservative 12.2
Extremely conservative 12.8


Liberals are also more likely to be unfaithful:


Percent ever cheated on spouse

Extremely liberal 26.1
Liberal 23.6
Slightly liberal 19.7
Moderate 18.2
Slightly conservative 17.9
Conservative 14.0
Extremely conservative 14.0


Percent who cohabited before marriage (1994--most recent year)

Extremely liberal 53.3
Liberal 43.3
Slightly liberal 35.4
Moderate 29.1
Slightly conservative 23.5
Conservative 23.1
Extremely conservative 5.9


Percent of married who have no children

Extremely liberal 23.1
Liberal 19.3
Slightly liberal 17.9
Moderate 13.2
Slightly conservative 12.4
Conservative 10.8
Extremely conservative 7.0

For 72 countries, I calculate a correlation of .44 between the mean IQ of a country and the rate of divorce. The greater wealth of intelligent countries reduces the economic necessity of marriage, but the correlation between per capita GDP and divorce is only .28.

I suspect that less intelligent countries are more likely to see marriage as a change in life status, not a contract. The acid of modern rationality reduces institutions like marriage to voluntary agreements that can be dissolved if unsatisfying. The focus on family used to be intergenerational; now it's business between adults.

Here are a number of additional cross-national correlations that are supportive of a socially conservative orientation (the church data is from here and the divorce data from here):


Pearson Correlations

Alcohol consumption--crude divorce rate .61 (strong relationship)
Crude divorce rate--suicide rate .49 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--alcohol consumption -.40 (medium)
Weely church attendance--suicide -.42 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--crude divorce rate -.34 (medium)

The Family/Gender/Sexual Revolution is a complex phenomenon, but there are signs that the rejection of traditional values continues to spread--50 years after it began.

Here are the percentage of Americans who think that various actions are morally acceptable, measured at the beginning and the end of the last decade (from Gallup):


Percent thinking the behavior is morally acceptable

Sex between unmarried man and woman
Beginning 53
End 59
Change +6

Divorce 
Beginning 59
End 69
Change +10

Having a baby outside of marriage
Beginning 45
End 54
Change +9

Gay marriage should be valid
Beginning 27
End 44
Change +17


Attitudes toward gay marriage have changed most dramatically, but this issue is just the most recently-grown leg of a monster that was born in the Sixties. The new ethic replacing the traditional one claims that any kind of relationship is good as long as it is honest, voluntary, and egalitarian (infidelity and polygamy are as condemned now as 10 years ago). Any limitations beyond that are considered judgmental. Questions of what is good for children or what is good for the country are irrelevant. Freedom from sexual rules, self-fulfillment, accommodativeness, egalitarianism, and androgyny are the new idols. The new Prophet is half Beatnik, half Woman.       

What kind of a woman should you marry? To continue the debate on marriage, let's look at the characteristics of married women who are least likely to get divorced. I focused on women ages 30 to 39 over the years 2000 to 2008. Using logistic regression analysis, I found that the following measures significantly reduce the risk of divorce:


Predictors (logistic regression coefficients)

White -.877
Years of education -.111
Frequency of church attendance -.112
Conservatism -.135

N = 799

All of these predictors are inversely related to divorce at the .05 alpha level. Speaking to the men, O my brothers, if you want to miminize the probability of a breakup, marry a woman who is white, educated, religious, and politically conservative. Mmmm, my kinda woman.

I got a chance to take a closer look at the research article Jason Malloy linked to to support the claim that the majority of cases of wife-initiated divorce are not due to husbands behaving badly. (Thanks to him for digging it up).

The problem is that people are asked what was caused the divorce, but they are not asked to whom they are referring. For example, a woman says that infidelity was the cause, but we don't know if she or her husband was the guilty party. Some of them seem more mutual, like "grew apart", but others are simply unclear. You can see all spontaneously mentioned causes in the table. (Notice how there isn't a single case of, "He turned into a wuss." Maybe it was put in "other.")

The authors do report the following correlations--wife respondent/infidelity .11, wife respondent/alcohol and drugs .13, husband repondent/communication .12, wife respondent/abuse .19, and husband respondent/don't know .24--but all this tells us is that one gender is slightly more likely than the other to report that specific cause. But once again, who did the bad thing is not specified, so we can't draw conclusions about about what percent of women-initiated divorces are caused by the husband's behavior. (You might also say that we can't decide this because women are not divided into initiators and non-initiators, but the other study used in this context shows that answers given by both groups of women generally do not differ significantly).

This leaves the 60% figure a shaky one, but let's see where it takes us. Current estimates put the lifetime probability of a marriage breaking up at just under 50%. According to the study I just mentioned, 69.5% of divorce cases are woman-initiated or the couple have made the decision mutually. If we mulitply .60 by .50 by .695, we get .209. So if you get married, there is a 21% chance that you're wife will leave you or the two of you will decide together to split up when you didn't do anything obviously wrong. Some readers are terrified by the prospect. The Spartans at Thermopylae had nothing on these guys. But I've got something from the study though that helps.

The researchers found that family-oriented people as well as those who place a lower value on self-realization are significantly less likely to initiate a divorce. The authors characterize these folks as "traditional." The take home message here is, lower the risk of divorce by marrying a traditional woman and by being a traditional man--just like several commenters and I have written.

Reasons for divorce: Some readers have implied that in a typical situation, a marriage comes to an end because the woman wants to trade up. Never mind that a couple of children is not a good plan if you want to attract another man. Here is the expert opinion of David Popenoe, a family researcher I trust at Rutgers:

[T]he higher rate of women initiators is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be "badly behaved." Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity.

Copyright 2002 by David Popenoe, the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

He neglected to mention domestic violence--another common reason for divorce.

Everybody's a sociologist when it comes to teen marriage: Let me follow-up on my last post with a comment on today's article in the NYT on teenage pregnancy. They took news of Palin's daughter's pregnancy as an opprtunity to remind readers how teenagers, especially girls, are doomed if they get married and have babies when they're teenagers.

What has happened to Bristol is not the best way to go, but let's use our brains for a second. First, early marriage was widespread 20 years before the divorce explosion of 1965-75. Most divorces take place in the first few years of marriage. If I get time, maybe I can look at this more closely, but I'm guessing that the divorce rate among those who married at 18 in 1950 was lower than those of people marrying at 30 nowadays. There isn't something inherent in early marriage that is conducive to divorce and failure.

Second, so many of these studies on negative outcomes assume that those who have babies as teens are in all important ways the same as those who don't. I haven't seen these studies typically control for things like IQ, talent, farsightedness, self-contol, industriousness, persistence, etc. I have read studies that have indicated that teens who have babies would have turned out poor even if they hadn't gotten pregnant.

To use a personal example, as I did in the last post. My brother got a girl pregnant when both of them were 16. He and the girl were excellent students, but their strict religious upbringing led them to have sex without confronting head-on what they were doing and what needed to be done to prevent pregnancy. (Plus, my bro was unhappy at home and irrationally thought a pregnancy might be a way out).

So the girl got pregnant. Most kids in their shoes would have gotten an abortion, but our type of people is a tad uncomfortable with slaughtering children, especially our own. Our parents and her parents pushed for adoption, but my brother and the girl told them all to go pound sand. They got married in our church 5 months before the baby was born.

Fast forward two decades. My brother has almost finished his MBA, he is the regional director over a number of large assisted-living facilities, and he makes probably three times what I make. His wife got her B.A. and was a very popular local TV news anchor for several years. Double careers were a little too much for them, so she scaled back her career a bit.

They have four beautiful children, and the oldest (the one conceived out of wedlock) has earned a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to a university where the average ACT is close to 30. He is majoring in math, and his college GPA is just about perfect.

Now, of course the sociologists would have predicted disaster for my brother and his wife. So why was the prediction wrong? Because sociologists, along with America's elites, believe that you are the product of your circumstances. If you get zapped with a baby at 17, you're done for. My bro and his wife made it because they are industrious, talented, relentless people. They would have been successful without the early marriage; they were successful with it.

If a sociologist says so, you know he can't be completely right.

Mid-level Job Prestige

Low Job Prestige

In the last post, I showed that marital decline has accompanied the movement of women into the workforce. What about occupational status? Feminists have told us for decades that increases in female job prestige will equalize men and women, and equality will improve the quality of relationships. The graph above (generated from GSS data for Americans 30 and over) shows marital status by job prestige--high, middle, and low prestige as we move from top to bottom. The green section of the bars indicate the percent divorced, and yellow is for separated. About 35% are the middle and high status women are separated, divorced, or never married, compared to 25% of low-prestige women. Once again, liberal social scientists have gotten it wrong: as women move up in the workplace, the institution of marriage declines.

Feminists have been telling us for decades that one's power in a marriage depends on one's personal income, and that women need to be employed to create equality between spouses. This equality, in turn, will lead to more mutually satisfying relationships. The lower graph is the employment status for women ages 30-60 over the period 1972-2006. Full-time employment has grown from 30 to 55%, while being a housewife has plummeted from 55 to less than 20%. While more and more women have moved into the workforce, women's marital happiness has slipped a little over this period (shown in the previous post). The top graph shows that, instead of improving marriage, growth in female employment has paraleled a decline in marriage--more divorced and never-married people. As we saw in the last post, rational predictions about the family made by liberal experts turned out to be exactly wrong.