Inductivist

Whether you are a social conservative or a eugenicist (let me know if there is a less loaded term), we have experienced an unmitigated disaster in the 2010s.  Both camps want healthy married parents having lots of healthy kids that are raised in a safe home.  Here are a series of graphs to document trends away from this:
















The percent married has dropped from 68% in the 1970s to 44% in the 2010s. And look at the trend in never-marrieds: the rate doubled over the past five decades from 14 to 28%.
















The trend is sharper if we only look at young people (ages 18-34). Among this group, the percent married has plummeted from 61% to 30% while the percent never-marrieds jumped from only 30% to 64%. In a word, early marriage is collapsing.
















Accompanying the decline in the institution of marriage is fertility among intelligent women. This graph shows the number of kids for women ages 40-59 with IQs of 118 or higher.

We see a collapse in the number of these women having four children, a strong increase in the percentage having two kids, and most disturbingly, a doubling of childless women--from 15 to 31%.
















A current priority of elites is to get women as educated as possible so they can have the type of careers that give them maximum autonomy.

The social conservative and the eugenicist, by contrast, know that prioritizing female education kills fertility among intelligent women and renders a society incapable of replacing itself with talented people. Maybe there is no necessary connection between education and fertility, but under current conditions, the link is very strong.

The above graph shows the tremendous growth in four-year and advanced degrees among American women. The number of intelligent women like my mom who finished high school, got married, and had four healthy children has become a rarity.
















The success of the gay marriage movement might be the most visible family-related loss that we social conservatives experienced in the past decade. The graph above shows the complete reversal of attitudes among young people (ages 18-34) concerning gay sex. (The General Social Survey doesn't have a question about gay marriage that spans the decades.)

The popularity of same-sex marriage is an important indication that Americans are replacing the belief that an important life purpose is to have a large biological family with the belief that the purpose of life is self-fulfillment and that being married or having one or two kids (biological or not) might work toward fulfillment for some people.

I suspect over the long-term that reproductively-oriented people tend to inherit the earth. Muslims and Africans might eventually displace Western Europeans. More virile people might eventually displace sterile Americans as well.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked American adults if they agreed with the following: "Having children increases people's social standing in society." Answers ranged from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The answers looked like this (sample size = 1,248):

Percent distribution

Strongly Agree  3.7
Agree  29.4
Neither  30.5
Disagree  31.3
Strongly Disagree  5.0

Answers are pretty normally distributed. People simply disagree on this issue.

I looked at a list of variables to see what predicted agreement--age, sex, race, city size, South v. North, income, education, IQ, church attendance, and political orientation.

The only three variables that matter are sex, income, and education: 39.6% of men agree or strongly agree that children increase one's social standing compared to only 27.7% of women. Perhaps women are more likely to see kids as obstacles to status since conventional status comes from education and work; activities that, for women anyway, conflict with raising children.

43.2% of people who dropped out of school agree or strongly agree that children give status, while only 31.8% of people with advanced educations feel the same.

Income is similar: 34.7% of low-income but only 25.2% of high-income people agree or strongly agree with the statement.

Since there is some tension between energy devoted to kids versus education and work, it looks like people who have earned lots of education and income status tend to devalue children, while the opposite is true for people with little conventional status.

I once discussed this issue with my physician brother-in-law. I told him that the most accomplished people are having the fewest children and that he and I were exceptions with our large families. I added that in an evolutionary sense, all these successful people were losers but didn't realize they were losers. My brother-in-law then responded, "That's right. We've got them right where we want them."

Here is a nice table from the study in Social Science Research I mentioned before showing different outcomes for people raised in lesbian vs. straight homes:

I had a family studies professor who informed us students that Democrats are the people who care about others.

The GSS asked respondents how often they visit their mother (sample size = 355). I calculated the percent who visit at least monthly. The estimate is 72 percent for whites who voted for Bush in 2000. It is 63 percent for whites who voted for Gore or Nader. Among women, the respective figures are 74 and 62 percent.

According to this new study, eating breakfast and dinner more frequently with family members was unrelated to cognitive and behaviorial outcomes for kids from kindergarten to 8th grade. A parents-are-everything model would predict that family meals are important since it is a time when parents can encourage and instruct kids about school and behavior. (It is an opportunity for bonding as well. One of my fat friends associates food with his mom's love.)

My students absolutely refuse to believe that parenting has little effect on a child's IQ and personality. Citing research doesn't matter. The idea is repugnant to them. Americans hate genes.

For those of you who are more open: don't decide to not have kids because work takes up too much of your time. The truth is, you ain't that important. (Your genes are, on the other hand.)

Pew asked a sample of Americans if they were accepting of all the changes in the family over the past four decades; for example, more gay couples raising kids. They then used the answers to categorize people as accepters, skeptics, or rejecters.

Any enlightened conservative knows that pro-family Hispanics are more alarmed by these trends than anyone else, and that their mass migration to the country will save the American family. Just look at the table:







































Oops--my mistake. Among racial/ethnic groups, Hispanics are the least concerned about family decline.

It's a win-win for liberal immigration enthusiasts. Not only are the ranks of loyal Democrats swelling. The new folks will put up absolutely no fight as the American family is gutted.

While it is not easy to find good ideas in sociology, it's not impossible. One useful concept is called "exposure" (I'm not sure a discipline really invented it. It's common sense). It's simple: behavior depends a lot on ease and opportunity. Why am I good friends with the professor next door, and not the guy down the hall? Simply because I bump into my neighbor all the time. Why are children often beaten by women--the less aggressive sex? One reason is because men are around kids less.

This truth has conservative implications. For example, it suggests that if you want to reduce the frequency of marital infidelity, reduce the number of men and women who work together.

The GSS asked: 1) have you ever cheated? and 2) what is your work status?  Here are the percentages who have ever been unfaithful:

Percent ever unfaithful (sample size = 7,890 white women--married or previously married)

Works full-time 16.9*
Part-time 13.0*
Homemaker  8.3
Retired 8.5

*significantly higher than homemaker

Full-time working women are twice as likely as those keeping house to cheat. In this respect, sex desegregation in the workplace is anti-family.

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.       

It turns out that feminists haven't got their claws in as deeply as it looks. From Heritage:

In reviewing data from the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, Wilcox found that only 18 percent of married women with children said they would prefer to work full-time, in contrast to 46 percent who would prefer to work part-time and 36 percent who said that they would prefer to stay at home. In addition, among married moms who were working full-time, nearly 75 percent said they would rather work fewer hours or not at all.

As a follow-up to the last post, let's look at the relationship between working and fertility for smart women only. While overall fertility is a concern of much of Europe, the American TFR is over 2. Since we don't have to worry at the moment about the country shrinking, we can concern ourselves with the eugenics question. Following the same rules as last time, I simply limited the sample to married women with scores 8 through 10 on the Wordsum vocabulary test.

Married women who work part-time or not at all have more kids. The differences are more glaring here than for women of all levels of IQ. (Differences, however, are not significant since the sample is small). To be specific, smart stay-at-home moms have 1 1/2 times as many babies. Now that's eugenic.  

FeministX has done a couple of interesting analyses of the relationship between employment and fertility. Her approach is macrolevel: she estimates the correlation across 23 countries, and over time in the U.S. The problem is that, more often than not, you use macrolevel data when you don't have relevant individual-level data available. With microlevel data, you can avoid the problems of small samples, country differences in data collection, and the danger of making the ecological fallacy (e.g., claiming that it is working women, as opposed to homemakers, who are having all the kids when the data can't tell you that). Plus, you have to use whatever macrolevel measures that happen to be available, while with GSS data you can custom-design your age group, period, race, etc. The typical weakness of individual-level survey data is whether respondents can be trusted. Fortunately, a solid argument can be made that women in the GSS are accurate in their answers concerning work status and number of offspring.

To answer the question, does working lead to more children, it seems to me that we should look at women who are old enough to have shown their fertility tendencies but are not so old that their kids are grown and consequently have entered the workforce. How about 35 to 44? (Feel free to do your own data crunching if you prefer another approach). And let's look at only this decade so we observe recent behavior.  Also--I suppose we want to look at married women since no one would want to see single motherhood encouraged. Here are the results:

* p < .05, two-tail test, compared with full-time status.

Married women who work part-time or who keep house average significantly more offspring than those who work full-time.

I looked up the demographic literature, and the general story--whether from microlevel or macrolevel studies--is that working reduces fertility. The one expection I found was that after 1985 the relationship across OECD countries switched from a negative to a positive. Some demographers have explained it in terms of factors like wider availability of day care centers, flexible hours at work, maternity leave--basically more social support for working mothers. Other demographers point to the negative relationship in each of these countries over time (FemX shows the opposite in the U.S.) and use fancy models to explain away the positive cross-sectional correlation (I don't have time at the moment to figure them out).  So the conventional wisdom of the discipline (most clearly seen in the microlevel research) is that working reduces fertility--and fertility also reduces work--but work and babies are becoming less incompatible as societies adjust to the new realities. FemX's point that more income can help a couple afford additional babies seems reasonable, but mom takes on a much heavier load, and not everyone is so industrious.

I agree with the reader who wrote that talented adults need to get the message that parents have little influence on their kids' personalities, and that this old idea that children have to be doted on 24/7 to turn out normal is bogus. Send the tots to day care. Hell, for all I know, they'll be fine at boading school.

Let me add, however, that there are other serious consequences of female employment to worry about. It has probably been the driving force behind the decline of the American family. Now that women are working outside the home, marriage is no longer an economic necessity--it's a choice. So women are waiting longer to get married, delaying children, having illegitimate kids, and walking away from their marriages. And men realize that now a woman can take care of herself, so he's freer to not marry the mother of his children, to divorce his wife, and to fail to support the kids. It seems pretty clear that, overall, the breadwinner model is superior.

In the last post, I showed that close to 20 percent of white moms are married homemakers. Here's a graph of whites moms of all work statuses and marital statuses over the past four decades (N = 8,209). It's not a surprise that the breadwinner family took a nosedive in the 70s, but things have stabilized pretty much since 1990. If fact, you can see that the share of moms who work full-time has dropped a bit in this decade--it's less than 50 percent.

There is a good case to be made for the breadwinner family. There are married moms who have to work out of economic necessity, but "necessity" is often stretched to ridiculous proportions. I'm surrounded by families with $50,000 SUVs and huge homes that are a pain in the ass to clean and maintain.

In my home, we live modestly and take pride in the fact that we don't give damn what the neighbors think, and my wife gets to do whatever she wants. Her staying at home makes a large family much easier to pull off. Research says a woman will be happiest if she's doing what she wants to do.

If I were a mom, I would opt for homemaking because I could do all the things that are important to me; things that a job would make difficult. First, I could have a large family much more easily and thereby increase my chances of having one child who turned out not to be a disappointment (joking). Little kids are a lot of work, but once they're in school, I'd have plenty of time for reading and blogging--something I don't have much time for with a full-time job. You might respond that employment is so meaningful and rewarding and blah, blah, blah. If that's the case for you, great, we need dedicated people.

Some might think that being a professor is the kind of job that would be at the center of one's life. It may be for some. For me it's a paycheck. Ninety percent of the students hit the mental delete key after completing my final exam. The whole process is hardly worth the time. And if I want to have success publishing, I have to play the whore and give liberal editors what they're looking for. And committee work: oh my God, what a waste of time. Endless gasbaggery. At my institution, we spend 80% of our time trying to figure out how to make students with 95 IQs understand what guys with 140 IQs are talking about.

And I imagine that my job is much better than most. Do you women really want to push paper in some little gray cubicle just so you can keep up with the Joneses? All that stress and hassle? Many look at homemaking as servant work or something, but working women have to do all the stuff at home too, plus everything at work. How did women get conned into working so hard?

Housewifery is a bit like the life of an aristocrat. I mean, how did those folks live? They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You know, socializing, playing cards, and maybe a little charity work sprinkled in. Isn't that the old sterotype of a housewife? Myself, I'd use my time to read and write, but that's the point: you don't have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it. You choose how to spend your time.

And guys, do I have to convince you that there are benefits to having your wife stay home? Yes, your standard of living will drop some, but my wife saves a lot of money too by doing the things that other people have to pay to get done. I'll confess that it gives me an old-fashioned feeling of pride to be the breadwinner, and a wife feels more for a man that she depends on.

But let's cut to the chase. Do you really want your wife spending her day working under a guy who is probably more manly than you are? Bad idea, especially if you two are having problems. Over the years, I've known several unhappy wives at school who have given me inappropriate attention. Is it some mystery that when you put vulnerable women and authoritative men together, you sometimes get sex? (Don't get me wrong, I've always behaved myself.) I know housewives can be bad too, but exposure matters, and the world of housewives is typically other women and children. Just as I like it.

Which is more common: single moms or married homemakers? In the debate concerning sex, marriage and family, I'd like to avoid the extremes of folks who say on one side that the diversification of family life is to be celebrated and those on the other side who claim that traditional family life is dead and Armageddon looms. Big themes like this have to be addressed with data in pieces, so here's my first installment.

Using General Social Survey data (N = 1,872), I calculated the percentage of all white moms ages 20-45 in this decade who have a least one child who: 1) have never been married; or 2) are married homemakers. Which group do you think is larger? Out all of these moms, 11.4% are never-marrieds; 18.9% are married homemakers. When I was a undergraduate almost 20 years ago, I read that the number was close to 20%. It hasn't changed. The American family is becoming de-institutionalized: absent social pressures and economic incentives to conform to the traditional ideal, people are pursuing personal preferences. Behavior is now reflecting individual personalities more, so the future is likely to be a real mix of arrangements, but many people, like my wife who is a homemaker, will choose a traditional (and societally constructive) lifestyle because it suits them. Of course, I'd prefer to see a traditionalist revival, but I'm not that optimistic.

Our country's shift toward expressive individualism and away from role orientation may have led to the decline of the American family and society, but that is offset by the fact that people are much happier these days, right?

Um, no. The graph shows reported happiness between the years 1972 and 2008. There hasn't been any change. The same is true for women as well as for men. We've taken a wrecking ball to the family, and what have we gotten for it? Zilch.

Another reason to have a family: It's a smart crowd that visits Inductivist, so I'm sure you guys have thought about this before, but I have to make the case anyway.

Many readers are atheists, and I, myself, have to make the case to you for having children? A Christian like myself hopes for existence beyond the grave. If I have no kids, so what, I will never end.

Many of you respect evolution and genes as well. Nature says if you don't have kids, you basically missed the point. You are a big, fat loser. You crossed the finish line last. In my view, it's not completely inaccurate to say you are your genes. (My pro-life position probably has something to do with this view). An endless chain of ancestors got you here, and you're okay being the loser who brings that awesome success to a pathetic end?

I've got a bunch of little Rons running around (God help us). They might not be able to continue the ancient chain, but they have a better chance than your non-existent kids. It's the closest you're going to get to immortality, unless you're Isaac Newton or George Washington. And sad as it is, most of us ain't Newton or Washington.

Now, some of you might not care in the least about your ancestors or immortaility. Understood. But let me make one more pitch, even though it will probably fail to move your type as well. You are capable, talented folks. Your community, your country needs the kinds of kids you would raise. In these selfish times where duty means little, this argument will sound pathetic, but I'm making it anyway. Who's going to run America in the future: your kids or those of your high-school dropout neighbor?

And for those of you who do believe in life after death, I'm probably preaching to the choir about having a family, but you simply do not know you will exist beyond death. Any thoughtful person recognizes they could be wrong on this. So hedge your bet, and if it turns out that you're nothing more than lunch for worms, well, the family goes on.

Also--encourage your relatives to have kids. You should be making my arguments to them. Even if I was childless, I have twelve nieces and nephews and dozens of cousins. Think of yourself as one element of the clan, and how the clan might go on indefinitely. It might not work for you, but I like the thought.

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.

Whites, N = 24,684




People used to be more indulgent about affairs, at least for men, but now they are much more approving of sex before marriage. I'm not thrilled with either era, but if you're going to be free sexually, I would prefer that you do it before children are involved. We traditionally make a big deal about divorce, but it's breakup of any sort with children involved that's the problem.

People seem to put marriage on a high pedestal now. Higher status people are thinking about how it's the institution where our precious children are raised and how they will be ruined or saved depending on the parenting, while lower status folks will start families without marriage, but still see it as an ideal they hope to eventually have.

And once you finally get married, you've got to get it right (although our expressive individualism makes that difficult). Does Hollywood have something to do with the idealization of marriage? Sailer has writen about the pro-family messages found in some films.

Can we attribute the moral improvement to feminism, to a greater concern for the treatment of women, like we might with attitudes towards wife beating and rape? Damn, I hate giving fems credit for anything. Is it due to a greater desire for couples to have an authentic relationship; to have real honesty?

If you're inclination is not a moralistic one like mine, keep in mind that society's condemnation of cheating benefits us beta males by making it harder for the alphas to have multiple women. If you're an alpha, why are you reading this dumb blog when you could be out on the prowl?

N = 10,999

N = 877

N = 883

In earlier posts, General Social Survey data have pointed to higher rates of problem behavior by atheists (i.e., crime, illegal drugs, and alcoholism). I suggested in the last post that atheists are skeptics in general and might question norms of all kinds, not just the existence of God. It might be that rejecting conventional rules of behavior might throw one back on his free judgment which is influenced by self-interest.

I wondered if this same tendency might be seen with family life. The top chart shows belief in God by one's marital status. Atheists are more likely to have never married (32.1% compared to 18.7% of believers). Younger age might be a factor here, but I found the same pattern among 40-60 year olds. (The younger age does explain lower rates of widowhood). More never-married atheists does not give them lower rates of separation and divorce: 21.1% are one or the other, compared to 17.5% of people who know there is a God.

In the two lower graphs, more atheists than believers are having serious problems with a spouse (13.6 vs. 8.1%) even though fewer of them are married, and a similar difference is seen on the question about breaking up with a fiance (13.6% vs. 5.1%).

The samples for the last two graphs are too small to give us much confidence since atheists are so rare, but the overall pattern suggests more family instability among atheists.

Age at marriage: The conventional wisdom is that the later you marry, the more likely that the marriage will last. This idea stems more from elite rejection of the 1950s model of family life than it does the research. (Research shows that teen marriages are the ones at risk).

Getting married while young is now considered low-class. By contrast, a long stretch of lies, used people, broken hearts, STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and abortions is a sign of enlightenment.

Tens of thousands of Americans have been asked about their age and marriage and their current marital status by the General Social Survey. I divided people into groups based on age at marriage, and looked at marital statuses after at least 20 years had passed:


Percent in each category

Married in teens
Married 58.9
Divorced/separated 19.9
Widowed 21.2

Married between ages 20 and 24
Married 68.2
Divorced/separated 13.6
Widowed 18.2

Married between ages of 25 and 29
Married 69.2
Divorced/separated 11.2
Widowed 19.6

Married between the ages of 30 and 34
Married 65.7
Divorced/separated 11.0
Widowed 23.3

Married between the ages of 35 and 39
Married 57.9
Divorced/separated 10.4
Widowed 31.7

Married between the ages of 40 and 44
Married 56.9
Divorced/separated 11.1
Widowed 32.0

The benefit that is gained by waiting is gained by your early 20s. The chance of being divorced or separated is roughly the same for everyone else, and the rate of widowhood is higher for those who married late.

Many of those who married later had failed cohabitation experiences which would add to the rate of relationship failures if they were counted.

Which reminds me of another research finding that contradicts the modern attitude toward family formation: people who cohabit before marriage are more, not less, likely to get divorced.