Standing as one

A friendly gadfly notes the seemingly out-of-character failure to break down the results on preferred methods of raising a family by race. It wasn't included for a few reasons; as someone with an inclination towards citizenism, there are times when capturing the entire American flavor sounds more appetizing than unnecessarily compartmentalizing the palates (although that's admittedly an approach that doesn't tell the whole story--further drilling down is usually required); racial differences are fairly marginal; and sample sizes for non-whites aren't as large we would ideally like them to be.

But the data are there, so why cover them up? Decide for yourself if there is anything additional that needs saying. The following table shows the percentages of respondents, by race (N in parentheses) in 2012, who identified each of the following six scenarios as the most ideal:

Arrangement	Whites (712)	Blacks (151)	Hispanics (73)	Asians (46)
Mother home, father full-time	40.6%	34.7%	45.4%	34.4%
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.1%	43.2%	36.3%	53.6%
Both full-time	11.3%	17.3%	2.3%	7.5%
Both part-time	6.3%	4.7%	14.9%	4.5%
Mother full-time, father part-time	0.2%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Mother full-time, father home	0.6%	0.0%	1.1%	0.0%

Even among a segment of the population for which over two-thirds of babies are born out of wedlock, the acknowledged ideal is one in which dad brings home the bacon and mom cooks it up.

It is often errantly argued that Hispanics are "natural conservatives", though these results make them appear quite progressive indeed--nearly 15% of those surveyed seem to have acclimated themselves to a Peak Jobs future in which part-time employment becomes more and more the norm not merely among the elderly and those in school, but among those in their prime working years as well.

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), FAMWKBST(1-6)

They aren't meant to pee standing up

++Addition++Staffan points out that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, the concept of feminism as an organizing principle is in decline:

How much of that is due to realization of biological differences and how much is due to female concerns being superseded by the concerns of 'victim' classes like blacks and gays who higher up on the victimology pyramid?

---

Gavin McInnes went into the HuffPo harpy's nest to--colorfully, as is his wont--assert that women tend to be happier following their maternal instincts than they are devoting all their energy to getting ahead in the rat race. He was met with lots of supercilious condescension but, predictably, nothing he asserted was empirically challenged. Unfortunately, his empirical grounding was insinuated rather than explicitly presented. The GSS can aid him in the future.

For starters, let's look at feminism as an idea. In the mid-nineties, the GSS asked respondents whether or not they considered themselves feminists. Self-described feminists, despite being modestly better educated, more intelligent (based on wordsum scores), and wealthier than those who didn't identify as such, reported lower levels of personal happiness than non-feminists. The following table shows the feminist/non-feminist breakdown among women who describe themselves as "very happy", "pretty happy", and "not too happy":

Happiness	Feminists	Normals
Very happy	24.5%	75.5%
Pretty happy	27.8%	72.2%
Not too happy	34.4%	65.6%

Feminists comprise less than one-quarter of women who are "very happy" but over one-third of those who are "not too happy".

Sure, the argument can be made that happiness is subjective and even though the non-feminists are more content, they're not objectively doing as well since they don't have as much money or education as the feminists do. That line of reasoning doesn't contradict McInnes' point, though. Instead, it strengthens it. Making that sort of judgment in favor of feminists because of career success is to assess female success by traditionally male--that is, masculine--standards, and the women whose lives more resemble men in this regard express lower levels of happiness than do women who travel life's more traditionally feminine path.

If that's overly abstract, let's take a look from another angle, one of social cohesion. In 2004, the GSS conducted a special module querying respondents on the most important aspect of their identities. Participants were able to choose from a list of ten, three of which are of special relevance to this discussion--occupation, gender, and family/marital status. The following table shows, among women who indicated one of those three identifiers as most important to defining who they are, the percentages who are "very proud", "somewhat proud", and "not very proud" of being American:

Identifies by	Very proud	Somewhat proud	Not very proud
Occupation	78.3%	18.7%	3.0%
Gender	70.2%	26.0%	3.8%
Family/marital status	84.3%	14.3%	1.3%

Women who are women, first and foremost, are the least content with the society they live in, those who most strongly identify with their work more middling, and those who care most about hearth and heart the most satisfied with it.

The survey also shows that, across a variety of measures, men are more willing than women are to make sacrifices--overtime, odd shifts, etc--in other areas of their lives for the sake of work. The converse of this, of course, is that women are less willing to put work ahead of other areas of life, like, say, raising a family.

What about the perceptions broader society has regarding what is, generally, the more preferable way for families to be raised? Collected in 2012, these figures still have that new car smell. The tables are reposted here from a post put together earlier this year. The following table shows the percentages of respondents who identified each of the following six scenarios as the most ideal:

Arrangement, all responses	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	39.7
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.6
Both full-time	11.3
Both part-time	6.8
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.5

Looks like we need a runoff to decide whether or not the woman should be a full time homemaker or should instead enjoy occasional breaks from the homestead to earn a few bucks while dad takes the kids. Fewer than 1-in-100 think Mr. Mom is the way to go, and the dual careerist path where, in McInnes' words, "shaping a human life" is put on the back burner, isn't very popular either.

Some great victory women in the workforce has been! On the bright side, though, it's self-perpetuating objective--the more women there are working, the lower the wages both working men and working women are able to command, and consequently the greater the need for women to enter the workforce to make ends meet, let alone raise a family!

Perhaps it's skewed heavily by the patriarchal enforcers of patriarchy, the patriarchs themselves. The response results, this time with only women considered:

Arrangement, women only	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	33.6
Mother part-time, father full-time	45.7
Both full-time	11.7
Both part-time	8.5
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.3

The vast majority--we're talking 4 out of 5--of Americans conceive of the ideal family environment being one in which a man works full-time and a woman works either part-time or not at all. It's as though they recognize some sort of special bond between a mother and the child her body spent nine devoted months bringing into the world.

Maybe the patriarchs have brainwashed their own barefoot wives slaving away in the kitchen into falling for the breadwinner-homemaker ideal, but what about women who think for themselves? Liberal women only (n = 130):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	23.1
Mother part-time, father full-time	48.4
Both full-time	12.9
Both part-time	15.0
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.6

The feminists may have three or four waves on their side, but McInnes has the tsunamic force of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary forces on his.

GSS variables used: SEX(2), HAPPY, FEMINIST, FAMWKBST(1-6), SEX(2), POLVIEWS(1-3), AMPROUD1(1-3), SOCID1(1,3,8)

Fighting the good fight

Photo diary of a loyal soldier in Agnostic's legion:

This is only the avuncular role. Just wait until it's the paternal one!

Consanguinity and corruption

In the wake of MG's essay on the nature and nurture of corruption, I wondered if a hard correlation between consanguinity rates and graft at the national level had been discovered. Searching for as much, the top returns I received were from MG and HBD Chick. Apparently, it hasn't been an area of academic interest, though HBD Chick is deserving of an academic spot for her intellectual curiosity about and indefatigable efforts researching and relaying consanguinity through history and up to the present to any who happen to be interested in as much.

Why should academics and policy makers take note, though, when they've already identified the culprits? They are, of course, bad laws, bad leaders, and bad institutions! Fix these things and any country is capable of resembling Norway. Any day now we'll get the right laws and enforcement mechanisms in place and use them to throw out the crooks and set things straight in Zimbabwe, Zaire, Syria, Sudan, the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea...

As is often the impetus here, not finding what I was looking for meant needing to figure it out. The data aren't perfect by any stretch, but something is better than nothing. Computing simple, unweighted averages for each country for which studies and surveys have been conducted and subsequently recorded on consang.net and then comparing them to Transparency International's 2011 Corruptions Perception Index yields a correlation of .44 (p = 0). In places where extended families are important and family members are more closely related to one another than they are in the West, outsiders are treated with much less even handedness than kin are and nepotism is, if not the rule, at least perfectly acceptable. In these places, if you're not blood, you're going to have to pay to play.

A correlation of .44 is considered fairly strong in the infinitely varied world of the social sciences, but the true relationship between corruption and consanguinity is almost certainly even more vigorous than that. I'm using imperfect and sporadic data. There is nothing available on inbreeding for about half the countries in the world while for India there are 45 studies for which I must, by necessity, compute a simple average from, because even if I wanted to try and weight the sources for geographic and demographic representativeness within India, I'd be utterly unable to do so competently since I know so little about that extremely complicated country of over 1 billion people.

Further, even to the extent that the data are representative, they leave something to be desired, as the chickadee explains:

what we are talking about here when we discuss inbreeding vs. outbreeding and nepotism and/or corruption are types of altruistic behaviors -- and these behaviors/attitudes have evolved differently in different populations, of course, over time. so you can't just take a population that has been inbreeding for scores of generations, and likely evolved certain altruistic behaviors, and change their behavior patterns via just one or two generations of outbreeding. there is going to be some lag-time.

 why do i say this? because the problem with using the consang.net numbers for the kind of analysis you describe is that there is no time depth to them. if you look at the data @consang.net, it appears as though the chinese have similar inbreeding/outbreeding rates to western europe or canada, but that's only in the last generation or so (and even that is debatable). as i've blogged about, the chinese have been inbreeding for literally millennia. any effects that's had on altruistic behaviors are NOT going to be overturned in one or two generations.

what needs to be done is that the histories of inbreeding/outbreeding in different populations need to be quantified (part of my ongoing, neverending project @hbd chick (~_^) ), and then those numbers need to be compared to transparency international's and/or other figures.

Yet despite this, we still see a rigorous, statistically significant correlation between corruption and consanguinity. Randomly generated numbers don't correlate with one another. If (when?) much of the remaining randomness in the consanguinity numbers is removed and the appropriate adjustments for time depth are made, the observed correlation will prove to be stronger still.

More on the myth of Hispanic social conservatism

From the Pew Research Center comes more evidence that the open borders Republicans' nonsense about Hispanics being natural Republicans because of their putative "family values" social conservatism is just that, nonsense.



Pew conducted a survey earlier this year in which respondents were queried about their positions on seven areas of contemporary change in family structure that has occurred in the US over the last several decades. The seven are "more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them", "more unmarried couples raising children", "more gay and lesbian couples raising children", "more people living together without getting married", "more mothers of young children working outside the home", "more people of different races marrying each other", and "more women not ever having children". Respondents rated each of the items as being "good for society", "bad for society", or "makes no difference".



From the responses, Pew categorized participants into three groups of roughly equal size ("accepters", "skeptics", and "rejecters"). Accepters were the most likely to render the changes as being good for society and rejecters the most likely to render them bad for society, while skeptics fell in between.



The following table displays a progressive index for various demographic groupings, computed by simply taking the percentage of each group classified as accepters and subtracting from that the percentage of the group classified as rejecters. Thus, the higher the value, the more progressive that group is:

Sex
Men	-8
Women	+7
Race
White	-5
Black	-1
Hispanic	+25
Age
18-29	+23
30-49	+2
50-64	-5
65+	-28
Marital status
Married	-15
Unmarried	+16
Political affiliation
Republican	-38
Democrat	+22
Independent	+1
Electoral status
Registered voter	-7
Unregistered	+19
Church attendance
Weekly+	-33
Monthly or less	+3
Seldom/never	+34

Hispanics hold far more 'progressive' views on the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family than blacks and whites do. Who would've thought blacks are even more natural Republicans than Hispanics are?! Hispanics are even slightly more progressive than self-described Democrats and those under the age of 30 are. Only the irreligious are more libertine in their views on the state of the family in contemporary America than Hispanics are.



The other results come as little surprise, meshing well with conventional wisdom, with a couple possible exceptions in the sex and registered voters gaps. After all, it's women who are said to suffer more from single parenthood, hence the recourse available to women through the legal system to force absent fathers to transfer resources to them. Regarding registered voters being more traditional than the population at large, it's yet another reason I'm an opponent of universal suffrage.

Educational attainment and barrenness in the US

In the comments of a previous post on the relationship between fecundity and educational attainment in the US, Bruce Charlton wondered what percentage of women never had children by educational category, noting that in Europe around one-third of female college graduates are barren.

Fertility in the US is higher than that among those with bachelor's degrees, but at the doctoral level, nearly one in three women never get around to starting a family. There isn't much in the way of surprises (heh) across groups, but the GSS has tracked the same data since its inception back in the early seventies. So, for comparative purposes, the percentages of women of the same age grouping who participated in the survey from 1973 through the end of that decade and reported never having children are also included in the following table, which shows the percentage of women by educational cohort who reported having no children*:

Education	2000s	1970s
No HS	6.2%	12.0%
Less than HS	6.5%	7.0%
HS grad	11.0%	7.3%
Up to associate's	12.8%	7.3%
Up to bachelor's	21.3%	10.0%
Up to master's	21.9%	14.9%
Up to doctorate	31.9%	32.1%

No difference among those who climb to the top of the academic mountain today and those who did so a generation ago (although at that time they represented less than 1% of all women; today they comprise nearly 4% of the female population). A significant change has occured among those who attend college without going as far, however. The percentage of these women who are not having children has almost doubled in three decades, while among the least educated, the proportion who forego kids has been halved.

GSS variables used: YEAR(1973-1980)(2000-2008), SEX(2), AGE(36-62), EDUC(0-8)(9-11)(12)(13-14)(15-16)(17-18)(19-20), CHILDS

* No high school = 0-8 years of education; Some high school = 9-11 years; High school graduate = 12 years, Up to associate's = 13-14 years; Up to bachelor's = 15-16; Up to master's = 17-18 years; Up to doctorate = 19-20 years.

Educational attainment and fecundity in the US

The correlation between educational attainment and fecundity has been a topic here on multiple occasions. At the national level, the gender gap in education is a strong predictor of national fertility rates. As measured by the World Economic Forum's 2007 report entitled "The Global Gender Gap", the correlation between fertility and educational parity is an inverse .75 (p=0), far stronger than it is among the other measures of gender equality, including economic participation and opportunity (.22), political empowerment (.22), and health and survival (.01).

In the US, where educational attainment is near parity and shifting in women's favor, a strong relationship between educational attainment and having kids exists. The following table and graph* depicts this among baby boomers, the youngest generation to have passed reproductive viability, from responses given from the turn of the century on:

	Women		Men
Education	Children	n	Children	n
No HS	3.26	167	2.86	156
Less than HS	2.80	340	2.26	308
HS grad	2.23	1123	2.07	937
Up to associate's	2.16	1040	1.98	788
Up to bachelor's	1.87	842	1.90	742
Up to master's	1.67	391	1.75	297
Up to doctorate	1.39	155	1.95	222

Both sexes follow the trend of more school, fewer kids to send to school, but it is especially pronounced among women. This is not to insinuate causality. Pursuing higher levels of education proxies for a lot of other factors that influence fecundity, like a long-term career orientation for which children are viewed as a handicap. I'm aware of the point made by Agnostic:

The idea that female empowerment or education (as a route to empowerment) is driving -- rather than merely associated with -- the demographic transition ignores history. It started at least in the 1700s among the French, continued through what feminists would call the oppressive Victorian era, etc.

Nonetheless, the dysgenic relationship is discouraging. Though the demographic transition started before the contemporary ecumenical educational system came into existence, the association is self-evidently strong, and is plausibly accentuating the effect not only by reducing total fertility, but also through delaying fertility, a more furtive filcher of our future.

We need methods to speed up the educational process, like self-paced coursework and subject-specific standardized testing (think Advanced Placement tests for those in college) that allows autodidacts to receive credit as soon as they've demonstrated proficiency in a subject rather than after four inefficient months of spending three hours per week having it delivered to them at varying levels of effectiveness. Ideally, passing the bar would be the only requirement for practicing law and passing the CPA exam the only requirement for becoming a CPA. If this results in a perceived glut of lawyers and accountants, the respective tests can simply be made more difficult. While the relative value of high parental socioeconomic status will decrease and higher conscientiousness might as well, higher intelligence would be rewarded with more precision and young professionals would be able to get to work years earlier and with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars less debt on their shoulders.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), AGE(36-62), EDUC(0-8)(9-11)(12)(13-14)(15-16)(17-18)(19-20), CHILDS

* No high school = 0-8 years of education; Some high school = 9-11 years; High school graduate = 12 years, Up to associate's = 13-14 years; Up to bachelor's = 15-16; Up to master's = 17-18 years; Up to doctoral = 19-20 years.