From such misunderstandings are dreadful unintended consequences born.

Interesting. From Wealthy Women Can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can't by Emma Green.

But income actually has a significant effect on how women can afford to think about marriage. Often, self-described feminists question the merits of marriage and urge their fellow women to remain independent if they choose. As Carol Gilligan, a New York University professor who sat on a panel with Ehrenreich, put it, "Does anybody know the word patriarchy?"

Taking a stand against patriarchy is much easier if you're well-educated, have a stable income, and live in a community where you could theoretically find an educated, employed man to marry. For poor, uneducated women, especially those who have kids, the question of whether to get married looks a lot different: It's the choice between raising children on one or two incomes, between having someone to help with household chores and child-rearing alone while working multiple jobs.

And that's the big difference: For a poor woman, deciding whether to get married or not will be a big part of shaping her economic future. For a wealthier woman, deciding whether to get married is a choice about independence, lifestyle, and, at times, "fighting the patriarchy." There's a cognitive dissonance in Ehrenreich's straight-up dismissal of the economic benefits of marriage, because the statistics tell an awkward truth: Financially, married women tend to fare much better than unmarried women.

I have long been commenting that much of modern day feminism smacks of some of the worst forms of self-indulgent classism, the projecting onto everyone else, the privileges one enjoys as the educated and already wealthy. Sometimes the policies advocated for such privileged individuals do also benefit poor women as well or even the entire community. But often not. The failure to accept a broader perspective of the community and reality can be catastrophic when setting policy. I think there is good substance to Green's article but I wish she had added numbers. According to the US Census, the average household with married-couple families and children, earn approximately $72,000 (all data from 2009). If the wife works, the median income is $86,000, if not working, $48,000. Households with children and a single male parent have an annual income of $42,000. These are about 25% of all single parent homes. Single mother with children homes (75% of all single parent homes) have an annual income of $30,000.

I have recently commented that sometimes we ought to be looking at things from the perspective of families as competing economic structures (The real productivity competition is between familial models not between genders) and this reinforces that view. In looking at that census data, it is interesting to note that in 1947, in constant 2009 dollars, the range was much narrower than today. Today, the lowest is the single mother household with an average of $30,000 and the highest is the married couple both working household with income of $86,000, more than 2.9 times as high. In 1947, the single mother household was $17,000 and the married couple both working was $30,000. So two observations - single moms today are earning as much today as dual income married families in 1947. Two, the productivity premium for marriage has increased from 1.8 to 2.9.

Separate from all that, Green's article reminds me of the case of the Green Revolution which I recall from my undergraduates days studying economic development. In the 1960s, American agronomists came out to the India, Philippines and Southeast Asia with these great new strains of rice. The aid workers and agronomists were immensely frustrated with how slow the local farmers were at taking up the new strains even though they were multiple times more productive, disease resistant, etc. There were lots of issues, but much of it came down to the fact that the two parties, aid workers and local farmers, had distinctly different profiles of risk sensitivity. Aid workers were on well paid contracts with the prospects of returning to booming agribusinesses or growing universities. There was very little risk to them. Local farmers however were using heuristics based on multigenerational experiences of living on the knife edge of poverty between hardship and starvation.

From their perspective, the new strains had to deliver reliably and predictably, not just productively. A shortfall of even ten percent in the crop might mean privation, anything more and starvation. Crop failure would mean likely loss of young and old.

The good intentions of the aid workers and the data they were using were not in question. But they simply did not take into account the well grounded risk aversion of local farmers.

Green's article highlights this from a class perspective. As long as you can go home to parents or fall back on well established siblings, or have enough savings for big risk taking, you are entitled to a much broader range of decisions and choices. It is important to remember that others are not so privileged and that the increased choices of the privileged are not always beneficial, and sometimes are harmful, to those less privileged. From such misunderstandings are dreadful unintended consequences born.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage

A pair of articles on measured life outcomes related to children, marriage, family formation and sequencing. The articles explore the question of why married parent families are so much more effective than say, unmarried parents or single parents, in helping children achieve measurably better life outcomes. The argument is that not only do married parents have greater disposable time and money to devote to childrearing but that the signaling function of the act of marriage is in itself a part of what explains the outcome.

An interesting discussion and interesting implications for public policy. The challenge is that these traditions are the work of culture and does not lend itself easily to public policy. Public policy might militate on the margin but the underlying issue is the strength and effectiveness of the culture. I think that is the unstated reason people tend to be cautious about cultural change. We impute our present position to the consequences of a past cultural disposition (and underestimate the impact of historical contingencies) and therefore display concerns about new changes that might undermine the old dynamic.

The articles.

Two parents, not just two incomes, are what help kids get ahead by Danielle Kurtzleben.

Study after study confirms that children in married-parent families grow up to be better off financially than the children of single and divorced parents.

This makes intuitive sense, of course; a single parent supporting her kids with only one income is going to have a tougher time giving her kids the same advantages that a child of a two-parent family will get. But it's not that simple. New research confirms that income accounts for less than half of the advantage that the children of married couples get. In fact, it's married couples' parenting behaviors that have the bigger effect.

The Brookings Institution's Kimberly Howard and Richard Reeves recently found that children from married families were 14 percentiles ahead of other kids on the income ladder, and their parents' income accounts for only 4.5 of those 14 points. That is, children of married mothers ended up at the 57th percentile, compared to the 43rd for children of mothers who weren't continuously married. That's after controlling for other factors, like education — people with bachelor's degrees both earn more and are more likely to get married these days, for example.

However, parenting behaviors, like time spent reading to kids, account for a much larger share of the gap — 7.5 percentiles, to be exact.

There is a common-sense reason to why this bump is so great. A pair of mediocre married parents will have way more time to spend with their kids than even an exceptionally devoted single dad — someone has to do the laundry, after all, and only one of these families has a spare parent around to read to the kids while the other cleans the clothes.

Marriage and Positive Child Outcomes: Commitment, Signaling, and Sequence by Scott Stanley.

Even here, there may be an under-appreciation for how (and if) the partnership to parent formed in the first place. The fact is that marriage is associated with a far greater likelihood that a child’s parents will continue to parent together than other contexts.vi At one end of a spectrum are parents who married before the child arrived, where those children have a relatively high likelihood of receiving extensive co-parenting. At the other end of this spectrum would be children born to parents who had not developed much, if any, commitment to each other beforehand, much less a commitment to parent a child together before having one. Those children, on average, have more of an uphill climb in life, and, as Howard and Reeves note, economic and social mobility are impacted. Such children are not disadvantaged because they don’t have a parent who cares, but because they are going to land, on average, the furthest from having the economic and social capital of two people pulling together to start them off in life. One can argue that the benefits of having two committed parents can exist apart from marriage. I agree. So why would I argue that marriage has special explanatory value regarding child outcomes?

Back to signals and sequence.

While not always, and perhaps less so now than before, marriage serves as a strong signal that two people are tacitly committed to raising a family together. Further, and for more complex reasons than I want to develop here, signals are the most informative when they are fully under the control of those sending them—by which I mean, when the behavior has fewer prior constraints so that it reflects something true about the individual. That means that signals about commitment are more informative before a child arrives than after because having a child increases life constraints. When marriage precedes two people having a child, the question of intention about a shared long-term time horizon was settled before things got messy with baby drool and poop. For couples with this foundation already in place, even unplanned and mistimed children are still landing in a relatively rich context regarding bi-parental commitment. One can (and should) believe that various socio-economic disadvantages govern a lot in this big lottery of life, but we should not lose sight of how sequence plays a consequential and causal role in child outcomes.

I am far from alone in believing this. I think the greatest change in families impacting children in this era is that so many are born into low commitment contexts. This seems to be exactly the point that Isabel Sawhill argues in her forthcoming book, Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage. In her recent New York Times piece, she wrote:

We’ve been worrying about these trends for years, and wondering: Can marriage be restored as the standard way to raise children? As much as we might welcome a revival, I doubt that it will happen. The genie is out of the bottle.

I would love for Sawhill to be wrong about marriage, but I share her pessimism. Further, by arguing for what is needed, Sawhill draws attention to what is increasingly missing.

What we need instead is a new ethic of responsible parenthood. If we combine an updated social norm with greater reliance on the most effective forms of birth control, we can transform drifters into planners and improve children’s life prospects.

In her book and article, Sawhill focuses a lot of attention on complex issues related to birth control. I will sidestep that issue for now to focus on drifting versus planning. This is familiar territory for me and my colleagues. Whether you think about drifting versus planning or sliding versus deciding, the underlying point is that it matters how and when (and if) intention forms when it comes to the consequences of life altering transitions such as having a child. Commitments are decisions, and decisions support the strongest follow-through.

What about Howard and Reeves’ finding about engaged parenting? They note that “It is plausible that parents who commit to each other through marriage may also have a stronger joint commitment to raising their children.” That’s exactly what I believe is being given short shrift in the current discussion. In fact, I suspect that their parenting variable is partly a proxy for the mutual commitment to parent that is implicit in marriage.

While I can see plenty of value in efforts to provide more education about parenting to both couples and single parents, I also believe we need to work to increase the odds that children are born into high commitment contexts. Such efforts might include helping people better understand how sliding into having a child together, in a relationship with an unclear future, leads to worse outcomes for adults and children. Emphasizing this reality may be unpalatable to some who worry that such messages can be retroactively stigmatizing for those who are already downstream from consequential drifting. If so, the importance of emphasizing this may be as controversial to some as Isabel Sawhill’s suggestions about birth control are to others. Either way, it does not reflect how life really works to ignore sequence as we all grapple with solutions.

Marriage is, indeed, fading in front of our eyes, and with it goes a lot of signal clarity about commitment in the context of sequence. Maybe those elements can be constructed behaviorally on a broad scale, but we should recognize the difficulty we face in trying to make up for the loss of something with real explanatory power.

Healthy, wealthy, and wise

An interesting juxtaposition over the past couple of days of old heuristic decision making processes. Healthy Lifestyles On Decline in United States from FuturePundit identifies five simple behaviors for good health (physical activity, eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables, maintaining a healthy weight, moderate alcohol use and not smoking) but observes that only 8% of the population follows those basic guidelines.

Family Matters by Ron Haskins points out that you only have a 2% chance of being poor if you simply 1) graduate from highschool, 2) get married and stay married, and 3) get a job, any job. Other figures I have seen put it at less than 1%. I can't find a figure that provides the percentage of the population that meets all three criteria, but estimating from percentages, I am guessing that only about 25% of the population have graduated highschool and are married without divorce and have been continuously employed. It might be closer to 10%.

Then of course there is Through the Magic Door's research on reading which indicates that if you simply talk a lot to your child, read to them, have plenty of books available, let them choose what to read, and and be seen reading yourself, then they have a 70% chance or better of being among the 10% of the population that are habitual and enthusiastic readers. Less than 5% of the population routinely do most of these things.

So supposedly, early to bed and early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise.

More reliably you can:

Undertake physical activity
Eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables
Maintain a healthy weight
Moderate alcohol use
Not smoke
Graduate from highschool
Get married and stay married
Get a job, any job
Talk a lot to your child
Read to them
Have plenty of books available
Let them choose what to read
And be seen reading yourself

Do these thirteen seemingly innocuous and simple things and you are almost guaranteed to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Engage

From 32-Year Study Shows How Geeky Kids Become Happy Adults by Garth Sundem.

In order to not be poor, we know empirically that there are three simple things you need to do: 1) Graduate high school on time, 2) Get married, stay married, 3) Get a job and keep a job (any job). Do these three things and your chances of being in poverty are less than 2%.

In order for a child to likely become an enthusiastic reader we know empirically there are five simple things to do: 1) Talk to them, 2) Read to them, 3) Have easy access to books, 4) Let them choose books, and 5) Be seen reading yourself.

Thanks to Lester Breslow we know that to be healthy, all we need to do is 1) Not smoke, 2) Drink in moderation, 3) Sleep seven to eight hours, 4) Exercise at least moderately, 5) Eat regular meals, 6) Maintain a moderate weight, and 7) Eat breakfast.

Now, courtesy of scholars in New Zealand, there is empirical evidence establishing links between childhood traits and adult well-being (defined as coherence, positive coping, social engagement and pro-social values) based on a longitudinal study of 1,000 people from birth to age 32.

This study defined four possible zones of the social connectedness pants to kick: quality of social attachments, participation in organized clubs and groups, self-perceived competencies or strengths, and life satisfaction.

First, a large part of social attachment is your teenager’s relationship with you, the parent – the better you relate with your teenager, the more likely he or she is to have high well-being as an adult. Nearly as important and equally as difficult to imagine as your teenager liking you, is your teenager liking school.

But social connectedness and liking school in no way implies that a kid has to be popular in order to become a well adult. More important than being the star quarterback is “having someone to talk to if they had a problem or felt upset about something,” the authors write. And participation in clubs and groups in no way implies sports. Band is just as good as football. It’s group membership and not necessarily athletic worship that builds well-being.

Finally and importantly, no matter the objective facts of a teen’s life, how a teen evaluates and values their life predicts well-being as a 32-year-old. Are they optimistic about the future, independent, and generally busy? If so, A) you have a teen that smushes every popular stereotype of Western culture, and B) you have a teen who’s likely to grow into a very well adult.

To be a well-adjusted adult then, you need as a child to 1) Have good social attachments (friendly and engaging), 2) Participate in organized clubs and groups (commitment and engagement), 3) Develop competencies and achievement, and 4) Have a positive attitude. So pedestrian, so achievable and so critical.

I have mentioned before that much of sociological research seems to focus on the obscure and the negative which is perhaps well meaning but odd. While it is useful to know what to do about bullying and social awkwardness and moral ambiguity and abuse and poverty, etc. what we really want to know is: what do we need to do to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

We now have a check list for life success broadly addressing addressing wealth, education, happiness. That is awfully close to the traditional triumvirate of healthy, wealthy and wise. That seventeen point checklist would now look like:

Undertake physical activity
Eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables
Maintain a healthy weight
Moderate alcohol use
Do not smoke
Graduate from high school
Get married and stay married
Get a job, any job
Talk a lot to your child
Read to them
Have plenty of books available
Let them choose what to read
Be seen reading yourself
Cultivate friendships
Participate with others
Develop competencies (or maybe pursue excellence)
Be positive

In a culture of excuse-making, it is easy to obscure that much of the ancient wisdom and many of our cultural traditions are in fact right there at our fingertips, ready to point the way towards happy, healthy, wealthy lives. Our language and the conversation that surrounds us is rife with morals, adages, and sayings which tell us what to do. Common verbal corollaries to the conclusions from empirical research show a nice consistency.

Hard work never did anyone any harm
An apple a day
A drunken fool
Smoking like a chimney
The wisdom of Solomon
Marriages are made in heaven
Early to bed, early to rise . . .
Hit the books
A friend in need is a friend indeed
Don't waste your time wondering, get busy and do it
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so

At most 10% of the estimated marriage premium is due to selection

Well this is interesting. In the past couple of years I have dug up the data to support something my father told me years ago; your chance of being in poverty is miniscule if you do just three things - graduate high school, get married, get a job, any job. I don't know where he came across this information but I have been able to validate it and in fact, if you have these three characteristics, you have a less than 2% chance of being in poverty.

All along though, it has been obvious that these are just markers for something else going on. Just the existential fact of being married isn't causative of income. Clearly, some of the human capital skills, or non-cognitive skills as they are sometimes called (empathy, self-control, tolerance, etc.) are at play - being empathetic probably increases both the probability of your being a good spouse and an effective employee. But is there an operational component as well? Is there something about the institution of marriage that also contributes to greater employment effectiveness? This study, Is the male marriage premium due to selection? The effect of shotgun weddings on the return to marriage by Donna K. Ginther and Madeline Zavodny answers in the affirmative.

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20% more than comparable never married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by spouses or because they earn high wages. This paper examines the selection hypothesis by focusing on shotgun weddings, which may make marital status uncorrelated with earnings ability. We compare the estimated marriage premium between white men whose first marriages are soon followed by a birth and other married white men in the United States. The return to marriage differs little for married men with a premarital conception and other married men, and the results suggest that at most 10% of the estimated marriage premium is due to selection.

So indeed, being a good spouse means you have some of the same attributes that make you desirable as an employee (selection) but there is some larger effect of being married that also makes you a more effective employee.

A 2 percent chance of falling into poverty

I had mentioned before finding and then immediately losing track of source data that bore out a contention I had heard my father advance when I was young: "If you graduate highschool, get married and stay married, and get a job and keep a job, any job, you won't be poor." I have now come across, not the original data but the reported work of a researcher that has done that analysis. From Family Matters by Ron Haskins:

In our recently published book Creating an Opportunity Society, my Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I analyze data from the Census Bureau to show that if young people finish high school, get a job, and get married before they have children, they have about a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and nearly a 75 percent chance of joining the middle class by earning $50,000 or more per year.

S-Curves Everywhere

From Salaries top out at age 40 by Penelope Trunk. Trunk reports on a conversation with Al Lee, the director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.

I am constantly intrigued by the pragmatic knowledge which we collectively know and selectively share. I have the idea that were some simple pragmatic truths more broadly disseminated, everyone would likely be better off and more productive. Our estimable desire that everyone should always have choices and can be whatever they wish to be tends to stand in the way of such pragmatic sharing. There are always exceptions to the norm but it is useful to know what the norm is.

As an example, it is well established, though not necessarily broadly known, that only 2% of people who graduate high school on time, are employed and stay employed (regardless of type of job), and who get married, stay married and do not have children before marriage will ever be in poverty. That is an astoundingly simple life strategy. Could there be a more straight forward policy to cut the poverty rate seven-fold?

The fact that it has about the same success rate as the strategy that in order to lose weight one needs to eat less and exercise more is a separate matter.

Trunk's conversation with Lee illustrates the prevalence of S-curves as I discussed in Predictability and Adaptability.

Al’s data, which is based on the careers of college graduates, is basically that the salary curve for most people in their 20s is very steep. Then it starts to flatten in the 30s, and then you get into the land of the 3% raise. In real dollars, those 3% raises are not actually raises, they are just keeping up with inflation.

[snip]

To be precise, pay tops out at age 38 for women ($61K) and age 45 for men ($95K). But the difference, according to PayScale data, is not due to unequal pay for equal work. Rather, the difference is that women choose lower paying careers, and women are more likely to take time out of the workforce for kids. So the first thing you can do to prevent your salary from flat-lining is choose a career that men dominate. But it's not just about industry—it is also about influence. Stick to line-management positions rather than support roles. For example, skip human resources and go to supply chain management.

This observation regarding salary S-Curves has some real world implications.

Buy a house assuming you won't get a raise. Ever. When it comes to houses in the U.S., the average age of a first-time buyer is 33. So people go through their 20s gaining super-high raises, and then people buy a house in their mid-30s with the assumption that the raises will continue. In fact, though, you should buy a house preparing for your real income to remain unchanged until age 55, when it is likely to go down.

I find all this interesting in and of itself. However, it highlights a paradox that most parents experience.

Increasingly, in our high-velocity, heterogeneous, uncertain world, the highest returns are to those who work hardest and practice longest in some specialized and competitive field. That means that it pays the most for children to get focused early.

At the same time, we want children to have a childhood. I think that is one of the most precious things we have to offer these days - shelter from a world environment that puts a premium on children growing up too soon, becoming worldly before their time.

Two competing goals: Get focused early to be successful but also experience childhood for a reasonable period. No wonder the field of parenting is so perilous. There is no right answer. But it is useful to know the S-curves that are out there and which influence everything.

Undertaking even a little planning is associated with sizable wealth holdings

From Baby Boomer Retirement Security: The Roles of Planning, Financial Literacy, and Housing Wealth by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell. Some interesting data. A handful of key take-aways:

28% of the population have done no planning for retirement.

Of the 72% that have done any planning whatsoever, they arrive at retirement age with twice the wealth of non-planners. And remember this is only focusing on people who say they plan at least a little for retirement - it says nothing about how they translate planning into actions, a notoriously big gulf.

College graduates have more than twice the savings of high school graduates and more than 3.5 times the savings of high school dropouts.

Perhaps most striking was the fact that married couples have more than three times the wealth accumulation as non-marrieds (separated, never married, divorced, widowed, etc.)

I find the last item intriguing. I wonder how much of that large factor (3X) is attributable to the simple effect of heterogeneity- i.e. when you have two individuals, you are statistically more likely to have complimentary skills and behaviors. If one is disinclined to plan and the other is inclined to plan, by having a married unit, you have a greater probability of at least some planning occurring (with the beneficial consequences) than is likely in a single person household where, if there is a disinclination to plan, it is unlikely to occur at all.

Also clear in Table 4 is the bimodal relationship between effort devoted to planning and household net worth. That is, those who report they undertook any planning – even “a little” – are much better off than those who said they planned “hardly at all.” In other words, undertaking even a little planning is associated with sizable wealth holdings, while non-planners display less wealth. The same pattern is present among the 1992 cohort. In other words, regardless of changes in home and stock prices, failure to plan for retirement for both cohorts is tantamount to having very little retirement savings. To highlight that planners hold substantially more wealth, we group households into two types: planners (those who have thought a lot, some, or a little about retirement) and nonplanners (those who have thought hardly at all about retirement). At the median, planners hold double the amount of wealth of non-planners

Behind all the data and technical discussion, it boils down to some very traditional advice. If you want a comfortable and secure life and retirement via wealth accumulation, 1) Work (10x multiplier lowest to highest), 2) Get educated (7.5x), 3) Get married (3.5x), and 4) Plan ahead (2.5x).

Regardless of race, gender, income level, etc., if you make these four decisions, you will be in pretty good shape. I.e. decisions and behaviors outweigh snapshot factors such as race, gender, etc.

Dressing a story in random data does not make it a fact-based story

There has been a hot trade in the social justice league of late in the idea that society is organized to obstruct the upward mobility of various victim groups. One argument made with some frequency is that the upper class in general, and elite universities in particular, are hoarding opportunities in a fashion which preclude non-traditional groups from moving in.

But as data from the IRS indicates, America really is the land of opportunity with individuals rising in a single generation from the bottom to the top and falling from the top to the bottom at various points in their life.

The issue is not so much opportunity as being able to hold on to achievements and income and wealth. People have their moments of success but they are challenged to sustain that success over stretches of time. Gregory Clark has discovered remarkably stable levels of inequality crossing multiple generations over centuries.

Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, argues empirically that this sustenance of inequality is primarily a product of folkways - marriage, education attainment, no children before marriage, no divorce, low time discounting, church attendance, innovation and considered risk taking, high-value profession selection, etc. Deirdre McCloskey makes much the same point in her Bourgeoise Virtues books.

But the social justice league labor on, trying to muster the data to support their view. Usually with cherry-picked, highly selected data. This is the latest entry in such arguments, The Ivy League Students Least Likely to Get Married by Kevin Carey.

There is no doubt that stable marriages are a huge multiplier in terms of psychological, social and financial well-being. High IQ is a pretty good multiplier as well, most especially when in combination with the ordinary bourgeoise virtues.

The data come from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which followed the economic and educational progress of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. For each year, researchers tracked who went to which college, how much money their parents made, and whether they were married in 2014.

Marriage rates for young adults just out of college are low across the board. But as people get into their 30s, trends diverge. For example, more than half of Princeton students born into upper-income households in the early 1980s — roughly, the classes of 2002 through 2006 — were married by 2014. They didn’t all marry other Princetonians, of course, but it’s common.

But for Princeton alumni from the lowest-income households — the bottom one-fifth compared with the top one-fifth — the trends are different. Only a third were married by 2014. This pattern holds for other elite colleges and universities. For people born over the five years from 1980 to 1984, the marriage rate for upper-income students who attended Ivy League institutions was 14 percentage points higher than the rate for lower-income students.

Aha! Princeton has social systems that reduces the chances of bottom quintile income students from integrating and marrying at the same rates as those children from the top quintile. Well, maybe. The fact that some other prestigious institutions such as University of Chicago has nearly identical marriage rates between top and bottom suggests that there must be something else going on beyond simple exclusive social systems at elite universities which is what the social justice advocates need it to be.

Carey offers a case study of a bottom quintile student as an example.

Alana Tornello, Princeton class of 2012, grew up in a working-class community on Staten Island. Her mother ran a small hair salon where Ms. Tornello spent her afternoons after school. Her father was a social worker. She tested into a specialized high school and applied to Princeton on a whim. When the acceptance letter arrived on April 1, she thought someone was pulling her leg.

Those doubts followed her onto campus, where she struggled academically her freshman year. The Princeton social scene revolves around “eating clubs,” to which people apply for membership, much like rushing a fraternity or sorority. The clubs, mostly housed in a row of imposing old mansions next to campus, are implicitly part of extensive social networks connected to exclusive private boarding schools and families with multiple generations of Princeton alumni. Eating clubs are where many upper-income marriages begin.

Ms. Tornello didn’t feel at home there. And while Princeton gave her a generous scholarship, the eating clubs were still expensive. She decided to be an “independent” — the telling label for students who didn’t eat at a club. “If you were independent,” she said, “you were kind of seen as a lone dog.”

Sounds like Tornello might possibly have suffered from social exclusion which might have possibly reduced her marriage chances. Possible, but is that the most likely explanation? Carey admits:

Ms. Tornello thought she’d study something “practical” at Princeton, like engineering or pre-med. Instead, she fell in love with her humanities courses and majored in comparative literature. In her spare time, she became interested in faith-based organizing. After graduation and a short stint in Washington, D.C., she moved back to Staten Island to help with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Today, she lives with six housemates in Brooklyn and recently started work in emergency planning and operations for a city agency. There are a lot of other Princeton graduates nearby, many commuting to Wall Street. She leads a different kind of life.

Ms. Tornello has mixed feelings about the path she chose. “You don’t quite belong anymore to where you’re from,” she said. “But I also didn’t belong at Princeton. There’s a meaning in my life that I can’t deny was created by my time there. I traveled the world from Princeton. I’m not in a better place than my family financially, but I have something I wish they had, too.”

After setting up the argument that Tornello's unmarried status is a function of social exclusion, Carey then introduces evidence that 1) Tornello is doing exactly what she wants and 2) what she wants to do is not associated with high income/wealth/status attainment with their corresponding linkages to marriage.

Carey wants to conclude, per the social justice fad, that

Instead of being places that provide equal opportunity to everyone based on merit, colleges are often complicit in the forces that push us apart.

Much as he might want that to be the conclusion, he makes it really hard to see that that proposition is in fact true. Elite universities have widely varying rates of marriage differential between their bottom and top quintiles. Many elite universities have close to zero variation. Personal behaviors and choices of career and field of endeavor have a huge impact on marriage opportunities.

And that is to say nothing about some pretty obvious multivariate confounders. People from top quintile households, on average, are far more likely to grow up in intact families compared to those in the bottom quintile. Perhaps pre-existing social norms from their childhood is driving the marriage differentials. You need to hold originating family structure and other such folkways constant to compare differences in like-to-like circumstances of income quintiles.

At most elite universities, students originating from bottom quintile circumstances are also highly likely to have been special admits (sports, race, under-represented, etc.) who correspondingly tend to have dramatically lower standardized test scores compared to their academic peers. Since IQ combined with normed folkways is predictive of outcomes, you also need to control for test scores between the quintiles.

Perhaps there are field of study differences between top and bottom quintile student groups, one gravitating towards challenging and high compensation professions (ex. electrical engineering or finance) and the other gravitating towards low income fields of study (ex. comparative literature or sociology.) If bottom quintile students are choosing to pursue low income professions, then the fact that low income professions are associated with reduced marriageability becomes pertinent.

Those are just three of the more obvious confounders between top and bottom quintile. The fact that Carey did not control for those obvious variables makes his conclusion even less supportable.

There is data. There is a table. There is jargon. But this has all the hallmarks of a conclusion seeking the appearance of empirical support. Carey has not made much of an effort to actually make his empirical argument. He has not controlled his variables. He has not dealt with the exceptions to his alleged pattern. He has not illustrated his article with a very convincing case study.

I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that most elite universities are far more interested in appearing to be socially just than they are interested in actually being socially just. Despite that disposition, Carey is unconvincing.

Which is a pity because pursuing social justice solutions does not solve real world problems for people. You cannot simply assume causes into existence, no matter what they taught in the intersectional social justice postmodernism classes. University of Texas had an interesting exercise going a number of years ago. They observed that their admits from the bottom quintile were accruing higher debt, were less likely to graduate, and were having worse post-graduation outcomes. They put together a holistic team to track such students to discover the real pitfalls and provided structured and testable interventions. They were having some good success in reducing the quintile disparities. And their solutions had nothing to do with eating clubs or social exclusion or mystical forms of class prejudice.

Solving real problems through fact based interventions. An approach so radical, it just might work.

Upper class people are not getting married to lower class people.

From Response to Douthat on Two-Parent Families by Matt Bruenig.  He makes a good point which I had not considered and which is germane in terms of policy considerations.  He is discussing marriage, class and income/well-being.  Read the whole thing but the gist is this.

Regarding Douthat’s marriage point here, he makes a mistake that nearly everyone in this discourse makes and it’s kind of driving me crazy over time. The mistake is saying that, contrary to lower class people, upper class people are getting married. The reason this is a mistake is that upper class people are not getting married to lower class people.

If we follow Douthat’s recommendation to look at the behavior of upper class people to determine what kinds of behavior are privilege-enhancing, then we are forced to conclude that marrying an upper class spouse is privilege-enhancing while marrying a lower class spouse is not and should be avoided. That’s how upper class people actually behave. Right?

Another common and pithy way of expressing Douthat’s point here is that upper class people should “preach what they practice,” with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not “marriage.” It’s “marriage to upper class people.” Right?

Indeed, if you want an example of how a certain marriage proponent approached marriage in her own life, she conveniently had the New York Times announce the details of her marriage in 2001.

Melissa Jean Schettini, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Schettini of Montville, N.J., was married yesterday to Daniel Patrick Kearney Jr.

The bride and bridegroom, both 27, met at Princeton University, where they graduated, she summa cum laude.

Mrs. Kearney is a candidate for a Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Her father owns Per Forms, a Montville company, which manufactures and markets business forms.

Next month, Mr. Kearney is to become a law student at Yale. He received a master’s degree in classical studies from Boston College.

The bridegroom’s father retired as the chief investment officer of Aetna, the insurance company in Hartford. He was also the president of its investments and financial services division.

Is the upshot from this kind of behavior really “people should get married”? Or is it “when the upper class boyfriend gets the letter from Yale law school, go ahead and lock that down”?

Is it offensive to write this? I gather from my surveying of the society that is. But why is it offensive? Is it because second-guessing people’s relationships is offensive? And if so, what should we make of people who write whole books doing that?

I take his point.  I remain convinced there are, on average, pro-social benefits to all when people marry.  

Are there lower probabilities or occurrence and greater probabilities of failure when it is a cross-marriage?  Cross-religion, cross-class, cross-race, cross-culture?  Sure.  We know these marriages can and do work.  We know they involve greater complexity.  They may possibly entail greater failure rates (I would default to that assumption but have not seen data on it.)  

I suspect that Bruenig is overstating just how hermetically sealed things are in terms of class.  But his general point that people assortatively mate within culture, class, education attainment, ethnicity, religion, etc. is usefully true.  And to the extent that it is strongly true, it raises legitimate questions about how transferable any policy might be across such groupings.

Only 3% of men take their wive's family name on marriage

H/T Marginal Revolution. The original research is from Marriage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife's last name? based on work by Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer.

It's rare for men who get married to change their last names - whether they take their wife's, adopt a hyphenated version or create a combination of the two. But those that do tend to be less educated, according to a new Portland State University study.

PSU sociology professor Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer analyzed data collected from a nationally representative survey that asked men if they did anything to their surnames in their most recent marriage.

The simple facts are:

Of the 877 men, only 27, or 3 percent, changed their name. Of those, 25 dropped their last name to take their wife's and two hyphenated their last name. Among the 97 percent who kept their name, 87 percent said their wife took their last name, 4 percent said their wife hyphenated her surname while they made no change, and 6 percent said that neither changed their name. No respondents reported creating a new last name.

[snip]

It found that among men with less than a high school degree, 10.3 percent reported changing their surname. Among men with a high school degree but no college, it was 3.6 percent, and among men with any college, only 2 percent. None of the men surveyed who had an advanced degree changed their name.

Economics is a big driver here:

Even though better-educated men may have more egalitarian attitudes about gender, they also find themselves in the traditional breadwinner role and potentially have more to lose by changing their surname, the study said. Less-educated men, on the other hand, may have less to lose.

Shafer said the findings parallel studies about women who are more likely to keep their maiden names after marriage—they get married later, usually after starting careers, and are eager to preserve their professional identities.

Even three percent seems high based solely on personal experience. I don't think I know any men who have taken their wives names. And I would have guessed that adopting a common hyphenated name would have been far more common than the complete abandonment of the patronymic.

The chattering class are comfortable with a plague of deaths by despair

From The Age of Distractipression.  The subheading is The pandemic’s true toll on mental health won’t be known for a long time, but data from the past two years indicates a rise — some of it sharp — in prescription drugs for conditions like A.D.H.D. and depression. by Casey Schwartz.

I have for several years been concerned about our deaths from despair, Suicides and Drug Overdoses.  The numbers have been increasing at an accelerating rate and are at distressing levels.  46,000 suicides in 2021 and drug overdoses were 100,000.  Roughly 150,000 people dead a year from despair.  

Why are people so anxious and despairing when we are so wealthy, rich, healthy, productive, safe, etc.?  Why does no one in government seem to care?  It is a real mystery.  There are obviously several ideologies (Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Post Modernist Theory, etc.) which emphasize existential doom to the exclusion of all good news.  We have an extraordinarily large advocacy sector all of who claim that inadequate attention and funding of their particular anxieties will lead to doom.

The increasing gap between the small chattering class (academia, mainstream media, deep state bureaucracy, entertainment) and the average American on all sorts of things is a contributor as is the resulting decline in trust by citizens of major institutions.  

23% of the adult population are on medications for depression, anxiety, and ADHD.  29% of women are on those medications.

Is so many people being depressed, anxious or ADHD part of the collapse in the fertility rate?  Or is it perhaps the medications for those conditions which are causing the collapse.

When I think about the Overton Window which was opened after the 1960s for so many past societal taboos, I wonder if this might be largely a societal change rather than a medical one.  

Gambling

Divorce

Alcohol

Drugs

Pornography

Secularism

Casual Sex

Every one of those categories is bedeviled by definitional issues but I think broadly, we can agree that the social proscriptions against all of them were more prevalent and effective in 1960 than they are in 2020.  We opened the Overton Window of what was acceptable.  

Sometimes to an astonishing degree.  Church membership fell from 73% to 50% between 1960 and 2020.  Married households fell from 67% in 1960 to 49% in 2020.  Out-of-wedlock births went from 5% in 1960 to 40% in 2020.  The drug overdose death rate per 100,000 was 2.5 in 1968 and 28.3 in 2020.  

Between 1960 and 2020 we became more accepting of all seven conditions by factors and sometimes orders of magnitude.  It is not just that we increasingly refused to condemn them, we made it much easier to indulge them - gambling and drinking in particular.

I am not arguing for a puritanical reversion to some theoretically golden moral earlier time.  From a libertarian perspective, I think the State should not be dictating individual's choices.  But as all the Founding Fathers seem to have concurred, a nation built on a constitutional republic needed a religious or moral people in order to work.

We have been conducting a sixty year experiment to test just how true that might be.  So far, it appears to have been pretty true.  By opening the Overton Window on all these earlier proscribed activities, I suspect we have driven up all those deaths by despair.  People are weak and need cathedrals with buttresses to both shore up and affirm the types of moral behaviors that help individuals to succeed without having to figure it all out from scratch.

Each of these seven factors are essentially leading indicators of childhood disruption and chaos.  And we now know that childhood disruption is one of the best predictors of negative life outcomes at adulthood.

And the thing is, this opening of the moral Overton Window had very substantial differences in impact based on class.  From memory, the marriage rate in the top quintile went from 95% to 85%.  Worrying drop but not a catastrophe.

But the marriage rate in the bottom quintile?  What, 90% then and 25% now?

Across all these factors, the bottom three quintiles have  been far more adoptive of these Overton window openings.  To their great detriment.  More Gambling, Divorce, Alcohol, Drugs, Pornography, Secularism, and Casual Sex are individually and cumulatively highly destructive to the bottom three quintiles.  

The top two quintiles?  They stuck with the traditional value schemes more or less.  By sticking to those traditional values, they and their values benefited.  Everyone else suffered increasing misery.

If we want to make everyone better off, perhaps tighten the Overton windows or perhaps educate everyone on the secret knowledge known to the upper two quintiles.  In order to succeed in life, get educated, get employed, stay employed, get married, stay married, stay away from alcohol, drugs, gambling, go to church (or have a deep rooted belief system), live right.  

But apparently, the chattering class are comfortable with a plague of deaths by despair. 

The problem is not that Elizabeth dares to want things. It’s that she wants things she can’t afford.

From You Can't Always Get What You Want by Naomi Schaefer Riley.  A pleasantly reality-based review.

One big source of conflict between the sexes, if you’ll excuse the stereotyping, is that when women complain, they just want their interlocutors to listen. Their boyfriends, husbands, and fathers, though, want to offer solutions. Recently I’ve noticed that when reading novels about the lives of contemporary women, my reactions are more like a typical male. 

Books like The Party Upstairs about Ruby—the daughter of a New York City building superintendent, who has just graduated from college with a degree in art, has no money, tons of student loan debt and is trying desperately to keep up with her not very nice wealthy friends from childhood and college—make me want to jump through the pages and shake their protagonists. The anxiety, self-destructive behavior, aimlessness, and self-pity are more than I can take.

But at least Ruby is only in her early 20s. Elizabeth, the protagonist of Lynn Steger Strong's new novel Want, is married with two young children of her own and still seems paralyzed by the way that her dreams don’t seem to match reality. Reviews of Want rave about the ways in which Elizabeth’s life represents “economic fragility and just how close to the edge people are―even with the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs and good educations.” Entertainment Weekly called it “a 200-page argument for the necessity of democratic socialism.” And the Wall Street Journal says, “Want … feels like something larger, a portrayal of generational dispossession, or of the American Dream moving in reverse."

There was a wonderful video a few years ago humorously making the same point: 

Double click to enlarge.

Riley begins a subtle transition into problem solving in her review.

So, what is Elizabeth’s situation? She and her husband both have college degrees; she has a Ph.D. in literature. Her husband lost his job at an investment bank during the financial crisis and then decided he’d rather make furniture anyway and never goes back to a full-time job. Elizabeth was unable to find a college teaching job and instead works at a charter school and as an adjunct professor one night a week. The couple rents a small apartment and has six figures worth of student loan debt, in addition to medical and credit card debt. 

Riley begins to introduce some problem solving thinking with a very light touch.

Elizabeth is not representative of generational dispossession, though. People who earn college degrees and get married before they have children are not the ones who don’t have money to pay for groceries. As Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox wrote in an Institute for Family Studies report, "97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the 'success sequence'—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34)."

Then, Wham!  She goes all Enlightenment empirical rationalist.

And Elizabeth’s loan debt is hardly typical. As Beth Akers of the Manhattan Institute noted, 

A Millennial household with two college-educated earners would earn more than $113,000, on average, and have monthly loan payments of less than $400 (assuming that both earners accrued the typical level of debt in pursuit of their bachelor’s degrees).

Moreover, Akers finds that “only 6% of borrowers have more than $100,000 in debt. These high-balance borrowers tend to have graduate or professional degrees and often come from higher-income families.” In other words, they are mostly in a position to pay it back. 

Of course, there are always exceptions, but Elizabeth and her husband are not the victims of some kind of capitalist plot to screw Millennials. They are people who made a lot of bad decisions and, frankly, should have known better. 

What.  Doesn't Riley know that the reader needs emotional affirmation of her bad decision-making?  Not this problem solving empirical stuff.  They said there wouldn't be any math!

Riley then switches from book reviewer to Enlightenment empirical rationalist advice columnist.

Maybe this sounds heartless. Even if Elizabeth (and presumably Strong, who seems to sympathize with her protagonist’s difficulties) just wants someone to listen to her complaints, I’d like to offer some advice.

First, the job market for literature professors has been impossible for more than 30 years. Universities continue to produce Ph.Ds at a breakneck pace but they don’t have tenure track positions for them. Unless you’re independently wealthy and just studying for fun, don’t bother. And if you’re studying for fun, you don’t need to get a Ph.D. for that. 

Second, once you’ve acquired six figures worth of student loan debt, stick with jobs that pay well and provide good health insurance for a few years, even if they’re not as much fun as woodworking. This is doubly true if you have children you’re trying to support. 

Finally, leave New York. The city has been unaffordable for middle-class families for decades. In most of the rest of the country, you can do just fine on the salary of a teacher and a furniture maker. You can even buy your own home. 

I know that literary people really want Enlightenment empirical rationalists to buy into their self-indulgent  self-victimizing self-justification.  So nice to see a review which cares more about real-life problem solving over maudlin complacency.

And I love her closing:

According to the book’s description, “Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things.” In fact, though, the problem is not that Elizabeth dares to want things. It’s that she wants things she can’t afford. Welcome to the club.

Now that was a useful and entertaining book review.  Wish we had more like it.

Socio political research is catching up, belatedly, with Norman Rockwell

From The Socio Political Demography of Happiness by Sam Peltzman.  From the Abstract:  

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government. All above differences survive control for other differences.

I am hitting it out of the ballpark.

Married

Well-off 

 

Classical Liberal (Conservative) 

 

Well educated

White

Trusting of others (Christianity)

Interestingly, out of the six significant factors, five of them are a matter of choice, including the most important factors.

So if an progressive autocratic central planner wanted maximize national happiness, what would be his or her advice about the things over which people have control.

Get married.

Work hard and productively.

Stick with tradition.

Go to church.

Get an education and be a life-long learner.

In other words, be a Norman Rockwell painting.  

This is the opposite of what they have been advocating for fifty years.  Either they don't know what they are doing or national happiness is an unimportant objective.  

All cultures are not equal

Hmm. From Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture by Amy Wax & Larry Alexander. Their argument is pretty straight-forward:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Problem definition, root cause analysis, and problem solving.

This argument is the antithesis of the prevailing postmodernist critical theory prevalent on campuses (and in the media) so Wax and Alexander are to be commended for their courage.

They have the advantage in that the great preponderance of sociological research supports their hypothesis. Reeves at the Brookings Institution has been putting out a large volume of research along these lines. The Wax-Alexander hypothesis is true not only for individuals but for groups as well.

As Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld have documented in The Triple Package, the cultural script is true at the group level as well. Those immigrant groups with the strongest manifestation of the bourgeois norms do as well and better as native born Americans. It is really a quite magical and reliable script. You just have to choose.

But choosing means personal responsibility and taking ownership of one's own life outcomes is incompatible with the cult of victimhood. Victimhood is the necessary life-blood of postmodernist critical theory. No victimhood, no postmodernist critical theory.

The acceptance of the bourgeois script has some necessary consequences for the adherents of postmodernist critical theory.
All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

I'd put it slightly differently. Every person and group has a marginally (or significantly) different set of important goals. The goals may differ to a greater or lesser degree, the rank order priorities are likely to differ, the relative trade-offs to be made will differ. All cultures differ in the degree to which they are compatible with variable goals, ordering of goals and trade-offs between goals.

Postmodernist critical theorists love to insist that all cultures are equal. It makes a great bumper sticker but it is not empirically true. If maximal individual liberty, prosperity (group and individual), diversity, and progressive stability (slow evolution without sharp discontinuities) are your important goals, then bourgeoise culture is demonstrably superior. If repression, conformity, poverty and stasis/devolution are your important goals, then postmodernist critical theory marxism/socialism is the game for you. You choose.

The great deceit of recent decades has been the claim that you can have the benefits of bourgeoise culture without bourgeoise culture.

Predictably enough, the general public (judging by the comments to the original piece by readers) is quite positive about bourgeoise culture. Equally predictable is that journalists and academics are hostile to it.

The global Great Divergence began in Europe between 1700 and 1800 before spreading around the world. Everywhere that it has occurred, it has been accompanied by recognizable bourgeoise cultural values. Those areas of the world where bourgeois cultural values have not yet emerged as the norm remain mired in poverty. Those areas where bourgeois cultural values were the norm but were abandoned have regressed towards poverty.

UPDATE: Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior by Heather Mac Donald. Well worth a read. Mac Donald documents counter-arguments from a University of Pennsylvania graduate student group, a social justice victim group at the university and a group column by half a dozen university professors.

In each instance, they demonstrate their own lack of intellectual calibre by arguing against a set of straw-man arguments not made by Wax and Alexander and never once actually address the argument and evidence Wax and Alexander actually made. either the grad students, victim students and professors are incapable of reading comprehension or they are willfully deceptive. Neither position is admirable nor reflects well on the university.

University of Pennsylvania is my alma mater and many of their departments are top notch but this deceptive ignorance on the part of a vocal few does not bode well for the academic environment. I hope the university president responds appropriately with a ringing endorsement of evidence-based argument, freedom of speech, and high standards of civil argument. It would be nice if she also mocked the straw-man arguers but that is probably asking too much.

Freely arrived at personal choices

Hat tip Ann Althouse. In the judgment from a Supreme Court case, Cantwell v. Connecticut, in 1940.

In the realm of religious faith, and in that of political belief, sharp differences arise. In both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor. To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation have ordained, in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.

The essential characteristic of these liberties is that, under their shield, many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed. Nowhere is this shield more necessary than in our own country, for a people composed of many races and of many creeds. There are limits to the exercise of these liberties. The danger in these times from the coercive activities of those who in the delusion of racial or religious conceit would incite violence and breaches of the peace in order to deprive others of their equal right to the exercise of their liberties, is emphasized by events familiar to all. These and other transgressions of those limits the States appropriately may punish.

Too many people too eager to legislate manners, to reduce choices of free people, and to constrict communication between people. There are limits of course but it seems many people wish to set the perimeter very close to home rather than far out on the distant horizon. Sharp differences do arise but as long as there is no harm, the default assumption should be no foul. There are too many people focusing on fostering divisions by race and class and religion and too few focusing on real problems and real root causes. Lovely to see plain language recalling to us the importance of fundamental principles.

If you take any newspaper report on virtually any subject, but especially political and policy, you will usually find a surfeit of exaggeration, vilification and false statement. This has led to the development of fact checkers at many papers but with the thoroughly ironic twist that most of the "fact-checking" itself becomes an exercise in exaggeration, vilification and false statement. It is almost as if there is a systemic aversion to truth seeking and truth telling. And the sad reality is that on many issues, we are at the frontier of our knowledge and that there is no truth that is actually settled.

The conflict is that the agenda to achieve social justice (as defined by equal outcomes) is inherently in conflict with the agenda to achieve maximum liberty. The more choices people are allowed to make, the more variant and unequal will be the outcomes.

When you determine that it is desirable that "many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed", you perforce have to accept that all these differences will yield very different outcomes. Some of those outcomes will be desirable and others not.

When people are free to make their own choices and they make bad choices, to what extent do you protect them from the consequences of those bad choices? And then what happens if they make further bad choices? What is the burden on others to protect them in a free society?

In a perfectly free society with everyone exercising their freedom around character, opinion and belief there will inherently be greater inequality. More freedom is likely to lead to greater inequality. All those that get educated, get married and stay married, get employed and stay employed do ever better, widening the gulf between those that make other choices such as not becoming educated, not marrying, and maintaining only a fitful relationship with work and effort.

These are deep and difficult waters. There are many pat answers but life is too messy for any of them to actually be good or comfortable answers. And most of all we seek to avoid having to make hard trade-off decisions at all. But that is the rub: in a complex multi-variable, high variability, human environment where people are maximally free to make their own choices, to what extent do you protect people from the consequences of their own bad decisions, to what extent do you allow them to continue to make bad decisions and how large an inequality do you tolerate when the gulf arises from freely arrived at personal choices?

Poor methods get results

From The Lancet’s editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton in the April 11th edition. commenting on a symposium examining peer review and the quality of science reporting. I found this quote in Science publication is hopelessly compromised, say journal editors from American Council on Science and Health.

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium — on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research — touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.

I like that list. Indicators of cognitive pollution:

Small sample sizes
Tiny effect sizes
Invalid exploratory analyses
Flagrant conflicts of interest
An obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance

I was originally led to this through the comments related to this unfortunate post, The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families by David Leonhardt. Leonhardt often does a good job of reporting on interesting work, but he is certainly hostage to the prejudices and biases of the New York Times.

In this case, there is an effort to arrive at a conclusion by ignoring critical information. An omission called out by the commenters. The argument attempting to be made is:

When it comes to family arrangements, the United States has a North-South divide. Children growing up across much of the northern part of the country are much more likely to grow up with two parents than children across the South.

[snip]

Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill argue that there are actually two models for having a large share of stable families: the blue-state model and the red-state one.

In the blue-state model, Americans get more education and earn higher income — and more educated, higher-earning people tend to marry and stay married. In Minnesota, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least 51 percent of teenagers are being raised by both biological parents, among the highest rates in the nation. (That figure excludes families in which the two parents are together without being married; such arrangements are still rare — and less likely to last than marriages.)

In the red-state model, educational attainment is closer to average, but “residents are more likely to have deep normative and religious commitments to marriage and to raising children within marriage,” write Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill, in a paper for the Institute for Family Studies. This model applies across much of the Great Plains and Mountain West, including Nebraska and Utah.

The article is trying to argue that family stability is primarily a function of higher education attainment (in the north) or religiosity (in the south).

There are a lot of other issues with the research, called out both in the article itself or in the comments. But the biggest issue is that this is not a map of family stability through education and religiosity and geography, this is a map of minority representation.
As commenters point out, the researchers try to ignore the correlation by dismissing it.

Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill also point out that two-parent families tend to be more common in states with predominantly white populations. But race is hardly the only explanation for the patterns. White single-parent families have become much more common in recent years. And in the Deep South, single parenthood is common among both whites and blacks.

And technically the researchers are correct. This has nothing to do with race per se. There is no biological or genetic necessity driving these outcomes. Race, at least in the US, is a general proxy for culture, i.e. individuals of different ethnic groups, on average, also demonstrate different cultural attributes, behaviors and expectations.

You want more familial stability? Focusing on education and religiosity won't get you very far. Focusing on behavioral attributes will get you a lot further. That's the danger of these shy articles which attempt to avoid hard conversations by diverting attention to non-root cause issues. They postpone actually addressing the real problems. Not education. Not religiosity. Not race. Not geography. Behaviors and values and expectations.

UPDATE: A statistical refutation of Leonhardt's position at Upshot sells Wilcox, but I’m not buying by Philip N. Cohen.

The new Financial Advisory Service - An AI bot for coaching and counseling paired with a rules-based expert systems for financial advice.

From Trust is mutual by Allison Schrager.  The subheading is How to to restore trust in the economy, society, and with your AI-powered financial planner.  She highlights some AI implications I had not considered.

On trust:

As with many problems, I believe the solutions for restoring trust can be found in financial markets. The financial industry constantly loses trust, yet people still entrust their life savings to markets. I take a Mertonian approach. Bob Merton argues that to trust a counterparty, we must believe they are competent and lack nefarious motives. However, in a large economy, we rarely know either of these things directly, so we must infer trust through other means. One approach is transparency—knowing everything about the transaction, such as reading the specs when buying a dishwasher. Another is verification, which is often more practical since transparency isn’t always possible, either because we're not expert enough to make sense of the data, or there’s just too much of it. Verification can come from third parties, like comparing returns to a benchmark, reading Amazon star-reviews, or consulting Consumer Reports.

She discusses the implications of AI on the financial advisor sector:

Good, fee-only advisors tend to focus on high-net-worth clients, but everyone needs good advice. In fact, those with less money arguably need better advice, as they have less margin for error. With AI and current robo-advisors, everyone can get pretty good portfolio construction, arguably as good as from a high-end advisor. But portfolio construction is only part of an advisor’s job. Advisors also act as therapists, having difficult conversations—like telling you that you can’t afford to keep subsidizing your 40-year-old son’s music career, helping with end-of-life financial decisions, or guiding you when your spouse dies, and you have to manage household finances for the first time.

She heads in a slightly different direction in the conclusions she draws because of her concern that these are not "conversations I’d want to have with a bot."  Fair enough.

But for those down market, which is most everyone most of their lives, with little in savings to draw the interest of financial advisors, a bot is likely a very viable alternative.  Indeed, because most people materially and embarrassingly mismanage their financial lives for long stretches of time, I suspect that the opportunity to interact with an AI capable bot might actually be an inducement to seek financial advisory services.  Interacting with a human being under these circumstances is tantamount to a visit to the confessional after a ling absence.  

My wife is a financial advisor (FA)who serves the top end of the market but, through moral convictions and religious faith, she actually has a surprisingly diverse portfolio of clients, from those with virtually no-savings to those with a great deal.  

Schrager is right on three points.  1) Most enterprises structure their financial incentives so as to induce financial advisors to do a lot of trades and sell a lot of fee-based services; 2) Most financial advisors are better sales people than they are either financially savvy or effective counsellors; and 3) the greatest value-add is indeed the counseling service rather than the financial advice.  

The actual financial advice is mostly driven by rules-based expert systems, the FA is just the human face, not the actual expert.  Indeed, most financial enterprises spend a lot of money constraining the action of FAs because most of them cannot come close to the performance of the rules-based expert system.

The opportunity that Schrager nods towards would arise from the anonymity and judgment-free interaction of the beginning saver (early or late in life) with an AI enabled bot which sits on top of the ruled-based expert system for recommending investments.  

It has been three or four years since I last researched AI as a counseling/therapy tool but even then, it was proving surprisingly effective, particularly in specific circumstances.  I would bet that an AI advisory bot now is pretty good at giving the advice and coaching towards it in a way that most FAs can't, won't, or are too expensive to do.

For most people the fundamentals to financial well-being are well established and documented.  They are the Bourgeoise Values of Dierdre McCloskey in combination with the Success Sequence.  

The success sequence is:

Finish high school on time.

Get a full-time job once you finish school and stay employed.

Get married before you have children and stay married.

Do these three things and you only ever have a 1-2% chance of being in poverty, a pretty phenomenally successful outcome were one to measure it as a social policy.  No other social policies, individually or in combination, come even close to such success.

Throw in the bourgeoise virtues described by McCloskey and you have a powerful one-two set of tools for a financially successful life.

Courage

Justice

Prudence

Temperance

Faith

Hope

Love 

Coaching and counseling on these two tools is the predicate to the accumulation of savings which, in turn, is a means of enjoying a comfortable life.  

I would wager an AI bot that coaches and counsels on the adoption and practice of these ten practices in conjunction with a ruled-based expert system for financial recommendations would be an enormous benefactor to the bottom 70% of society who are not well served by the financial system.  

For the provider, it would cheap (after design and establishment) and a great feeder.  Right now, the financial services industry seeks out those who have already succeeded and compete brutally for those few.  An AI bot (for behavioral coaching) linked with a rules-based expert system (for financial recommendations) could establish a relationship far up the chain and long before they could be served by expensive humans.  

The blot on this rosy vision is the reality that knowing what needs to be done (success sequence and bourgeoise virtues) is hardly the impediment.  We all know what we should be do.  We just don't do it.  Will AI bot coaching make a difference?  At the margin, I suspect so.  A wholesale difference?  I am less sanguine.