Affordable Family Formation

"Affordable Family Formation:" The Neglected Key To the GOP's Future -- My new VDARE.com column is up.

Now that the triumphalism rampant within the GOP after last November's election has died down, and Republicans realize that their current ascendancy is not a historical inevitability but a tenuous margin that needs careful cultivating, it's time to review the fundamental factors making some states red (Republican) and others blue (Democratic).

The key reason why some states vote Republican, I've found, can be summed up in the three-word phrase:

Affordable Family Formation.

The more economical it is to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, the more Republicans you'll find.

The more expensive it is, the fewer families with children you'll find, and thus the fewer Republicans.

Some of this is because family-oriented people move to family-friendly states, but the cost of forming a family in a particular state also affects how many families are formed.

It's a stereotype that a mortgage, marriage, and babies tend to make people more conservative.

But it's a true stereotype.

That's why it's in the GOP's self-interest to pursue policies that keep demand for housing down (such as limiting immigration) and the quality of public schooling up (such as, well, limiting immigration.)

The culture wars between Red States and Blue States are driven in large part by objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking.

Places that are terribly costly in which to raise children, such as Manhattan and San Francisco, unsurprisingly possess less family-friendly cultures than more reasonably priced locales, such as Nashville and Provo.

According to Google, nobody in the history of the Web has ever uttered the phrase "Affordable Family Formation."

But, those three words work both as a hard-headed summary of what drives voting, and as an appealing campaign theme.

The GOP could say to voters:

"We're on the side of making it affordable for you, and your children and grandchildren, to form families. The Democrats are on the side of dying alone."

Of course, Republicans could hardly say that with a straight face as long as their President refuses to repudiate his Open Borders plan that would allow anyone in the world with a minimum wage job offer from an American employer to move here.

Four interlocking reasons form a chain of causality explaining why Affordable Family Formation paints the electoral map red.

I call them the Four Gaps: the Dirt Gap, the Mortgage Gap, the Marriage Gap, and the Baby Gap.

I wrote about each of them in VDARE.com and The American Conservative following the election.

Unfortunately, I discovered them in reverse order of fundamentality.

This time, however, we'll start from the ground up with the Dirt Gap... [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Will "affordable family formation" remain dominant in a McCain-Obama fight?

As I've been pointing out for years, in both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush's share of the vote by state correlated closely with the rate of family formation among whites, which in turn correlated with the affordability of housing and decent schooling.

Will this pattern be seen again in 2008?

Keep in mind that the theory of affordable family formation doesn't tell you who's going to get elected President. It merely says that the relative voting orientation of a state is driven by how affordable marriage and children are among non-Hispanic whites in that state.

My first guess regarding 2008 would be that the correlations will almost certainly go down because they were so high in the last two elections that they can hardly go up any further.

Back in 1988, the correlations between white total fertility and Bush the Elder's share of the vote by state was about 70% as large as in 2000/2004. In 1992 and 1996, the relationship either dropped sharply or grew, depending on how you treat Perot's votes. The correlation between white total fertility and the GOP candidate's share by state went way down versus 1988, but if you add Perot's votes to Bush/Dole's votes, the center-right share's correlation with white total fertility went up.

Bush the Younger, for all his peculiarities, was apparently seen by voters as a fairly generic Republican candidate, and they also viewed Gore and Kerry as fairly generic Democratic candidates, allowing the underlying dynamic of affordability of family formation to drive the voting.

On the other hand, unusual candidates could upset the relationship. My guess would be that if the candidates in 2008 were Hillary, the feminist with one child, and Romney, the business executive with five children (especially if Romney weren't a Mormon), affordable family formation would again rule the day.

On the other hand, I can't really begin to guess what impact McCain and Obama would have on the distribution of voting among states.

Another issue is that I don't have enough to see how fast voting patterns respond to changes in, say, total fertility. The latest Census Bureau statistics on non-Hispanic white total fertility by state, for example, is a report on 2002. My guess would be that numbers from a half-decade ago would remains reasonably useful -- that this isn't the kind of thing that changes year-to-year.

Any thoughts on what we'll likely see at the state level in 2008?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Once again, Affordable Family Formation paints the states red or blue

I have to confess that I wasn't paying that much attention to who would win the election. What I was really looking forward to was the distribution of votes within states. Based on the extremely similar results in 2000 and 2004, I had invented a novel and ambitious theory explaining why American states vote in differing proportions for Republican or Democratic candidates.

My Affordable Family Formation theory isn't about who wins nationally, it's about how, given a particular national level of support, which states will be solid blue (Democrat), which ones purple (mixed), and which ones solid red (Republican).

Of course, George W. Bush ran in both 2000 and 2004, so maybe he was the reason my theory worked so well in both elections. Thus, 2008, with its quite different candidates, was a good test. Or maybe the Housing Bubble and its subsequent popping would have changed results dramatically.

Before getting to the results, let me review my AFF theory. It holds that what paints the electoral map red and blue is "affordable family formation" was validated once again. Taking a quick and dirty look at McCain's and Obama's shares in each state (plus DC) with 92% of the national precincts reporting, the same two demographic variables that drove the results in 2000 and 2004 showed startlingly high correlations once again.

My basic theory is that Democrats do best in states with metropolitan areas where land for homes is scarce because they are hedged in by oceans or Great Lakes; while Republicans do best in inland areas where homebuyers can look around for homes in a 360 degree radius around job sites. I call this the Dirt Gap: Republicans are found more in areas with more dirt and less water.

This means that homes in inland areas tend to be cheaper because the supply of land within a certain commuting time is greater. In turn, cheaper homes mean that non-Hispanic whites tend to marry earlier and have more children, which means they attract family oriented people and their cultures tend to be more family-oriented, making Republican family values appeals more appealing there. In contrast, "Living by the Water," which is #51 on the Stuff White People Like website, correlates with Stuff White People Like political views. (You can read about Affordable Family Formation in detail with graphs here.)

Take a look at the Average Years Married between ages 18 and 44 among non-Hispanic white women in the 2000 Census. That's a statistic I invented to be the marital analog of the well-known total fertility rate measure (which estimates from the latest available year's birth behavior how many children a woman will have in her lifetime). Likewise, Average Years Married estimates how many years out of the 27 between 18 through 44 will a woman be married. The Average Years Married for non-Hispanic white women does a remarkably good job of predicting McCain's (or Obama's) share of the total vote across all races in the states.

Thus, McCain carried 19 of the top 20 states on Average Years Married among non-Hispanic whites, while Obama carried 18 of the 19 lowest states. The correlation coefficient was r=0.88, on a scale where social scientists usually call r=0.2 "low correlation," r=0.4 "moderate correlation," and r=0.6 "high correlation." So, in the social sciences, r=0.88 would have to be something like "extremely high correlation." This is, however, down from the astonishing 0.91 level seen in 2004, but, keep in mind, the demographic data I'm using is now 8.5 years old. (It was collected on April 1, 2000 for the last Census.)

Looking at the 2002 Total Fertility Rate among non-Hispanic Whites, Obama carried the bottom 15 states, while McCain carried 14 of the top 15. The correlation coefficient was r=0.82. The demographic data is now 6 years old. (In 2004, when the demographic data was fresher, it was 0.86.)

Keep in mind that this is based on incomplete 2008 voting results with 8% of the precincts and who knows how many of the mail-in ballots missing, so the correlations will likely change.

By the way, this explains much of the Sarah Palin Hysteria: with her five children, she elicits the SWPL whites' secret dread that they are being outbred by the non-SWPL whites.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Affordability of Family Formation

The February 11 issue of The American Conservative, the one with John McCain and his crypto-slogan "Invade the World / Invite the World" on the cover, features my long article "Value Voters," which sums up my theory of how the affordability of family formation drives the Red State -Blue State divide. I've published it in bits and pieces over the years in AmCon, VDARE, and my blog, but I finally had the space to lay it out fully. It's not online.

Here's the opening:

No matter who wins the 2008 presidential election, pundits will afterwards hypothesize feverishly about why the country is so divided into vast inland expanses of Red (Republican) regions versus thin coastal strips of Blue (Democratic) metropolises. Yet, judging from 2000 and 2004, few will stumble upon the engine driving this partisan pattern, even though the statistical correlations are among the highest in the history of the social sciences.

The Republicans lost the popular vote in 2000 while advocating a "humble" foreign policy, and won in 2004 while defending a foreign policy that Napoleon might have found bombastic. Yet, all that happened from 2000 to 2004 was that virtually every part of the country moved a few points toward the Republicans. The relative stability of this Red-Blue geographic split suggests that more fundamental forces are at work than just the transient issues of the day.

Neither Jane Austen nor Benjamin Franklin, however, would have found the question of what drives the Red-Blue divide so baffling. Unlike today's intellectuals, they both thought intensely about the web tying together wealth, property, marriage, and children. Thus, they probably would not have been surprised that a state's voting proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of what I call "affordable family formation."

First-time readers of Pride and Prejudice frequently remark that Austen's romance novels are, by American standards, not terribly romantic. She possessed a hard-headed understanding of how in traditional English society, wedlock was a luxury that some would never be able to afford, an assumption that often shocks us in our more sentimental 21^st century.

Economic historian Gregory Clark's recent book, A Farewell to Alms, quantified the Malthusian reality under the social structure acerbically depicted in Austen's books. The English in the 1200-1800 era imposed upon themselves the sexual self-restraint that pioneering economist Thomas Malthus famously (but belatedly) suggested they follow in 1798. By practicing population control, the English largely avoided the cycles of rapid growth followed by cataclysmic famines that plagued China, where women married universally and young. The English postponed marriage and children until a man and woman could afford the accouterments suitable for a respectable married couple of their class.

In the six centuries up through Austen's lifetime, Clark found, English women didn't marry on average until age 24 to 26, with poor women often having to wait until their 30s to wed. And 10 to 20 percent never married. Judging from the high fertility of married couples, contraceptive practices appear to have been almost unknown in England in this time, yet, merely three or four percent of all births were illegitimate, demonstrating that rigid pre-marital self-discipline was the norm.

Remarkably, a half century before Malthus's gloomy and Austen's witty reflections on life and love in crowded England, Ben Franklin had pointed out that in his lightly populated America, the human condition was more relaxed and happy. In his insightful 1751 essay, Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind, Franklin spelled out, with an 18^th Century surfeit of capitalization, the first, nonpartisan half of the theory of affordable family formation:

"For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life."

He outlined the virtuous cycle connecting the Colonies' limited population, low land prices, high wages, early marriage, and abundant children:

"Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People… Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry …"

Franklin concluded: "Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe."

The Industrial Revolution broke the tyranny of the Malthusian Trap over food, but the supply of and demand for land never ceased to influence decisions to marry and have children. As America's coastal regions filled up, affordability of family formation began to differ sharply from state to state (disparities partially masked over the last few years by subprime mortgages and other financial gambits). CNN reported in 2006:

"More than 90 percent of homes in [Indianapolis] were affordable to families earning the median income for the area of about $65,100. In Los Angeles, the least affordable big metro area, only 1.9 percent of the homes sold were within the reach of families earning a median income for the city of $56,200."

When I lived in the Midwest, from age 24 to 34 I attended numerous weddings, but as my social circle matured, the invitations naturally dried up. Yet, when I moved back to my native, but now much more expensive, Los Angeles in 2000, I suddenly started being invited to weddings again. Like male characters in a Jane Austen novel, four of my seven closest friends from my high school class of 1976 got married and bought houses for the first time in their early forties.

Similarly, the cost of childrearing varies more across the country than ever before. A study of Census data by the New York Times found that "Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My Affordable Family Formation theory tested

The roots of my theory of Affordable Family Formation influencing which states are blue and which are red in elections goes back to before the 2000 election, but it emerged in mature form in the weeks and months following the 2004 election. (Here's my 12/20/2004 American Conservative article Baby Gap and my subsequent 12/12/2004 VDARE article extending the correlation from fertility to years married. Here's a brief summary in 2005, and a fuller treatment in 2008.

Among academics, Andrew Gelman of Columbia has shown some kind interest in my theory. Now a Poli Sci Ph.D. candidate at the U. of Houston has tested my theory and published a paper on it. While I looked at state level voting for 2000 and 2004, George Hawley looked at county level voting in 2000 and Census data from 2000. This gives him a much larger sample size. The correlations I found at the state level in 2000 and 2004 were just ridiculously high, so looking at a bigger sample size of county data gives a broader perspective.

From Party Politics:

Home affordability, female marriage rates and vote choice in the 2000 US presidential election: Evidence from US counties 

George Hawley

University of Houston

Abstract

This article tests the hypothesis that differences in the housing market can partially explain why some American counties are strongly Republican and others strongly Democratic, and that this phenomenon can be largely attributed to the relationship between home values and marriage rates within counties. Specifically, I test the hypothesis that, in the 2000 election, George W. Bush did comparatively better in counties with relatively affordable single-family homes, even when controlling for other economic, demographic and regional variables. Using county-level data, I test this hypothesis using spatial-lag regression models, and provide further evidence using individual-level survey data. My results indicate a statistically significant relationship between Bush’s percentage of the vote at the county level and the median value of owner-occupied homes, and that at least part of this is explained by the relationship between home values and marriage rates among young women.

Two important developments in American politics in recent decades involve political sorting. In a process that began in the 1970s, political conservatives and liberals have, for the most part, joined the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively, which, many scholars argue, subsequently led to increasing ideological homogeneity within the parties and higher levels of partisan polarization. The other major sort is geographic in  nature. Many regions of the country have become, to a significant extent, politically homogeneous, with an increasing number of counties consistently giving landslide victories to presidential candidates of one major political party or the other. The first major political sort – which led most individuals to align with the ‘correct’ political party based on their ideological inclinations – has been well examined and explained. The latter political sort has also been well described. However, up to this point, relatively little scholarship has examined the causal mechanism driving the geographic sorting of the population by partisan affiliation. Why do some regions prove a magnet for Democrats, and some draw increasing numbers of Republicans? ...

Specifically, I test the hypothesis that relatively affordable housing was associated with more support for George W. Bush in the 2000 election at the county level. Although the relationship between home-ownership and partisanship has been examined previously (Blum and Kingston, 1984; Verberg, 2000), most such studies consider home-ownership primarily as it relates to economic well-being or incorporation into the community. I offer an alternative hypothesis. I hypothesize that home affordability at the aggregate level is relevant to political outcomes even when controlling for economic variables such as median income and poverty rates. I argue that home affordability is relevant to politics largely because of its relationship with marriage rates within geographic units, which subsequently influences political outcomes because of the partisan marriage gap.

Put less abstractly, I suggest that married couples are more likely than single individuals to want to own their own home. However, there are some areas where home-ownership is prohibitively expensive, especially for younger Americans. If young couples living in those high-housing-cost communities want to own their own house, they have no choice but to move. Thus, I anticipate that the marriage rates within a county can be at least partially explained by the average housing costs within that county. Because, as the political science literature suggests, married voters are more likely to vote Republican than non-married voters, this trend leads some counties to become increasingly Republican, and others increasingly Democratic. ...

The possible relationship between home affordability and aggregate voting trends has largely been ignored up until now by the political science literature, though the topic has been considered by the political journalist Steven Sailer (2008). Sailer hypothesized that ‘affordable family formation’ – which he argued was closely related to housing costs – was a key difference between majority-Republican states and majority-Democrat states. Sailer went on to conclude that the relative affordability of housing accounted for the differing typical political behaviour within various large cities. Sailer suggested that the relative costliness of owning a home in America’s large coastal cities, such as Los Angeles, led to later family formation, which partially explained the greater support for Democratic politicians in those cities and regions. In contrast, inland American cities like Dallas are able to expand outward all-but indefinitely, which keeps housing costs low and subsequently such cities more attractive to young families. ...

This article suggests that the geographical sorting of the United States along partisan lines results, at least in part, from differences in housing markets. Specifically, these results indicate that, in the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush typically received a smaller share of the vote in counties where home values significantly outpaced incomes, and that this was, to a meaningful extent, due to the relationship between home affordability and marriage rates.

Hawley could likely replicate this finding for 2004, an election that was virtually identical to 2000, just shifted a few points in Bush's direction. 2008 was not as similar, however, in part because of different turnout rates brought about by Obama's candidacy. 2010 looked a lot like 2004, although there are methodological problems with dealing with midterm elections.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Unaffordable Family Formation in San Francisco

Unaffordable Family Formation in San Francisco: Baghdad by the Bay is the foremost example of the Dirt Gap in action: a seven mile wide mountainous peninsula surrounded by salt water almost inevitably translates into a limited supply of housing and high prices:

Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer

Anne Bakstad and Ed Cohen are starting to feel as if their family of four is an endangered species in San Francisco. Since the couple bought a house five years ago, more than a dozen families in their social circle have left the city for cheaper housing, better schools or both.

The goodbyes are so frequent that Carina, age 4 1/2, wants to know when she is going to move, too. Eric, 2 1/2, misses Gus, his playmate from across the street.

"When we get to know people through our kids, we think to ourselves, `Are they renters or owners? Where do they work?' You have to figure out how much time to invest in people," Bakstad said. "It makes you feel like, `Where is everyone going? Stay with us!'"

A similar lament is being heard in San Francisco's half-empty classrooms, in parks where parents are losing ground to dog owners, and in the corridors of City Hall.

San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under.

It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

San Francisco's large gay population — estimated at 20 percent by the city Public Health Department — is thought to be one factor, though gays and lesbians in the city are increasingly raising families.

Another reason San Francisco's children are disappearing: Family housing in the city is especially scarce and expensive. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot starter home is considered a bargain at $760,000.

A recent survey by the city controller found 40 percent of parents said they were considering pulling up stakes within the next year.

Determined to change things, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the kid crisis near the top of his agenda, appointing a 27-member policy council to develop plans for keeping families in the city... And voters have approved measures to patch up San Francisco's public schools, which have seen enrollment drop from about 62,000 to 59,000 since 2000...

"We are at a crossroads here," said N'Tanya Lee, executive director of the nonprofit Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. "We are moving toward a place where we could have an infrastructure of children's services and no children."

Other cities are trying similar strategies. Seattle has created a children's fund, like the one in San Francisco. Leaders in Portland, Ore., are pushing developers to build affordable housing for families, a move Newsom has also tried.

For families choosing to stay in San Francisco, life remains a series of trade-offs. They can enjoy world-class museums, natural beauty and an energy they say they cannot find in the suburbs. But most families need two or more incomes to keep their homes, and their children spend most of their days being cared for by others.

"We have so many friends who are moving out and say how much easier life has been for them," Bakstad said. "If we can make it work in the city, we would love to stay. In a way, the jury is out."

As I pointed out in "Affordable Family Formation," the adults moving out to find affordable housing and schooling for their children are more likely to become Republican family values voters than the ones who stay and don't have children because they like the San Francisco lifestyle so much.

Now, some people move to San Francisco specifically because they don't have family values (e.g., a lot of gay men move there). But other people end up in a city because when they got out of college, that's where they got the best job offer. And people naturally put down roots wherever they are and adopt some of the local norms. An interesting question would be: What's the impact on your likelihood of getting married and on your average number of children if you take a job first in SF or NYC vs. Atlanta or Dallas?

That leads to a more general question that I'd like your advice upon: The extraordinarily high correlations between measures of family formation (such as the marriage rate and the birth rate) and Bush's share of the vote in the last two elections are obviously the result of two effects. More conservative people move to cheaper areas to have families, and, people who are living in more liberal, more expensive areas are less likely to go down the family path and become family voters because of the cost and culture of their urban area. But, how do I estimate the size of the two effects? My gut feeling is that correlations are driven 50% by people moving and 50% by people not moving and being affected by their locality.

But what is a good approach to quantifying this breakdown?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My new VDARE.com column:

"The Return of Patriarchy:"

Philip Longman, a nice liberal affiliated with the nice liberal New America Foundation, has written a politically incorrect article that's getting a lot of deserved attention: The Return of Patriarchy in the March-April edition of Foreign Policy magazine. It endorses, without mentioning it by name, much of Pat Buchanan's 2001 book on falling birthrates, The Death of the West.

Longman's thesis is:

"Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best." ...

Longman rightly points out that religious and ideological differences affect fertility. But the arrow of causality also runs in the opposite direction—people who get married and have several children tend to become more socially and politically conservative for the sake of their children. ...

So Longman shouldn't ignore the impact of economics on marriage and fertility—what I call "Affordable Family Formation." There's more the government can (and should) do about the cost of housing and the cost of good schools than about religious beliefs.

My theory that affordable family formation drives marriage and fertility was anticipated in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin in his landmark Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind:

"For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life."

A quarter of a millennium ago, Franklin explained the virtuous cycle connecting low land prices, high wages, marriage, and children:

"Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People… Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry;… Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe."

As Ben might have expected, I found that:

"Bush carried the 20 states with the cheapest housing costs, while Kerry won the 9 states with the most expensive… The Mortgage Gap has been growing. Bush was victorious in the 26 states with the least home price inflation since 1980. Kerry triumphed in the 14 states with the most (according to the invaluable Laboratory of the States website)."

So, what can Republican government do to help preserve the traditional American patrimony of high wages and affordable land prices (and, in turn, help itself by creating new family values voters?) Franklin offered a sensible answer, which is even more logical now. Restrict immigration. As old Ben asked:

"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?"

Good question. [MORE]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Palin: Affordable Family Formation in action

A couple of writers for Slate get it (almost) about how the Palins are the exemplars of my theory of Affordable Family Formation:

Working-Class Hero: How the Palins' enviable blue-collar lifestyle could help the McCain campaign.
By Adriaan Lanni and Wesley Kelman

But the pregnancy (which could help swing voters identify with Palin) threatens to obscure a seductive and misleading subtext in Palin's biography that may play a key role in the election: the way she embodies the hope of a blue-collar life without economic insecurity.

Actually, the 18-year-old fiance looks quite capable of doing a man's work and earning a man's pay in the Alaskan economy. I have no idea if he, personally, will turn out to be a decent provider, but he's got a strong back in a place where that's worth something.

Palin's background reminded us of an Alaskan we met several years ago. We had just moved to Anchorage for a temporary job in the state court system and struck up an illuminating conversation with a bricklayer while on a hike outside town. He made a surprising amount of money—he had moved to Alaska because its wages were so high. He also had enviable stretches of leisure: He worked long shifts during the short construction season, then spent all fall and winter riding his "snowmachine" (Alaskan for snowmobile), panning for gold—yes, people still do that there—and hunting and fishing. He exuded optimism; his life was good and he knew it, and there was no resentment of yuppies like us.

Palin's family, warts and all, has some of the same features. Husband Todd's two jobs—commercial fisherman and oil production manager on the North Slope—required little formal education and provide ample time off. Yet they pay extremely well. If you include the permanent fund dividend that Alaska distributes to its residents as a way of sharing oil tax revenues, the family made about $100,000 last year, not counting Sarah's $125,000 salary as governor.

Mr. Palin's income alone would put the Palins at about the same level as many well-educated, white-collar workers we knew in Anchorage. It is also enough money to enjoy a quality of life that is, at least to a certain taste, superior to what is enjoyed almost anywhere else, either in cities or in the countryside. Like the bricklayer, the Palins can hunt and fish in a place of legendary abundance. Their hometown may be a dingy Anchorage exurb, but it has cheap, plentiful land bordering a vast and beautiful wilderness, which is crisscrossed by Todd (the "Iron Dog" champion) and the Palin children all winter. (By comparison, in the Northeast many leisure activities are brutally segregated by income: Martha's Vineyard vs. the Poconos, the Jersey Shore vs. the Hamptons.)

This free and easy life is radically different from the desperate existences depicted in Barack Obama's speeches. The main policy thrust of Obama's acceptance speech (and of both Clinton speeches) was that middle-class families, and particularly blue-collar families like the Palins, are in crisis because of stagnant wages, unemployment, foreign competition, and growing inequality. But these problems, which are a statistical fact, seem a world away from the Palin family.

This disjunction between the good life for many Alaskans and the not-so-good life for working-class families elsewhere suggests several strategies for the McCain campaign. Palin certainly has more credibility than McCain to attack Democrats' economic policies. More subtly, Palin embodies a notion that Republicans can create a society like Alaska—where the culture has a heavy working-class influence, state taxes are nonexistent, economic prospects are good for people regardless of formal education, and bricklayers can make the same money as urban lawyers (and have more fun in their spare time).

While Democratic policy tries to help blue-collar workers by making it easier for them to attend college and get office jobs—that is, by encouraging them to cease to be blue-collar—Palin's Alaskan story offers hope from within the blue-collar culture. She validates the goodness of life in rural America because she has embraced a particularly exotic, turbocharged version of this life. Her biography, bound to be emphasized by Republicans, thus makes a powerful appeal to one of the country's most decisive constituencies.

The rub, of course, is that however genuine it may be, Palin's family life may not be possible outside Alaska.

The bottom line is supply of land vs. supply of labor. That's always been America's big advantage, but John McCain, of course, will never get it. Ben Franklin did get it, way back in 1751:

“For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life. ... Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People. … Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry… Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.”

Franklin then pointed out the policy implication of this simple logic: don't flood the country with foreigners. McCain will never, ever figure that out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Affordable Family Formation and college debt

A reader writes:

I've read your articles about the political impact of family formation costs with interest.

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes had a piece about the rising number of people who begin their adult lives with enormous student loan debt. It occurred to me that, for those living with the problem, this is probably as significant an obstacle to family formation as any, and thus would have a leftward influence on the student-debtor population.

This may help explain another political trend that’s been taking place over the past 20 years or so. Forgive me for not having the statistics handy, but I’ve read that political conservatism used to be significantly, positively correlated with education and that this is no longer the case. Could it be that it isn’t having acquired a college education that makes those with more schooling veer leftward; it’s that paying for it keeps those people from starting families sooner? Add to this the fact that net debtors of all types have historically been sympathetic to the left, and it’s possible that student debt could be quite significant in shaping political leanings.

It’s easy to make too much of such things, but there might be something there.

Can anybody think of a data source to check this hypothesis?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Affordable Family Formation at work in the Lonely Hearts columns

John Kass writes in The Chicago Tribune:

Kevin J. McGraw, a student of finches and other birds, is working toward his doctorate in evolutionary biology at the esteemed Cornell University in New York...

It's all in his latest study, "Environmental Predictors of Geographic Variation in Human Mating Preferences," published in Ethology, a European scientific journal.

But if you don't have the latest copy of Ethology handy, let's just call his study by an earthier, more precise title:

What do women really want in a guy, anyway?

"That's what I tried to determine," McGraw said on the phone Tuesday from his Cornell office. "And so we studied the lonely-hearts ads in newspapers from many cities."

One of those newspapers was the [Chicago] Tribune. He read hundreds of personal ads from the Trib and other newspapers across the country. He examined the words in the ads, those that fell into four categories: physical attractiveness, resources, emotional stability and hobbies. The frequency of words in these categories enabled McGraw to figure out what women really want. It's scientific.

You might think big-city women want men who are gentle, kind, compassionate, sensitive.

And you'd be wrong, wrong, wrong.

In cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Miami, women don't go weak for sensitive, caring guys, no matter what anyone told you.

Cash wins. As does the big luxury car; the expensive suits; the strong, handsome jaw line; the alpha personality.

"It's a question of resources," McGraw said. "Women want what birds want. They're looking for the strong genes. They're searching for a mate that will provide what they need to raise a family.

"And in big-city environments, crowded areas with lots of people, women are attracted on average to men who will accumulate these resources."

So what happened to the sensitive male?

"The sensitive male?" McGraw asked, snickering politely.

Yeah, the sensitive male, the guy without much money, without the good looks or Scorpion King physique. You know, that caring, nurturing male, the gentle guy that women are supposed to go for?

"Well, now, the sensitive male, on average, he's not going to be able to pass on his genes in a big city," McGraw said. "He'll have to move to a small town."

Yes, it sounds cruel and harsh, but ovenbirds and finches have it tough too. It's not like men didn't already know this truth.

Birds, chicks, lions, guppies, whatever. Men are easily manipulated. The females are the ones with the power to choose.

While big-city women want power, McGraw found that in smaller towns, women tend to prize emotional stability--kindness, gentleness--in a man.

So if you are single guy without much money and you're looking for the woman of your dreams, you better move to a city of more modest size, like Montgomery, Ala.

"A female bird needs resources to complete her breeding attempts in a season, and so she's going to find a male who can provide for her," McGraw said. "We transferred that idea to humans and found, that in a dense population, women really, truly emphasize things about a man that can help her get those resources to survive and reproduce."

"It's an indicator of resources," he said. "But women also highly prize physical attractiveness. They care about emotional stability on average, throughout the survey. Only in larger, more densely populated cities, resources win out."

Happily, the women of the Chicago metropolitan area aren't all that materialistic. Well, almost.

The mercenary women of San Francisco beat them, followed by women in Los Angeles and Boston. According to the study, the women of the Chicago area are slightly greedier than the women of Miami. And that's fine with me.

Women who care more about sensitive men live in cities like Montgomery, New Orleans and St. Louis.

"The big-city girls like the sugar daddies, as people have called it," McGraw said. "And the nice guys win out in the small cities. So there's still hope."

He means, for the species.

jskass@tribune.com

Clearly, the correlation is with the cost of living, especially the cost of housing. See my article "Affordable Family Formation" on how the cost of housing, marriage, and children makes some states red and other states blue.

Judging by mass murderer Chai Vang's success with the ladies, however, perhaps when gentlemen fill out their Personal ads, they should also advertise themselves as possessing an "itchy trigger finger." That seems to set feminine hearts aflutter.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Affordable Family Formation is a huge political issue in ... Iran

Time reports:

Hekmati's experience is typical of young Iranians, who are finding themselves increasingly priced out of the marriage market. During the tenure of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, real estate prices have soared across the country, but especially in Tehran, where they have risen as much as 150%. Economists have blamed the spike on Ahmadinejad's disastrous economic policies. The President flooded the economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price of building materials. Those changes prompted many investors to move out of the stock market and the banking system and into real estate, which was considered a safer bet. Apartment prices in the capital more than doubled between 2006 and 2008. (See pictures of health care in Iran.)

The real estate boom was a disaster for middle-income Iranians, particularly young men seeking marriage partners. And many of those who have married and moved in with in-laws are finding that inflation is eating away at their savings, meaning it will take years, rather than months, to get their own place. The resulting strains are breaking up existing marriages - this past winter, local media reported that a leading cause of Iran's high divorce rate is the husband's inability to establish an independent household. Many others are concluding that marriage is best avoided altogether. (See the Top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

Ahmadinejad's government response to the crisis included a plan, unveiled in November 2008 by the National Youth Organization, called "semi-independent marriage." It proposed that young people who cannot afford to marry and move into their own place legally marry but continue living apart in their parents' homes. The announcement prompted swift outrage. Online news sites ran stories in which women angrily denounced the scheme, arguing that it afforded men a legal and pious route to easy sex while offering women nothing by way of security or social respect. The government hastily dropped the plan.

As Iranians head to the polls on Friday, Ahmadinejad faces the prospect that the very same broad discontent with the economy that propelled him to victory in 2005 could now help unseat him. Samira, a 27-year-old who works in advertising, recently became engaged and is among the millions of young Iranians who are eyeing the candidates through the lens of their own marital concerns. "Ahmadinejad promised he would bring housing prices down, but that didn't happen at all," she says. If left to their own salaries, she explains, she and her fiancÉ will never be able to afford their own place. That's a key reason they're voting for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate, who has made the economy the center of his platform. Like many young Iranians, they hope a new President will make marriage a possibility once more.

It's striking how obvious the logic of what I call Affordable Family Formation is to Iranians, while the vast majority of social analysts in the U.S. remain oblivious to the obvious.

Different social norms mask the situation somewhat in the U.S. Here, high housing prices tend to discourage child-bearing merely among the prudent but not among the imprudent (as satirized in the opening scene of "Idiocracy.") As I reported in VDARE.com: "From 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born in the United States to married women declined 0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3 percent."

Still, you'd have to say (at least from this one example) that political discourse in America compared to Iran, whether due to our country's well-padded safety margins or due to greater indoctrination by the media, is less in touch with the basic logic of human existence.

P.S. Obviousl

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Affordable Family Formation in action

Informative Michale Barone article in the WSJ:

The Realignment of America
The native-born are leaving "hip" cities for the heartland.
BY MICHAEL BARONE Tuesday, May 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly.

It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South. But the actual picture of recent growth, as measured by the 2000 Census and the census estimates for 2006, is more complicated. Recently I looked at the census estimates for 50 metropolitan areas with more than one million people in 2006, where 54% of Americans live. (I cheated a bit on definitions, adding Durham to Raleigh and combining San Francisco and San Jose.) What I found is that you can separate them into four different categories, with different degrees and different sources of population growth or decline. And I found some interesting surprises.

Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole. [More]

To understand the reasons behind these shifts in population and the voting behavior associated with them, see my 2005 article on "Affordable Family Formation."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

WSJ's Taranto pushes his "Roe Effect" half-truth again

James Taranto writes on the Wall Street Journal site:

Compounding the GOP advantage is what I call the Roe effect. It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

Well, it's definitely not a statement of fact that 40 million legal abortions caused there to be 40 million fewer babies born. What Taranto fails to understand is that legalizing abortion vastly increased the number of unwanted pregnancies, just as it also increased the sexually transmitted disease rate, by making unprotected coitus seem less risky. As U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt notes in his bestseller Freakonomics, after the Roe decision in 1973, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” So, net, for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe!

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, legal abortion turned out to be not just the solution to, but also the cause of, many unwanted pregnancies.

So, let's do the math, because Taranto sure hasn't. If that ratio held true overall (and I'm not sure that it does), then legalized abortion reduced the total number of births by 7 million, not 40 million. Most of the abortees would have been under 18, so that leaves about 3 million eligible voters. Their voting rate, being young and fairly minority would be low, so figure about only 1 million would have voted in 2004. If they would have gone 2 to 1 for Kerry (and who knows what the real ratio would be), that means the Roe Effect increased Bush's margin by 0.333 million, or about one-tenth. So, the Roe Effect would probably not be trivial, but it's not very important either. And of course, any guesstimate of how these aborted young people would have voted is just a guess.

If anybody wants to take a more sophisticated crack at estimating the size of the Roe Effect, please let me know what you come up with.

This is not to say that things like fertility and marriage don't have a huge impact on hows states voted in the last two Presidential elections. In this century, Republicans win in states with a high degree of "affordable family formation." Democrats win where suburban land is scarce, housing prices are high, people (especially whites) get married late or not at all, and have few children. My summary article that explains the red-blue map is here. You can follow the links to my other, more detailed articles explaining the link between affordable family formation and voting Republican.

It's testimony to the lack of clear thinking in our public discourse on the effects of legal abortion that Taranto has been pushing his Roe Effect idea for a long time without anybody ever making clear to him the massive flaw in his logic.

(Or, possibly people have explained it to Taranto and he simply chooses to mislead people about the impact of abortion. That wouldn't be the first time anybody has chosen to mislead the public about abortion's effects! For example, you have to read Levitt's hugely hyped chapter in Freakonomics on how legalizing abortion supposedly cut crime very carefully to understand why his celebrated theory fails most obvious historical tests. The reason Levitt's crypto-eugenic logic didn't work, with the first cohort born after legalization going on the worst teen violence spree in recent American history, is the same reason as Taranto overestimates the importance of the Roe Effect: abortion drove up the number of pregnancies far more than it drove down the birthrate.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"'Marriage promotion' is a destructive cargo cult"

Steve Randy Waldman writes:

“Marriage promotion” is a destructive cargo cult

... The case for marriage promotion begins with some perfectly real correlations. Across a variety of measures — household income, self-reported life satisfaction, childrearing outcomes — married couples seem to do better than pairs of singles (and much better than single parents), particularly in populations towards the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. So it is natural to imagine that, if somehow poor people could be persuaded to marry more, they too would enjoy those improvements in household income, life satisfaction, and childrearing. Let them eat wedding cake! 

But neither wedding cake nor the marriages they celebrate cause observed “marriage premia” any more than dances on tarmacs caused airplanes to land on Melanesian islands. In fact, for the most part, the evidence we have suggests that marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause on its own. In particular, for poor women, the availability of suitable mates is a binding constraint on marriage behavior.

Perhaps the availability of suitable progenitors should also be a binding constraint on breeding behavior? Or should we just switch over wholly to a Big Man system in which NFL star Antonio Cromartie fathers most of the children in America?

People in actually observed marriages do well because they are the lucky ones to find scarce good mates, not because marriage would be a good thing for everyone else too. Marrying badly, that is marriage followed by subsequent divorce, increases the poverty rate among poor women compared to never marrying at all. Married biological parents who stay together may be good for child rearing, but kids of mothers who marry anyone other than their biological father do no better than children of mothers who never marry at all.

Perhaps then it's not such a hot idea to have a child out of wedlock and then expect some other man to support it?

... Let’s stop with the litany of citations for a minute and just think like humans. Marriage is a big deal. The stylized fact that the great preponderance of grown-ups with kids who seem economically and socially successful are married is known to everybody, rich and poor, black and white. Yes, the traditional family is not uncontested. There are, in our culture, valorizations of single-parenthood as statements of feminist independence, valorizations of male liberty and libertinism, aspirational valorizations of nontraditional families by until-recently-excluded gay people, etc. But, despite the outsized role played by Kurt on Glee, these alternative visions are numerically marginal, and probably especially marginal among the poor. Single motherhood is the alternative family structure that matters from a social welfare (rather than culture-war) perspective. The problem marriage promotion could solve, if it could solve any problem at all, would be to increase the well-being of the people who currently become single mothers and of their children. 

But why do single women choose to become single mothers? It does not, in any numerically significant way, seem to have much to do with purposeful rebellion against traditional family norms. No, marriage of poor women seems constrained by the availability of promising mates. And why might that be? 

Charles Murray recently wrote a wonderful, terrible, book called “Coming Apart“. The book is wonderful, because it identifies and very sharply observes the core social problem of our time, the Great Segregation (sorry Tyler), or more accurately, the Great Secession of the rich from the rest, and especially from the poor. The book is terrible, because it then analyzes the problems of the poor as though they come from nowhere, as though phenomena Murray characterizes as declines in industriousness, religiosity, and devotion to marriage among the poor have nothing to do with the evacuation of the rich into dream enclaves. There are obvious connections that Murray doesn’t make because, I think, he simply doesn’t wish to make them. Let’s make some. We were talking about marriage. 

Murray does a wonderful job of describing the homogamy of our socioeconomic elites. The people who, at marriageable age, seem poised to succeed economically and socially, tend to marry one another. Johnnie doesn’t marry the girl next door, who might have been a plumber’s daughter while Daddy was a bank manager. 

Johnnie doesn’t marry anyone at all he met in high school, but holds out for someone who got into the same sort of selective college he got into. The children of the rich marry children of the rich, with notable allowances made for children of the nonrich who have accumulated credentials that signal a high likelihood of present or future affluence. Of course, love knows no boundaries. 

As a matter of simple arithmetic, increasing homogamy among the elite and successful implies a reduced probability that a person who cannot lay claim to that benighted group will be able to “marry up”, as it were. Once upon a time, in the halcyon days that Murray contrasts to the present, the courting would not have been so crass. There were many fewer markers of social class and future affluence.

Alert Jane Austen!

It's important to remember that the social conditions of America in 1946-1964 were not some sort of universal Old Days, but a historic high point of affordable family formation, as shown by an extremely young age of first marriage for women. The average age of first marriage for Englishwomen from 1200 to 1800 was around 25. In more affordable America from 1890-1940, it was 23 (before dropping to 20.4 in 1950).

Yet, we didn't have 40% illegitimacy rates in 1925 or 1880 or whenever.

The best and brightest were not so institutionally, geographically, and culturally segregated from the rest.

This news would have come as a surprise to Edith Wharton and Henry James. In 1900, for instance, a very large fraction of the wealthiest heiresses in the United States spent their summers at Newport, Rhode Island. We should not let our assumptions of what The Past was like be based solely upon watching Happy Days and Back to the Future.

(That is, within the community of white Americans. For black Americans, all of this is old hat.) The risk of “mismarrying”, for a male, was not so great, as he would be the primary breadwinner anyway, and her family, while perhaps poorer than his own, was unlikely to be in desperate straits. Men could choose whom they liked, in a personal, sexual, and romantic sense without great cost. 

Women from poor-ish backgrounds had a decent chance at landing a solid breadwinner, if not the next President. Very much like an insurance pool, a large and mixed pool of potential spouses renders marriage on average a pretty good deal for everyone. Really bad future husbands existed then as now, and then as now women were wise to do all they could to avoid marrying them. But the quality of a marriage is never revealed until well after you are in it. In a middle-class society, it was reasonable for a woman to guess that a nice guy she could fall in love with would be able to be a good husband and father too. 

Flash-forward to the present. We now live in a socially and economically stratified society. By the time we marry, we can ascertain with reasonable confidence what kind of job, income, neighborhood, and friends a potential mate is likely to come with. The stakes are much higher than they used to be. Our lifestyle norms are based on two-earner households, so men as well as women need to think hard about the earning prospects of potential mates.

But that also means that women would need to think less hard about whom to marry because the financial risk of picking a guy who turns out to not claw his way to the top is mitigated by her earning power.

Increasing economic dispersion — inequality — means that it is quite possible that a potential mate’s family faces circumstances vastly more difficult than ones own, if one is near the top of the distribution. It is unfashionable to say this in individualistic America, but it is as true now as it was for Romeo and Juliette that a marriage binds not only two people, but two families. If you have a good marriage, you will love your spouse. If you love your spouse and then her uninsured mother is diagnosed with cancer, those medical bills will to some perhaps large degree become your liability. More prosaically, if the inlaws can’t keep the heat on, do you wash your hands of it and let them shiver through the winter? In a very unequal society, the costs and risks of “marrying down” are large.

And this wasn't even truer in the past when people tended to have more in-laws and more of them tended to be close to the edge of actual physical suffering?

Waldman is sort of on to something here, but the lack of understanding of the concept of affordable family formation blurs his understanding. These days we're supposed to talk about Income Inequality and the One Percent, but what's really relevant here is not the One Percent but the supply and demand of housing and schooling free of the children of single mothers relative to wages, since Americans expect marriage to go with owning a home with a yard. The One Percent don't actually use up that much residential land and their swarming masses of children don't overwhelm public schools.

If they insisted in living Downton Abbeys surrounded by miles of scenic sightlines, yeah, sure. But what really uses up the supply of metropolitan land and tuition dollars is getting away from poor people, especially getting your children away from bastards. But all the Nice People tell us that it's very, very important to import more poor people from the third world to bring us the blessings of diversity.

As with an insurance pool, too much knowledge can poison the marriage pool, and reduce aggregate welfare by preventing distributive arrangements that everyone would rationally prefer in the absence of information, but which become the subject of conflict when information is known in advance.

Let me try to explain the math of where Waldman is coming from and why it isn't all the relevant to working class people. If Waldman's sister (who may be novelist Adelle Waldman, but probably isn't novelist Ayelet Waldman who is married to bestselling novelist Michael Chabon) is at, say, the 98th percentile of society and she's considering a man who is only at the 91st percentile, that 7-point gap is a big deal. You have to subtract the numbers from 100%: 9/2 is 4.5. That's really marrying down.

(I had to do this math once to convince a small town student's family to have her take the ACT a second time. She had scored at the 88th percentile the one time she took the test, which seemed pretty good to them. But then after I badgered her father into getting her to study up and retake the test, she scored at the 95th percentile. That meant she leapfrogged over 7/12ths of the people in her way, which is a lot.)

On the other hand, if you are talking about some woman who is at the 44th percentile of society and her beau is at the 37th percentile, well that's not really a big deal. But that's hard for somebody who writes long blog posts about what Charles Murray overlooked to grasp.

Because the stakes are now very high and the information very solid, good marriage prospects (in a crass socioeconomic sense) hold out for other good marriage prospects.

There is a lot of projection going on here of from the top few percent where people obsess over brand name colleges to the rest of society.

The pool that’s left over, once all the people capable of signaling their membership in the socioeconomic elite have been “creamed” away, may often be, objectively, a bad one. Marriage has a fat lower tail.

Which is why European ancestors insisted upon a harem system. Oh, wait, no, they found a one husband - one wife system worked better than African style one husband-many wives systems. Of course, that big mistake is why Europeans were conquered by Africans: polygamy just makes better societies.

When you marry, you risk physical abuse,

Fortunately, all these young women who don't marry join convents where these bad marriage prospects can't get at them to beat them up.

Oh, wait, no, they're actually sleeping with, getting impregnated by, and getting smacked around by these guys.

you risk appropriation of your wealth and income, you risk mistreatment of the children you hope someday to have, you risk the Sartre-ish hell of being bound eternally to someone whose company is intolerable.

Whereas having a couple of kids by a couple of guys you didn't marry ushers you into a social world where all your beaus are as decent and supportive as Mitt Romney.

More commonly, you risk forming a household that is unable to get along reasonably in an economic sense, causing conflicts and crises and miseries even among well-intentioned and decent people. It is quite rational to demand a lot of evidence that a potential mate sits well above the fat left tail, but the ex ante uncertainty is always high. When the right-hand side of the desirability distribution is truncated away, marriage may simply be a bad risk.

Whereas motherhood before marriage is a safe bet.

If you are at all libertarian, what the behavior of the poor tells you is that it is a bad risk.

Whereas being a welfare mom is the quintessence of playing it safe.

After all, marriage is not subject to a Bryan-Caplan-esque critique of politics, where people make bad choices in the voting booth that they would not make in the supermarket because they don’t own the costs of a bad vote. The consequences of a decision to marry or not to marry or who to marry are internalized very deeply by the people who make them. Humans, rich and poor, have strong incentives to try to make those choices well. Both common sense, social science, and revealed preference suggest that marriage rates among the poor have declined because the value of the contingent claim upon the future represented by the words “I do” has also declined within the affected population.
Promoting marriage among this population is not merely ineffective. It is at best ineffective. If the marriage-promoters persuade people to marry despite circumstances that render it likely they will marry poorly, the do-gooders will have done outright harm.

Or maybe they can persuade the person that having a child before marriage is not such a hot idea?

Pacific Islanders no doubt bore some cost to build their wooden planes, lashed to a mistaken theory of causality. But lives were not destroyed. Overcoming peoples’ well-founded misgivings about the quality of potential mates with moral exhortations and clipboards of superficial social science might well destroy lives. It would create plenty of success stories for marriage promoters, sure, because even bad bets turn out well now and again. But it would create more tragedies than successes, tragedies that very likely would be blamed on personal deficiencies of the unhappy couple while the successes would be victories for marriage itself in some insane ideological version of the fundamental attribution error.

I'm really not clear on the math here. Waldman seems to think it would be catastrophic for many women to be persuaded to have children only by their own personal Loser. But the real world alternative is having children by several losers. How does that work out better?

... But what about the children? One variant of marriage-centric social theory refrains from pushing marriage so hard, and simply asks that people delay childrearing until the marriage comes. (See e.g. Reihan Salam for some discussion.) If a woman is likely to find a good spouse at a reasonable age, then it might make sense to suggest she delay childbearing until the happy couple is stable and married, since kids reared by married biological parents seem to do better than other kids. Even that is subject to a causality concern: Perhaps childrearing is best performed by the kind of mother capable of finding a good mate, and at a time some unobservable factor renders her both ready to raise a child well and likely to take a husband.

E.g., she finally notices the older she gets the sexier she ain't.

A huge fraction of modern marketing is aimed at convincing women that they can get sexier in the future. All I Have to Do is buy the right makeup, lose the baby weight, get a new wardrobe, get a gym membership, eat at the right restaurants, and I'll be sexier than I am now. Would Oprah lie to me? So why should I throw away my sexytabulous future and settle for some guy who likes me now? You see, I need to lose a few pounds. Sure, I'll have a baby with him now, but then I'll lose all the baby weight and have a giant wedding. With him or maybe with somebody better. But exactly who is going to be the groom is not the point. The point is I'm going to have a giant wedding and be the star, so I can't have a crummy wedding now just because I'm kind of in the mood to have a baby. I can make a baby for free, but weddings cost money. So, if my mom wins the Lotto, or if my dad ever turns up, then somebody will pay for my amazing wedding (but not until after I lose the baby weight).

This would create a spurious correlation between the presence of biological fathers and good kid outcomes. We can’t rule that out, sure. But we have no reason to think it’s so, and lots of common sense reasons to think a biological father in a stable marriage improves outcomes by contributing to better parenting. So, I’d agree that women likely to find great marriage partners should by all means delay children until they have actually found one. 

But women likely to find great marriage partners already do exactly that. Single motherhood is not a frequent occurrence among women who expect to marry happily and soon. The relevant question is whether we should discourage from having children women who reasonably expect they may not find a good spouse at all, at least not while they are in their youth.

Because while it's apparently hard to find a man Good Enough to Be My Husband, it's evidently easy to find a man Good Enough to Be the Father of My Child.

That is to say, should we tell women who have been segregated into the bad marriage market, who on average have lowish incomes and unruly neighbors and live near bad schools, that motherhood is just not for them, probably ever? 

Yes.

We could bring back norms of shame surrounding single motherhood, or create other kinds of incentives to reduce the nonadoption birth rate of people statistically likely to raise difficult kids. It is possible. 

Indeed.

I think it would be monstrous.

It would be monstrous if the taxpayers chose to subsidize less lavishly the breeding of more Democrats.

I believe that, as a society, we should commit ourselves to creating circumstances in which the fundamentally human experience of parenthood is available to all, not barred from those we’ve left behind on our way to good schools and walkable neighborhoods. Women unlikely to marry who wish to have children by all means should. The shame is ours, not theirs.

We're up to 40% bastards now. Why not 80%?

It belongs to those of us who call ourselves “elite”, who are so proud of our “achievements” that we walk away without a care from the majority of our fellow citizens and fellow humans, from people who in other circumstances, even in the not so distant past, would have been our friends and coworkers, lovers and spouses. It’s on us to join together what we have put asunder.

You know, what married parents are spending huge amounts of money to do is to get their children away from the ever-increasing numbers of bastards in the schools. How is having even more bastards in the schools going to lessen the economic pressures to get your kids into schools with few bastards?
 

My Election Overview

From my new column in VDARE:

Let’s recap what happened:

Governors: As of my writing this, some 36 hours after all the polls had closed, Republicans had won 23 gubernatorial races, Democrats nine, independents one, and four were still up in the air.

State legislatures: Numbers are hazy at present, but Republicans supposedly took 500 legislative seats from Democrats. That will be important in the upcoming redistricting based on 2010 Census numbers, and in furnishing bench strength for future races.

Senators: Republicans won 23, Democrats 12, with Alaska still not called.

House: Republicans have won 239 races, Democrats 186, with ten yet to be decided.

"House Democrats lost more than half of the land mass they once held."
 

In other words, the historic Republican House advances of 2010 occurred largely in the less densely populated parts of the country. This was as predicted by my theory of Affordable Family Formation. Back in the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that the less crowded the country, the lower the land prices and the higher the wages. That means that more people can afford, and at younger ages, to get married and have children. The 21st Century partisan corollary to Franklin’s insight: "The party of family values" thrives most where and when family formation is most affordable. The political implication: urbanizing more and more of the country through mass immigration is bad for Republicans. But Republican politicians have been remarkably slow to grasp that concept.

It’s important to remember: this fairly strong Republican performance in the 2010 mid-term elections wasn’t supposed to be demographically possible anymore. After 2008, the whole country was supposed to have become like California—where, indeed, Republicans were mostly thrashed on Tuesday. (One commenter has suggested Republicans could now label Democrats "the Party of California.")

The question was repeatedly asked after 2008: How could the GOP ever win again when the population becomes less white each year?

Well, the answer is obvious, but only semi-mentionable in polite society: the GOP needs to do two things—get white people to turn out; and get them to vote Republican. This is the “Sailer Strategy”.

That’s how Republicans have long won in the South, where the white share of the population is already lower than California. (Outside of Florida, GOP candidates won all but a handful of Southern Congressional districts that weren’t specifically gerrymandered to be majority minority.)

You’d prefer not to live in a country where whites vote like a minority bloc? Me too! But maybe we should have thought about that before putting whites on the long path to minority status through mass immigration.

In the GOP’s 2002 and 2004 victories, whites turned out in large numbers and voted Republican by sizable margins—basically as a patriotic response to 9/11 and the subsequent Bush wars.

With the war going sour in 2006, however, the Republicans failed to hold their share of whites: Republican House candidates only won the white vote 51-47 and thus lost the House.

In 2008, McCain beat Obama by a mediocre 55-43 among whites. That’s not awful, but McCain also didn’t inspire whites to turn out to vote in large numbers, while Obama excited minorities and the callow. (In 2008, 11 percent of voters said it was their first time ever in a polling booth, compared to only three percent in 2010.)

As David Paul Kuhn, author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Party, pointed out in RealClearPolitics, the MainStream Media rewrote the history of 2008 in line with their worship of Obama. The forgotten truth: after picking Saran Palin as his veep, McCain led Obama in the Gallup Poll for the nine days preceding the epochal bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. on September 15, 2008, after which Obama regained the lead. But the Crash of 2008 didn’t so much convert whites into Obama voters as depress them.

In 2010, in contrast, GOP House candidates crushed Democratic House candidates 60-37 among white voters. And minorities had a hard time getting interested in a non-Presidential contest lacking in personalities and Will.I.Am videos.

The GOP picked up 91 percent of its votes among whites—in contrast to the Democrats’ 65 percent.

The two biggest governor’s races—California and Texas—illustrate how it works. In California, Hispanics and blacks together accounted for 31 percent of the voters—compared to 30 percent in Texas. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown won Latinos 64-30. Democrat Bill White carried them 61-38 in Texas.

(Interesting side note: as Hispanics become more dominant in California’s Democratic Party, blacks have been trending slightly more Republican. Among blacks, Meg Whitman lost only 77-21, while Rick Perry lost 88-11. As I’ve argued, immigration will cause problems for the Democrats too)

Adding blacks and Hispanics together, Rick Perry did slightly worse with the Non-Asian Minority vote in Texas, losing it 73-26, than Meg Whitman did in California, where she lost 68-27.

Why, then, did Perry cruise to a 55-42 victory in Texas, while Whitman failed 41-54 in California?

Answer: because Perry won the Texas white vote 69-28. In contrast, Whitman only edged out Brown 50-46 among California whites.

Moral: If a Republican candidate can’t win a majority of whites, he or she can’t win the election.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer