Gays and lesbians make bad bed-fellows

Slate's William Saletan on gay parenting, here. Slate likes the bratty contrarian angle, and they're willing to challenge feminists and a few other liberal shibboleths, but it's impossible to imagine them taking on the gay initiative.

I don't know enough about the research to have a position, but I certainly don't trust Saletan's take the studies. My biggest question: why do the studies consider male-male and female-female parenting pairs together, if they do? They're virtually certain to be widely divergent in some very fundmental ways. If some studies do consider the groups separately, why doesn't Saletan report on the findings? (I don't have a problem with female-female parents, as long as they have plenty of money, but I can't say the same about male-male.)

Diamond-encrusted fraud

Particularly bad little Weisberg article in Slate on why reasonable folks won't vote for Romney, here.

Boils down to: people who would believe in a fraud as transparent as Joe Smith are too stupid to be trusted in office. No, Smith's claims are no more outrageous than the central claims of Christianity and Judaism, but they're worse, because they're newer, because.... not quite clear on that one.

Self-critical essay on atheism

Interesting essay on atheism from The New Republic here. I really dislike the word "atheism" in this context.

Illegitimate births and teen pregnancy highest among most vulnerable groups (duh)

These stats on out-of-wedlock births from "Hispanic Family Values?" by Heather MacDonald, appearing in City Journal, here.

Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

I don't know what data set she's mining for these numbers, and I don't care for the tone of the piece. But I think the numbers bear out the idea that a permissive sex culture puts the most vulnerable segments of a population at greatest risk.

Food and Sex

This from Slate's bio-sciences guy on appetites for food and sex.

The premise---that the drives for food and sex are roughly analogous in many ways---is strong, I think.

Briefly Noted, 11/28/06

The Book of Dave, Will Self. A deliberate parody of the Book of Mormon?

The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton. I'm in interested in what he means by the "genuine psychological needs" to which good architecture responds.

Haven't I been saying this for a long time now?

Jane Galt on women's choices, here.

Yep. To all of it. I think I'm as smart as she---fewer skillz, though---but maybe less ambitious? Could I be Jane Galt?

2006 divided by 100 is...

NYT's 100 most notable books of 2006, here.

I'm a sucker for lists like this; the impulse to list and catalog, so as not to forget, is the engine behind this blog, in fact.

I haven't read any of these books, although I'm aware of many of them (maybe half) and placed several of them on my library queue (another comforting list).

If I read two of these each week, I can have them done by next year's list. (Unlikely.)

The only thing better than making a list like this, of course, is being on a list like this. (Even more unlikely.)

You go, girl!

From Slate, on why there isn't gender parity in the upper echelons of the business world: here.

The thesis is that a miasma of unconscious bias erodes women's ambition.

Ick. Ick, ick, ick. I don't know why I've become so averse to the "unconscious bias" hypothesis, but recently nothing pleases me more than to spend an afternoon inveighing vigorously against it.

Here are my objections: "Ambition" is defined entirely too narrowly, from an evolutionary perspective. Women ARE ambitious---Hrdy is very good on this---in the sense that they are motivated to achieve particular sorts of status and acquire particular kinds of resources. But the female reproductive strategy is different from the male---all caveats about environment apply here---"ambition" is going to look very different between the sexes. Women are ambitious to achieve social status in a network that preserves social relationships---social relationships that will allocate resources to her offspring; this is the "Queen Bee" phenomenon. They will undermotivated to achieve the kind of social status that destroys or attenuates relationships with other people; conversely, men will be overmotivated in precisely this way---destroying rivals, not cultivating them---and also will be more strongly motivated to acquire material resources (or its proxies) in order to win mates.

I think this hypothesis is supported by the fact that girls' ambition changes right around puberty---when, crucially, they are STILL outperforming boys in school, so the unconscious bias hypothesis is les convincing.

I don't know what to make of the "stereotype threat" research: what is the mechanism? (And I love how the author dismisses the neurobiology in a single sentence, but devotes paragraphs to stereotype threat.) Can it really by so robust a phenomenon if it can be corrected with nothing more than anodyne happy talk? Okay then: you go, girl! Now go forth and achieve at rates precisely parous to men. That should do the trick, right?

(I was also surprised that there was no talk of the "mommy track"---this seems to me an important issue.)

A pinker shade of crimson

Steven Pinker in the Harvard Crimson on science and faith, here.

I enjoyed this paragraph very much:

Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

But I was annoyed---precisely as he intended, I'm sure--- by the following: "Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these." The "good reasons" was intended to needle believers, of course; he knows very well that the implied valuation of "good" has no basis in science, either.

I'm slightly puzzled by his and Dawkins' great anatagonism toward faith. Clearly some orientation of the human mind toward the supernatural has been selected; do they believe humans would be better off simply suppressing it? Is it only organized religion, not spirituality more generally, to which they object? (They reject both, I know.)

It's funny: I was sort of predisposed to like Pinker until I looked him up on Wikipedia, here. I was completely turned off by that photo---I'm not sure why---and now I think of him as a real tool. I wonder what conclusions people reach about me based on my photo?

Having It All... the way to the bank

This in the Washington Post about women having it all; it looks to me like precisely the sort of high-carb pandering that women gobble up, particularly the Whelan book (Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, by Christine B. Whelan), although it would be lovely if it were all true.

From the article:

As late as the 1980s, according to economist Elaina Rose, women with PhDs or the equivalent were less likely to marry than women with a high school degree. But the "marital penalty" for highly educated women has declined steadily since then, and by 2000 it had disappeared. Today, women with a college degree or higher are more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings potential.

Here's my understanding of the data: the marriage rate against years of education is a roughly bell-shaped curve. During the past decades, the peak of the curve has moved up the educational scale, precisely as one would expect as more women pursue higher education. So yes, at the moment women with college degrees have a higher marriage rate than women without. But women with advanced degrees still have LOWER marriage rates than women with college degrees (not sure about women with PhDs v. women with high school). I think the article's presentation of the data is misleading.

From the article:

Career women who postpone marriage, she explains, still have a good chance to marry in their 30s or 40s, and she cites a study by three sociologists who find that, unlike in the past, wives' fulltime employment is now associated with a lowered risk of divorce.

I don't know what data she's citing, and I don't know how to make sense of this. It seems like increasing women's earning potential could only increase the divorce rate. (Unless it's a simple matter of SES---that is, financial stress contributes to marital difficulty, so to the extent that the wife's income increases SES, it would benefit the marriage. You'd have to compare couples with the same total income, some with wives working and some without, and see what it looks like then.)

From the article:

Low-income, poorly educated men have the worst prospects of any group in today's marriage market, suggesting that it is a mistake to frame the revolution in marriage as a woman's issue.

Yes. This fits with my intuition that what is good for advantaged women is men, children, and disadvantaged women (and men and children).