Weekly Digest: Spreading the Word
Welcome to my weekly digest for June 16, 2023, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!
Spread the Word
As you may have seen, I have a new book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, coming out in January with Zondervan Reflective.
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The Beauty Privilege
The Wall Street Journal has a great article talking about all the benefits that accrue to people who are physically beautiful.
Beauty has its privileges. Studies reliably show that the most physically attractive among us tend to get more attention from parents, better grades in school, more money at work and more satisfaction from life. A study published in January in the Journal of Economics and Business found that good-looking banking CEOs take in over $1 million more in total compensation, on average, than their lesser-looking peers. “Good looks pay off,” the authors write.
New research from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance similarly finds that comely managers of mutual funds lure more investments and enjoy more promotions than their homelier counterparts, even though their funds don’t perform as well. The researchers suggest this performance gap may be because handsome managers approach risk with hubristic levels of confidence.
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Scientists attribute the human tendency to give attractive people better treatment to something called the halo effect. Basically, we tend to assume that good looks are a sign of intelligence, trustworthiness and good character and that ugliness is similarly more than skin deep. “Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference,” Aristotle observed. This may help explain why attractive people are less likely to be arrested or convicted, even after controlling for criminal involvement, according to a 2019 study of nationally representative data published in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law.
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Xijing Wang, a social psychologist at City University of Hong Kong, addressed these questions in a set of five experiments involving more than 1,300 participants in the U.S. and China, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior in November 2022. After giving people money and raffle tickets and asking them to share, Wang and colleagues found that those who rated their own looks highly were more likely to keep the items for themselves. Participants who were primed to feel more attractive were also more likely to agree with the statements “I demand the best because I’m worth it” and “I feel entitled to more of everything.”
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Her findings reinforce other studies that show that physically attractive people often cultivate self-serving beliefs. A 2014 paper in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, for example, found that those who saw themselves as good-looking sensed they had more power and higher status than their plainer peers. They were also more likely to attribute growing economic inequality in the U.S. to the hard work and talent of those at the top. Participants who were prompted to recall a time when they felt alluring were more inclined to agree with the statements ‘‘Having some groups on top really benefits everybody’’ and ‘‘Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.” They were also less likely to donate a $50 gift card to charity than those who were asked to recall a time when they felt ugly.
Politically Polarized Dating
Sociologists Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone have another interesting piece in the Atlantic about how even romance is becoming politicized.
Marriage rates in America are falling fast: Many men and women are marrying later, and more and more people. are never marrying at all. Marriage is in retreat for a host of reasons, but one overlooked cause is the rising difficulty many young people have finding a partner who meets all of their requirements—emotional, physical, financial, and political. That last requirement has only become more important over time, with fewer Americans willing to date or marry across the aisle.
Dating apps and websites report a growing share of users setting political criteria for matches. The Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, recently found that about two-thirds of liberal and conservative singles would be more likely to “swipe left” and reject a potential match who did not share their politics.
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The most striking aspect of these trends is that the past decade has seen the sexes polarizing along ideological and political lines, a pattern that coincides with the rise of social media and the post-Trump political landscape. Young single men have been moving to the right, even as their female peers have been moving even further left. About 10 percent of such men were conservative in the early 1980s, but that share has now risen to about 15 percent (while the proportion of single liberal young men has held steady at about 18 percent in recent years).
As for single young women, the share identifying as liberal surged from about 15 percent in the early 1980s to 32 percent in the 2020s. (Correspondingly, the share of conservative single women declined from 10 percent to about 7 percent over the same period.) Most of this change has happened since 2010. In short, the past decade has seen single young men shift slightly to the right and single young women move markedly left, which means that the ideological divide between the sexes is growing.
The values and attitudes encapsulated in religious and political ideologies also act as a reliable proxy for long-term life goals—especially regarding gender, work, and family—that have a big bearing on whether marriages succeed or fail. For men and women who have similar political views, forming a bond with a mate is simplified. But for those with very different political views, matching is a tougher challenge. Because fewer heterosexual men and women will be able to find a partner who shares their politics, more people may never marry at all.
This political polarization is a less advanced version of what has toxified gender relations in South Korea. See my recent newsletter #75 for more about that country and what it might portend for the future here.
And speaking of South Korea, here’s a new one:
WSJ: Pricey Hurdle Before the Wedding: A Splashy, $4,500 Proposal - South Koreans like to pop the question in a fancy hotel suite, with a new designer handbag to mark the occasion.
Best of the Web
Amy Lim, et. al.: Desire for Social Status Affects Marital and Reproductive Attitudes
We argue that modern desire for social status hijacks psychological mechanisms governing life history strategy, leading to maladaptive delays in marriage and reproduction. A heightened desire to acquire higher social status led to preferences for investing heavily in fewer children rather than spreading one's resources across multiple children (i.e., offspring quality over quantity), and for delayed marriage and reproduction.
NYT: What All the Single Ladies (and Men) Say About the Economy
Institute for Family Studies: A Sad Time for Alienated Fathers
MSN: Brad Wilcox on the state of fatherhood in America — and what can be done to make it better
Richard Reeves of Brookings argues for a post-marital conception of fatherhood. Reeves is the author of the recent book Of Boys and Men.
Gallup: Social Conservatism in U.S. Highest in About a Decade
Mere Orthodoxy: Piety, Technology, and Tradition - Great piece by Jon Askonas about the fundamental threat technology and modern society poses to tradition.
Politico: ‘I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government. I Want Something Far More Revolutionary.’ - A profile of Patrick Deneen. I do find the respect shown to revolutionary post-liberal Catholic integralism curious in light of the hostility to “Christian nationalism” when the former is more radical as well as being foreign to the American cultural and political tradition.
London Review of Books: A History of Rules
New Content and Media Mentions
I got a mention this week in the Washington Post, and was also linked in the Aquila Report..
I was also a guest on the Death and Glory podcast this week discussing a post-familial society.
New this week:
In case you missed it, newsletter #77 was a look back at the gender teachings of the infamous pastor Mark Driscoll.
At American Reformer, M. A. Franklin writes about the right books.
Post-Script
There was a bit of Aaron Renn newsletter convergence on Twitter this week:
I was unimpressed with Reeves' article. I don't disagree with the proposition that fathers, even if unmarried to the mothers of their children, play an important role in their children's lives, but much of what he had to say in the latter half of the piece was garbage.
He emphasizes this point about the single biggest explanatory factor in the rise of non-marital births is the decline of shotgun weddings, partly to justify his policy recommendation of "better access for both women and men to effective forms of contraception." He goes on:
"in 1977, among women with a low level of education, 26% who became pregnant outside marriage would get married before the birth. Now it’s 2% for that group. That puts a sharp empirical point on what might otherwise be a theoretical conversation. What about that 24% percent-point difference? Do we think the world was better when women who got pregnant outside of marriage felt obliged by social norms to get married? Or do we think that the world is better where they don’t? And if you believe at all in revealed preference, the fact that only 2% of them are choosing to get married now must tell us something."
He must not get out much, such that he thinks it's so obvious that the world is worse when there's social pressure to get married if you are pregnant that he can ask this question rhetorically. Notice a few things: he assumes it is primarily the women who don't want to get married, rather than the men. I'm sure the term "shotgun wedding" came about because the father of the bride had to force his daughter, rather than the cad, to the altar. He has very little to say about the welfare state and how that might change decisions on the margin about getting married. And why is the more recent data more so "revealed preference" than in 1977?
He goes on to say, "I think what it tells us, above all, is that the real problem here is very often unintended pregnancies." But he seems to think there is an inelastic demand curve for engaging in activities that lead to unintended pregnancies. Does he not think that a world in which shotgun weddings are expected will be a world with fewer unintended pregnancies?
I just don't see why someone can propose greater access to contraception as a "solution," to this problem without asking, "Why hasn't that worked by now?" Is it really a matter of access? I have a hard time believing this. Is it really safe and effective? Then why is abortion treated as a sacred right, especially among highly educated women, who would presumably have the means and ability to use such safe and effective contraception? Why would a pre-pill world have so many fewer unplanned pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births if the demand for pregnancy-inducing activities is inelastic? It seems like there's something missing and people like Reeves are not interested in asking these questions.
And then he poo poos Charles Murray's urging that elites "preach what they practice" for two reasons. First, he says, "First, people don’t need persuading. Most survey evidence says actually that marriage is still the ideal for most people, and especially for working class Americans. It’s not that people don’t think having kids within marriage is a good idea. It’s that for one reason or another, they’re finding it difficult to do so."
It's friggin' rich that he claims to believe in "revealed preference" and then accepts what people say in surveys over the preferences they actually demonstrate. But he doesn't acknowledge that the elite actually do avoid births out-of-wedlock at a much higher rate than the working class, even while they promote sillyness such as non-monogamy and post-familialism.
"The second problem is that I don’t think the American working class right now is in a terrifically receptive mood for lectures from liberal elites about how they should be living their lives. That’s just my political sense of it. I don’t have empirical evidence, and I could be wrong, but I just don’t feel like it’s going to go down very well right now, given our current politics."
He just seems terribly out of touch if he thinks the only method is literally preaching at people. Don't get me wrong: the Cathedral will preach their message and shove it down people's throats. But that's not all they do. They pump their message, which is the precise opposite of traditional family values, through the universities, K-12, libraries, TV and movies, and taxfunded NGOs. And it works.
I sure hope Driscoll shouted "HOW DARE YOU?!" at Josh Hawley.
I am skeptical of most beauty privilege research, as I think there is a publication bias when a plausible alternative explanation is that beautiful people have higher opportunity costs and this isn't accounted for in the research. Why might a beautiful professor, who could be a fashion model, get higher student evaluations than an average looking professor? Maybe because the beautiful one, who could be a fashion model, loves teaching so much and that love shines through how the course is delivered and the effort put forth, whereas the average looking professor has lower opportunity costs.