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.
Regarding Deneen and the different treatment for his ideas vs. Protestant "Christian Nationalism":
It's probably easy to get conspiratorial here, but really I think this is all happening at a visceral level.
"Evangelicals" and "Fundamentalists" have been identified as enemies. The typical leftist, in his very bones, understands us as his primary enemies, even if his conception of us is distorted to the point of being contradictory and nonsensical. In his mind, all of the worst hypocrisies, real and imagined, of any church in America are assumed to belong to every church all at once.
I don't think the typical leftist really understands "TradCath" as a separate category from "Catholic". Largely because TradCaths are rarer, electorally invisible, and, in a bizarre dance, they still belong to the same church as their primary religious enemies -- indeed, in some cases may address them as "Your Excellency" or "Your Eminence".
We could compare it to rightist tolerance of anti-Woke leftists. Freddie deBoer is an avowed Communist, which is surely more alien to the American tradition than someone who just wants American corporations to show more deference to minorities. Indeed, if Freddie were in power, it likely would be worse for all of us. Why, then, do we find him so much more tolerable?
Times change. Picture the Catholic integralists making their arguments in 1960, when JFK had to assure the nation that he was not going to take marching orders from the Pope if he were elected President. Imagine the reception that Deneen et al. would have gotten.
The Catholic church is not a novelty in public life today. They include half the Supreme Court. Not so in 1960. But the fervor of the Catholic church is not much compared to 1960. Non-Catholics are not particularly worried about Catholic influence today.
The Catholic justices (and any Catholics that participate actively in GOP politics) are viewed primarily as an extension of Evangelicalism. Conservative Catholics who aren't explicitly tied to the GOP, meanwhile, are seen as essentially just members of the same body as Fordham and the Jesuits. Conservative Catholicism isn't really understood as a force in its own right, and I think it's because of the way Catholicism is still a broad church. For example, they're not viewed like Mormons -- a scary part of the GOP coalition in leftist eyes despite being very small -- and I'd argue it's primarily because of the "big tent" they fall within. If American Catholicism were 1/5th the size it is today, but self-identified Catholics voted like Mormons, they'd receive more dedicated hate of their own.
My sense of the mood in 1960 and earlier is that people, including liberal Protestant elites, worried Catholicism was ascendant, because Catholic fertility was greater than Protestant and a Catholic wave of mass immigration had taken place in living memory. Moreover, places that national elites care about (major Northern cities) were much more Catholic than places they don't (the South), so the problem appeared more acute.
Today, while the American right is in disarray and no part of the GOP coalition is really ascendant in a way that threatens leftist interests, conservative Protestantism comes the closest, and it's a material fact that Roe was overturned due primarily to our electoral influence, so we're the ones that receive the bogeyman treatment.
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.
Regarding Deneen and the different treatment for his ideas vs. Protestant "Christian Nationalism":
It's probably easy to get conspiratorial here, but really I think this is all happening at a visceral level.
"Evangelicals" and "Fundamentalists" have been identified as enemies. The typical leftist, in his very bones, understands us as his primary enemies, even if his conception of us is distorted to the point of being contradictory and nonsensical. In his mind, all of the worst hypocrisies, real and imagined, of any church in America are assumed to belong to every church all at once.
I don't think the typical leftist really understands "TradCath" as a separate category from "Catholic". Largely because TradCaths are rarer, electorally invisible, and, in a bizarre dance, they still belong to the same church as their primary religious enemies -- indeed, in some cases may address them as "Your Excellency" or "Your Eminence".
We could compare it to rightist tolerance of anti-Woke leftists. Freddie deBoer is an avowed Communist, which is surely more alien to the American tradition than someone who just wants American corporations to show more deference to minorities. Indeed, if Freddie were in power, it likely would be worse for all of us. Why, then, do we find him so much more tolerable?
Times change. Picture the Catholic integralists making their arguments in 1960, when JFK had to assure the nation that he was not going to take marching orders from the Pope if he were elected President. Imagine the reception that Deneen et al. would have gotten.
The Catholic church is not a novelty in public life today. They include half the Supreme Court. Not so in 1960. But the fervor of the Catholic church is not much compared to 1960. Non-Catholics are not particularly worried about Catholic influence today.
The Catholic justices (and any Catholics that participate actively in GOP politics) are viewed primarily as an extension of Evangelicalism. Conservative Catholics who aren't explicitly tied to the GOP, meanwhile, are seen as essentially just members of the same body as Fordham and the Jesuits. Conservative Catholicism isn't really understood as a force in its own right, and I think it's because of the way Catholicism is still a broad church. For example, they're not viewed like Mormons -- a scary part of the GOP coalition in leftist eyes despite being very small -- and I'd argue it's primarily because of the "big tent" they fall within. If American Catholicism were 1/5th the size it is today, but self-identified Catholics voted like Mormons, they'd receive more dedicated hate of their own.
My sense of the mood in 1960 and earlier is that people, including liberal Protestant elites, worried Catholicism was ascendant, because Catholic fertility was greater than Protestant and a Catholic wave of mass immigration had taken place in living memory. Moreover, places that national elites care about (major Northern cities) were much more Catholic than places they don't (the South), so the problem appeared more acute.
Today, while the American right is in disarray and no part of the GOP coalition is really ascendant in a way that threatens leftist interests, conservative Protestantism comes the closest, and it's a material fact that Roe was overturned due primarily to our electoral influence, so we're the ones that receive the bogeyman treatment.