Vox has a new post on Game of Thrones Season 5 which began on Sunday.
It is the best take yet on George R.R. Martin's epic, incomplete hard fantasy series based loosely on England's thirty-two year long War of the Roses fought in the 1400s between competing claimants to the throne that culminated in the rise of the House of Tudor under Queen Elizabeth; and, on the parallel HBO television series.
Showing posts with label Great Adjustment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Great Adjustment. Show all posts
13 April 2015
10 May 2013
Why do U.K. divorce trends differ from those in the U.S.?
In the United Kingdom, divorce and marriage statistics show a somewhat different pattern from those seen in the United States:
Also, long term marriage in the U.K. have not lost their stability over time:
The reasons for the discrepencies aren't entirely clear.
Is the difference due to the social welfare system?
I've explored the hypothesis in many previous posts, that economics is the most powerful driver over large scale trends in marriage and divorce rates, with the likelihood that a husband is unable to be a reliable breadwinner, who earns more than a spouse, and the reality that the spouse is economically dependent upon him, powerfully driving average divorce rates.
One plausible possibility is that the key factor is the social welfare system in the U.K. which differs greatly from that in the United States. There are several ways this could play out.
Few instances of extreme economic hardship puts less pressure on fragile marriages
The most extreme pressure on a marriage is the sustained unemployment of one or both spouses leaving them unable to support their household. It is much easier to let the forces of marital interia continue uninterrupted when one's basic economic needs are being met than in periods of great economic hardship that threaten lack of access to health care, homelessness, difficulty paying for food, and the like. Economic hardship is also a major driver of child abuse and neglect which when it happens is often a powerful push for a spouse to leave a marriage with the abusive or neglectful parent.
The U.K. has a much stronger social safety net than the U.S. As a result, once people meet the threshold of basic interpersonal compatability once the romance of being newlyweds wears off, U.K. couples are far less likely to face the acute economic stresses increasingly faced by American working class couples who have increasingly faced frequent bouts of unemployment with a very thin and time limited social welfare system to support them over the last forty years or so. In contrast, upper middle class families, who have reaped the lion's share of economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s in the United States (in contrast to a pattern of shared gains from economic growth in the post-World War II period) have been far less exposed to unemployment risks and have had sufficient savings during this mostly prosperous period to whether the brief periods between good jobs that they did experience.
In the absence of this kind of extreme economic hardships, more divorces in the U.K. are driven by interpersonal incompatability and couples that marry at an older age, including necessarily, on average, couples in second marriages, are less likely to be swept off their feet into these kinds of relationships and more likely to be able to work through them when they arise, because they are more mature.
In the United States, in contrast, where economic hardship drives many divorces, the same vunerability to unemployment that often caused the first divorce is disproportionately represented in the pool of people who are divorced and is likely to recur.
Less pressure to remarry improves the quality of the remarriages that occur anyway
Another factor in the difference, also related to the presence of a stronger social safety net, may be the reality that in the U.S. the need for someone who is divorced to remarry and quickly for economic reasons is far more intense than it is in the U.K.
A newly divorced single mother with a young child in the United States has a much more difficult time supporting her household than someone like the author of the Harry Potter series of books, J.K. Rowling did - writing her first book while living in public housing and surviving on welfare after leaving her bad marriage in Portugal. For example, homelessness is a far more real possibility for a woman in this situation in the U.S. than in the U.K.
The upshot of this reality is that many people who would enter into hasty remarriages with spouses deemed acceptable with fairly low standards out of economic necessity in the U.S. might not have remarried at all, or would have the luxury of being more discriminating in a choice of a second spouse in the U.K. than in the U.S.
A greater emphasis on unemployment benefits gives economic value to an unemployed man
A third way that this could play a role is that social welfare benefits are structured differently in the U.K. than in the United States.
In the U.S., eligibility for unemployment benefits is very restrictive, unemployment benefits are short in duration, and the amounts are meager. Typically, unemployment is available only to employees who are laid off and not to workers who are fired for any meaningful cause, or who quit even if they do so because the conditions of their employment are intolerable. Once unemployment benefits commence, they can be terminated for fairly trivial failures to pursue work opportunities or for securing almost any new work even if it leaves the worker no better off than receiving unemployment benefits. The benefits typically last no longer than six months and the amount is typically a quite small percentage of income over a prior time period (reduced greatly if the worker was employed for only part of that time period) subject to a cap that makes this percentage even smaller for anyone who was earning a really solid wage before loosing their job. These benefits, unlike most other social welfare benefits, are also subject to state and federal income taxation with the former taking a particularly large bite in many Southern states. The benefits generally do not include any health insurance coverage.
As a result of the features, in normal times, only a small fraction of the unemployed are eligible for unemployment benefits at any given time and those benefits are inadequate for those who are eligible for them. Household without a husband who is additional potential wage earner in them can access other means tested benefits, like food stamps, WIC, Medicaid and ordinary welfare (TANF, the last time I looked up the acronym) just as easily as households with one, or even more easily.
For example, the reality of long waiting lists for Section 8 public housing benefits in the United States mean that these benefits are available mostly only for those families who are in poverty continously for a long sustained period, which is not a typical pattern for an intermittently employed working class man who tends to have periods of somewhat higher than poverty line benefits for a while cycling with periods of poverty, requiring a household to constantly reapply for welfare benefits with each new cycle and falling out of line for benefits like public housing benefits that have waiting lists.
In contrast, in most European welfare systems, including that of the United Kingdom, unemployment benefits are more generous, easier to qualify for, and last longer. So, even when a husband is temporarily unemployed, rather than providing nothing at all, in a welfare system with generous unemployment benefits, the husband's access to these benefits makes him an economic asset to the family rather than an economic zero who increases their cost of living without providing any economic contribution of his own.
Universal health care removes economic pressures to jettison husbands without health insurance
Universal health care in the United Kingdom also creates different incentives than those found in the United States. In the U.S., middle class jobs frequently provide health insurance, and those in poverty or near poverty can receive Medicaid coverage, but health care is universal (mostly via Medicare) only for the elderly and the low income disabled. In the U.S., a large share of working class jobs don't provide health insurance and health insurance is very expensive for the self-employed.
Because health care is so expensive in the United States, being poor and thus qualifying for Medicaid coverage provides a benefit that would cost something on the order of $6,000 to $12,000 to obtain with private insurance for a household that has few prospects of securing a middle class job that provides health insurance. If the household includes a husband who has a working class job that doesn't provide health insurance (at least intermittently), or who is self-employed and has ups and downs of income, this very valuable economic benefit is not available to the family.
In contrast, in the U.K. and in almost every other developed country, health insurance is universal. This means that a husband who can find a working class job or obtain some self-employment income is adding value to the household, rather than putting its source of valuable government health care benefits at risk.
The availability of universal health care also makes it far less risky to be self-employed. For example, as a self-employed person, I pay about $12,000 a year for very high deductable ($5,000 per person per year) health insurance coverage for a family of four. And, if I can't make the pay the premium for even a month or two, I lose it and it becomes quite hard to obtain a comparable new health insurance policy. This means that I need great confidence that I can afford to pay $1,000 a month more than I would have otherwise needed every single month to make it possible to take the risk of pursuing self-employment. At the margins, this means that many people who would have higher average income from self-employment can't afford to do so because the income isn't sufficiently regular every single month. The minimum base of monthly income drives the decision more strongly than the average income. This means that the poor in the U.S. are more prone to favor welfare reliances over marginal self-employment (and almost no U.S. or foreign welfare system requires beneficiaries to seek self-employment), which again reduces the economic value of having a husband who is able and willing to work but can't find a job in a household.
Other possibilities
There are many other possibilities. For example, in the relevant time period, the U.K. was rapidly secularizing, while the U.S. remained far more religious.
The U.S. may value independence and freedom more than the authority respecting British do, leaving couples in the U.K. to put up with marginal marriages out of respect for community norms.
Divorce laws could play a role.
There are surely other possiblities as well.
Where one or both spouses are marrying for the second time, couples marrying today face an estimated 31% risk of divorce during their lifetime, compared to an estimated 45% risk of divorce amongst couples where both spouses are marrying for the first time.The first marriage divorce rate is quite close to the U.S. rate, but the second and later marriage lifetime divorce rate in the U.S. is well over 50% leading to an overall average for all marriages of about 50%.
Also, long term marriage in the U.K. have not lost their stability over time:
[T]he divorce rate for couples after they have been married for ten years or more was the same as it was in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. A couple who married in 2001 have the same chance of getting divorced after ten or more years of marriage as a couple who married in 1971[.]The U.S. trend, starting in about the 1970s, was for the rate of divorce to increase across the board for at least two decades, followed by a social class divergence sometime in the 1990s, with divorce rates (and couples who lived together and had children not marrying at all) at greater rates for working class families while marriage rates recovered and divorce rates fell for college educated couples.
The reasons for the discrepencies aren't entirely clear.
Is the difference due to the social welfare system?
I've explored the hypothesis in many previous posts, that economics is the most powerful driver over large scale trends in marriage and divorce rates, with the likelihood that a husband is unable to be a reliable breadwinner, who earns more than a spouse, and the reality that the spouse is economically dependent upon him, powerfully driving average divorce rates.
One plausible possibility is that the key factor is the social welfare system in the U.K. which differs greatly from that in the United States. There are several ways this could play out.
Few instances of extreme economic hardship puts less pressure on fragile marriages
The most extreme pressure on a marriage is the sustained unemployment of one or both spouses leaving them unable to support their household. It is much easier to let the forces of marital interia continue uninterrupted when one's basic economic needs are being met than in periods of great economic hardship that threaten lack of access to health care, homelessness, difficulty paying for food, and the like. Economic hardship is also a major driver of child abuse and neglect which when it happens is often a powerful push for a spouse to leave a marriage with the abusive or neglectful parent.
The U.K. has a much stronger social safety net than the U.S. As a result, once people meet the threshold of basic interpersonal compatability once the romance of being newlyweds wears off, U.K. couples are far less likely to face the acute economic stresses increasingly faced by American working class couples who have increasingly faced frequent bouts of unemployment with a very thin and time limited social welfare system to support them over the last forty years or so. In contrast, upper middle class families, who have reaped the lion's share of economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s in the United States (in contrast to a pattern of shared gains from economic growth in the post-World War II period) have been far less exposed to unemployment risks and have had sufficient savings during this mostly prosperous period to whether the brief periods between good jobs that they did experience.
In the absence of this kind of extreme economic hardships, more divorces in the U.K. are driven by interpersonal incompatability and couples that marry at an older age, including necessarily, on average, couples in second marriages, are less likely to be swept off their feet into these kinds of relationships and more likely to be able to work through them when they arise, because they are more mature.
In the United States, in contrast, where economic hardship drives many divorces, the same vunerability to unemployment that often caused the first divorce is disproportionately represented in the pool of people who are divorced and is likely to recur.
Less pressure to remarry improves the quality of the remarriages that occur anyway
Another factor in the difference, also related to the presence of a stronger social safety net, may be the reality that in the U.S. the need for someone who is divorced to remarry and quickly for economic reasons is far more intense than it is in the U.K.
A newly divorced single mother with a young child in the United States has a much more difficult time supporting her household than someone like the author of the Harry Potter series of books, J.K. Rowling did - writing her first book while living in public housing and surviving on welfare after leaving her bad marriage in Portugal. For example, homelessness is a far more real possibility for a woman in this situation in the U.S. than in the U.K.
The upshot of this reality is that many people who would enter into hasty remarriages with spouses deemed acceptable with fairly low standards out of economic necessity in the U.S. might not have remarried at all, or would have the luxury of being more discriminating in a choice of a second spouse in the U.K. than in the U.S.
A greater emphasis on unemployment benefits gives economic value to an unemployed man
A third way that this could play a role is that social welfare benefits are structured differently in the U.K. than in the United States.
In the U.S., eligibility for unemployment benefits is very restrictive, unemployment benefits are short in duration, and the amounts are meager. Typically, unemployment is available only to employees who are laid off and not to workers who are fired for any meaningful cause, or who quit even if they do so because the conditions of their employment are intolerable. Once unemployment benefits commence, they can be terminated for fairly trivial failures to pursue work opportunities or for securing almost any new work even if it leaves the worker no better off than receiving unemployment benefits. The benefits typically last no longer than six months and the amount is typically a quite small percentage of income over a prior time period (reduced greatly if the worker was employed for only part of that time period) subject to a cap that makes this percentage even smaller for anyone who was earning a really solid wage before loosing their job. These benefits, unlike most other social welfare benefits, are also subject to state and federal income taxation with the former taking a particularly large bite in many Southern states. The benefits generally do not include any health insurance coverage.
As a result of the features, in normal times, only a small fraction of the unemployed are eligible for unemployment benefits at any given time and those benefits are inadequate for those who are eligible for them. Household without a husband who is additional potential wage earner in them can access other means tested benefits, like food stamps, WIC, Medicaid and ordinary welfare (TANF, the last time I looked up the acronym) just as easily as households with one, or even more easily.
For example, the reality of long waiting lists for Section 8 public housing benefits in the United States mean that these benefits are available mostly only for those families who are in poverty continously for a long sustained period, which is not a typical pattern for an intermittently employed working class man who tends to have periods of somewhat higher than poverty line benefits for a while cycling with periods of poverty, requiring a household to constantly reapply for welfare benefits with each new cycle and falling out of line for benefits like public housing benefits that have waiting lists.
In contrast, in most European welfare systems, including that of the United Kingdom, unemployment benefits are more generous, easier to qualify for, and last longer. So, even when a husband is temporarily unemployed, rather than providing nothing at all, in a welfare system with generous unemployment benefits, the husband's access to these benefits makes him an economic asset to the family rather than an economic zero who increases their cost of living without providing any economic contribution of his own.
Universal health care removes economic pressures to jettison husbands without health insurance
Universal health care in the United Kingdom also creates different incentives than those found in the United States. In the U.S., middle class jobs frequently provide health insurance, and those in poverty or near poverty can receive Medicaid coverage, but health care is universal (mostly via Medicare) only for the elderly and the low income disabled. In the U.S., a large share of working class jobs don't provide health insurance and health insurance is very expensive for the self-employed.
Because health care is so expensive in the United States, being poor and thus qualifying for Medicaid coverage provides a benefit that would cost something on the order of $6,000 to $12,000 to obtain with private insurance for a household that has few prospects of securing a middle class job that provides health insurance. If the household includes a husband who has a working class job that doesn't provide health insurance (at least intermittently), or who is self-employed and has ups and downs of income, this very valuable economic benefit is not available to the family.
In contrast, in the U.K. and in almost every other developed country, health insurance is universal. This means that a husband who can find a working class job or obtain some self-employment income is adding value to the household, rather than putting its source of valuable government health care benefits at risk.
The availability of universal health care also makes it far less risky to be self-employed. For example, as a self-employed person, I pay about $12,000 a year for very high deductable ($5,000 per person per year) health insurance coverage for a family of four. And, if I can't make the pay the premium for even a month or two, I lose it and it becomes quite hard to obtain a comparable new health insurance policy. This means that I need great confidence that I can afford to pay $1,000 a month more than I would have otherwise needed every single month to make it possible to take the risk of pursuing self-employment. At the margins, this means that many people who would have higher average income from self-employment can't afford to do so because the income isn't sufficiently regular every single month. The minimum base of monthly income drives the decision more strongly than the average income. This means that the poor in the U.S. are more prone to favor welfare reliances over marginal self-employment (and almost no U.S. or foreign welfare system requires beneficiaries to seek self-employment), which again reduces the economic value of having a husband who is able and willing to work but can't find a job in a household.
Other possibilities
There are many other possibilities. For example, in the relevant time period, the U.K. was rapidly secularizing, while the U.S. remained far more religious.
The U.S. may value independence and freedom more than the authority respecting British do, leaving couples in the U.K. to put up with marginal marriages out of respect for community norms.
Divorce laws could play a role.
There are surely other possiblities as well.
03 May 2013
The Porn Singularity
One could say that I had the misfortune of my adolescence overlapping almost perfectly with the last few years prior to the ‘pornographic singularity.’ I speak here of the internet, circa 1995 and later. Prior to this era of the ‘pornographic explosion’ one often had to rely upon a lax or absentee father of a friend, from whom the porn was ‘borrowed,’ and then returned with the owner none the wiser. . . . I recall realizing that something radical had occurred when visiting my family and observing my brother, who was 8 at the time, deleting porn spam from his Hotmail account. Porn as nuisance rather than treasure would have amazed my adolescent self.From Razib Khan.
For anyone out there is doesn't know, there is now and has been for a long time, an essentially unlimited amount of hard core, video, non-child pornography of every type available on the Internet for free to anyone capable of putting key words into a Google search whose computer isn't filtered and few people have effective filters on their home computers (although many business, school and library computers are effectively filtered). Apparently, some people still pay to purchase pornography in non-streaming formats and over the Internet, but an ability to pay certainly isn't necessary for anyone with unfiltered Internet access.
This is notable not just because pornography is more available, but because the character of the pornography that was available is different. Much of pre-1995 porn sales involved erotic nude photography and implied but not directly depicted sex acts and lacked sound and video. Much of pre-1995 porn sales of materials that were more explicit in depicting sex acts was less "hardcore". The explosion in access to explicit video depicting many individual orgies, bestiality, S&M, fetish porn, and the like has been far more dramatic than the increase in access to images of naked twenty-something girl's next door posed suggestively.
I was a law school graduate and newlywed around the time that the "pornographic singularity" hit and as a result didn't notice it until quite a few years later.
Pornography and Rape
The number of rapes per 1,000 people has declined steadily since about 1990 by about 32% in all from the peak to the present (to roughly 1975 levels), more or less in line with the decline a broad spectrum of serious crimes of all kinds in that time period. The same period also saw great declines in high school dropout rates and teen pregnancy rates, especially for minorities, declines in non-geriatric deaths from almost causes other than prescription drug overdoses, and immense increases in incarceration rates.
Theses overall trends at attributed to a variety of causes: the aging of the baby boomers, the crime impact of greater availability of abortion and declining levels of lead poisoning, greater institutionalization levels as prisons willed while impatient mental health care facilities emptied, sustained economic prosperity subject to only relatively minor speed bumps, increasing education levels, public awareness campaigns, a collapse of the drug trade, new policing strategies, and stronger anti-crime technologies that made crime less profitable and more risky (from anti-theft devices in cars to DNA testing to widespread use of surveillance video).
Current rates of reported rape are not terribly low by historical standard, unlike many other serious crimes (such as homicide), however. Rape incidence is still about three times as high as they were in 1960, and increased steadily from 1960 to 1990 by more than a factor of four.
Some of the increase in rape incidence relative to 1960 may be due to greater reporting of rapes and broader acceptance of a broader definition of what constitutes reportable rape in the living law of every day culture (there have been shifts in formal legal definitions of rape as well, but they have been more subtle) driven largely by the feminist movement.
But, quite a bit of increased incidence, to the extent that exceeds increases in other kinds of serious crimes, is also probably due to the fact that men and women have opportunities to interact with each other in relatively unsupervised situations that are far more expansive than they were in 1960 (also as a result of the feminist movement) and create more opportunities for crimes to take place.
In an era when female college students and young adults were essentially locked in their dorms and homes at night for the most part until they were swiftly married and expected to stay at home away from non-family men and have children, there were fewer occasions in which a woman was in a place where a man (other than her husband) could rape her.
No one seriously suggests that we should return to that regime (and even at the 1990 peak 2499 out of 2500 women did not report a rape to authorities in any given year v. 9,999 out of 10,000 in 1960), because it so greatly benefits women who are not raped. But surely, these changes in the daily lives of women did have some measurable impact.
It also isn't unfair to observe that one reason for the declining precautions against rape was that the downside consequences of rape for a victim were mitigated by wider use of birth control pills and abortion and declining social sanctions suffered by women who weren't virgins, and did not reflect the still limited awareness of the risks associated with serious and incurable sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. The consequences of rape were and continue to be serious, but they weren't as catastrophic for the average victim in 1990 as they were in 1960.
Some explanations of declining rape incidence point to decreased "demand" on the part of rapists, as sex has become easier for men who aren't married to obtain. But, the timing is wrong. The sexual revolution started to happen just as rape incidence was rising, and was rolling into a "counter-revolution" as it began to fall. The proportion of men who are single has increased dramatically (and single men have sex much less often than married men, even in the post-sexual revolution world).
It isn't at all obvious that the motives of rapists are comparable to the motives of ordinary single men who can't find someone to sleep with them - i.e. it seems likely that men who commit the rapes that end up in crime statistics have a quite different profile from the vast majority of men. Incarcerated rapists aren't that different in demographics or traits like mental health, education, unemployment and intelligence from other violent criminals. Incarcerated rapists have more in common with murderers, carjackers, home invasion burglars, robbers and men who commit aggravated assaults than they do with the growing ranks of ordinary, single, young adult men.
As Razib explains:
I’m not claiming that the correlation is causal. Rather, I’m pointing out that the explosion in porn use does not seem to have led to a concomitant explosion in sex crimes, which would have been the prediction by social conservatives and radical feminists if they could have known of the extent of penetration of pornography into culture and private lives over the next 20 years in 1990.I agree with his conclusion that while the decline in rape incidence was not materially caused by the explosion of access to pornography, that the decline, viewed in the context of declines in rates of other serious crimes, does support the conclusion that an explosion in access to pornography did not lead to any material increase in the number of rapes committed relative to what we would have seen without this factor.
The assumptions of freedom of speech doctrines that distinguish strongly between acts and words have turned out to be empirically well supported.
Footnote: Razib also make a quite insightful observation: "Kissing a woman is preferable for a heterosexual man not just because a woman has smooth skin, and attractive facial features, but because the target of their affections is a woman."
02 April 2013
Gender Preferences v. Economics in Marriage and Parenting
A Real Life Case In Point
The following is from the current online dating profile of a never married, childless woman in her late thirties who is a medical doctor who has completed her residency and is well established in her career describing what she wants in a prospective husband (emphasis mine):
The following is from the current online dating profile of a never married, childless woman in her late thirties who is a medical doctor who has completed her residency and is well established in her career describing what she wants in a prospective husband (emphasis mine):
You want kids/a family. . . . I am not willing to compromise on having my own complete family one day. . . . You know how to save. You make a good living. Yes, I'm a physician, and this means I'm financially independent. . . . But I'd like to work part time once I have kids. I don't want to be the primary bread winner.*
05 February 2013
Reflections On Names
Should you change your name when you marry, as I did (from Willeke to Oh-Willeke)? Should you do what one of my assistants did and take as your last name your birth name, then a space, then your spouse's hyphenated name? I'm curious what my children who share that hypenated name will do. Both my son and my daughter have mentioned the possibility of ditching their hypenated names when (and if) they marry. Their long hyphenated surname and double barrelled Korean middle names were important reasons that we chose short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, gender unambiguous first names for our children.
Claudia Maittlen-Harris who didn't take her husband's name, discusses the issue at the Huffington Post in a column worth reading.
The main downside of a hyphenated name during a stable marriage, is that socially inept computer programmers for large companies and institutions everywhere make it impossible to put a correctly punctuated name in their systems. My name routinely shows up run all together, with an apostrophe (even college graduates often don't know what the word "hyphen" means), or with a space and no puctuation. The article aptly sums up the struggles involved. (Then again, the first time I ordered a business card for my solo practice of law, they got my last name right, but misspelled "Andrew". Since then the same thing has happened at least one other time at a different business card company. Go figure.)
Then again, it is very convenient for everyone in the family, parents and children alike to have the same last name. A hypenated name is more memorable (always a marketing plus), especially for men (although you do have to develop a spiel to explain it to people), and it makes it much easier to get an e-mail address that is your name or to be found in a google search. In my case, moving up in the alphabet from W to O has been delightful. I never knew how bad I had it until I moved up the ranks.
The hard parts are not so much having the name itself, whatever it turns out to be, because you get used to it. It is the transitions - taking it, and, if a relationship ends, thinking about whether or not to keep it. The younger you are when you marry, the easier the initial transition is for you. Keeping a "professional name" isn't an issue when you have not yet established yourself in a profession. But, once you've invested a couple of decades of personal contacts, your children's names, and all of your professional life in a name, the decision is far harder.
Claudia has struggled with her choice mostly because she is thirty, old enough to have established a professional identity, but not so old that she is all that deeply vested in it. She describes the options:
If any of my female readers are considering the same question, I will not for your edification based on my years of practicing law, that almost every woman who does not have the same surname as her husband will inevitably be addressed as if she had frequently enough that she will sometime give up on trying to correct someone in the interests of etiquette and avoiding fuss, so that her first name and her husband's surname will inevitably become at least an alias for her and will probably even show up in her credit record whether she likes it or not.
It is also worth noting that genuine, automatically inherited surnames themselves are not terribly old. In many places they were not fixed until the 19th century following an interim period in which patronymics, matrinymics, and identifiers based on the particular individual's current customary profession, or geographic location with which he was associated, or individualized identifier (e.g. Pliny the Younger, or Alexander the Great) were the norm. Even now, the royal family of the British Commonwealth has to improvise a surname that fits in the plebian system by using appellations like "Harry Wales" which aren't truly surnames in the conventional sense, because bureaucratic systems other than libraries have a very difficult time coping with naming cultures like theirs (the customary surname to use in these situations traditionally changes at a couple of other points in the life of a British Prince).
For what its worth, the bother of having to understand an entirely separate system of naming for the British royalty is still considerably relaxed from the situation of royalty in Japan and when it had a royal family, in Korea, where there were an entire set of honorifics, pronouns, relationship names, and grammatical structures reserved for members of the royal court.
Also, many places that do have surnames now, such as China, Korea, and most of Latin American, at least, have rather botched the job by having a very small number of surnames (in each case about twenty or so) that belong to a very large share of the popuation. This, of course, defeats the main purpose of a surname, which is making it possible to easily distinguish people with the same first name from each other and truly bollocks things up in Korea where marrying someone with the same surname is usually prohibited in a primative form of incest regulation. In Spain and Portugal, this issue is sometimes overcome by simply having children inherit multiple surnames from their parents (protocal regarding the order is still required) which are all part of a surname but are separated by spaces rather than hyphens. But, while upper class Latin Americans sometimes follow this practice, in the less illustrious ranks, the practice of assigning a single surname of the father to his children is still the norm.
First names aren't inviolate either. I know many people who somewhere in their childhoods or young adult years ceased to use the name on their birth certificates in lieu of another name entirely: sometimes a middle name, sometimes a varient version of their original name, sometimes a nickname that sticks (particularly in the case of people with "foreign sounding" names or the same name as one or more of their ancestors), sometimes as a stage name or pen name, sometimes to try on a new identity when living in with a new set of people upon entering college or entering the workforce or the military, sometimes following a religious conversion (for example, the man formerly known as Cat Stevens), or sometimes for other reasons that are simply unfathomable (e.g. the man with the stage name "Prince").
Of course, one could go even further. Someone who takes holy orders in the Roman Catholic church takes an entirely new first name, and changes it again should that person be elevated to be the Pope, a practice also associated with the French foreign legion. Likewise, many Native American cultures had a practice of assigning an entirely new name (in a mononame culture where a name is often a descriptive phrase rather than a pure proper noun) to someone upon coming of age that fits the person that they have become.
The mere fact that the subject of names is so involved is itself symptomatic of the fact that we are still in the "Great Adjustment", a transitional phase of cultural ethnogenesis, rather than an equilibrium point in our society.
Claudia Maittlen-Harris who didn't take her husband's name, discusses the issue at the Huffington Post in a column worth reading.
The main downside of a hyphenated name during a stable marriage, is that socially inept computer programmers for large companies and institutions everywhere make it impossible to put a correctly punctuated name in their systems. My name routinely shows up run all together, with an apostrophe (even college graduates often don't know what the word "hyphen" means), or with a space and no puctuation. The article aptly sums up the struggles involved. (Then again, the first time I ordered a business card for my solo practice of law, they got my last name right, but misspelled "Andrew". Since then the same thing has happened at least one other time at a different business card company. Go figure.)
Then again, it is very convenient for everyone in the family, parents and children alike to have the same last name. A hypenated name is more memorable (always a marketing plus), especially for men (although you do have to develop a spiel to explain it to people), and it makes it much easier to get an e-mail address that is your name or to be found in a google search. In my case, moving up in the alphabet from W to O has been delightful. I never knew how bad I had it until I moved up the ranks.
The hard parts are not so much having the name itself, whatever it turns out to be, because you get used to it. It is the transitions - taking it, and, if a relationship ends, thinking about whether or not to keep it. The younger you are when you marry, the easier the initial transition is for you. Keeping a "professional name" isn't an issue when you have not yet established yourself in a profession. But, once you've invested a couple of decades of personal contacts, your children's names, and all of your professional life in a name, the decision is far harder.
Claudia has struggled with her choice mostly because she is thirty, old enough to have established a professional identity, but not so old that she is all that deeply vested in it. She describes the options:
[T]here are many last name options out there for brides-to-be (exasperating my struggle):One of my first clients after I passed the bar exam was a man who changed his name to his wife's last name and then kept it after they were divorced. In his case, the reason for his choice was that it spoofed efforts to link him to his ample secret police file in the country that they had lived in before the emigrated to the United States.
· Happily change last name to husband's name [ed. the Anglo-American common law norm considered to be mandatory by most until relatively recently.]
· Keep maiden name [ed. this is the norm in Spain and Korea]
· Hyphenate both names [ed. this is what my wife and I did when we married.]
· Keep maiden name professionally but change it legally (Katy Perry legally became Mrs. Brand, Jennifer Garner is legally Mrs. Affleck, even Demi Moore legally took Kutcher)[ed. the construction Mrs. Affleck, for example, isn't necessarily incorrect even if the wife retained her maiden name; etiquette diehards would insist that Mrs. Affleck to address the wife of Ben Affleck is a shortened version of "Mrs. Ben Affleck", not "Mrs. Jennifer Affleck."]
· Make maiden name new middle name and take husband's as last name [ed. this is what my mother did.]
· I even met a couple that blended their two names together to create a new married name that they both legally changed theirs too. (This seemed kooky, but good for them for thinking outside the box) [ed. my wife and I considered, but ultimately did not choose the option of selecting an entirely new surname for us. My mother's patriline immigrant ancestor who arrived in his teens before many of his siblings wisely chose a fresh surname when he arrived from Finland, because his birth surname had unfortunate connotations in English (it sounded like a synonym for urine in English when spoken), and then convinced his later arriving family members to adopt the surname he had chosen).]
· Change your last name years into the marriage. Who knew, but you can change your name at any time [ed. in Colorado, the case law provides that you can take a new name at common law simply by being addressed by it without objection on a regular basis, so this can even happen by default without any bureaucratic action.]
· Some men take their wife's last name (rare, but it happens)
If any of my female readers are considering the same question, I will not for your edification based on my years of practicing law, that almost every woman who does not have the same surname as her husband will inevitably be addressed as if she had frequently enough that she will sometime give up on trying to correct someone in the interests of etiquette and avoiding fuss, so that her first name and her husband's surname will inevitably become at least an alias for her and will probably even show up in her credit record whether she likes it or not.
It is also worth noting that genuine, automatically inherited surnames themselves are not terribly old. In many places they were not fixed until the 19th century following an interim period in which patronymics, matrinymics, and identifiers based on the particular individual's current customary profession, or geographic location with which he was associated, or individualized identifier (e.g. Pliny the Younger, or Alexander the Great) were the norm. Even now, the royal family of the British Commonwealth has to improvise a surname that fits in the plebian system by using appellations like "Harry Wales" which aren't truly surnames in the conventional sense, because bureaucratic systems other than libraries have a very difficult time coping with naming cultures like theirs (the customary surname to use in these situations traditionally changes at a couple of other points in the life of a British Prince).
For what its worth, the bother of having to understand an entirely separate system of naming for the British royalty is still considerably relaxed from the situation of royalty in Japan and when it had a royal family, in Korea, where there were an entire set of honorifics, pronouns, relationship names, and grammatical structures reserved for members of the royal court.
Also, many places that do have surnames now, such as China, Korea, and most of Latin American, at least, have rather botched the job by having a very small number of surnames (in each case about twenty or so) that belong to a very large share of the popuation. This, of course, defeats the main purpose of a surname, which is making it possible to easily distinguish people with the same first name from each other and truly bollocks things up in Korea where marrying someone with the same surname is usually prohibited in a primative form of incest regulation. In Spain and Portugal, this issue is sometimes overcome by simply having children inherit multiple surnames from their parents (protocal regarding the order is still required) which are all part of a surname but are separated by spaces rather than hyphens. But, while upper class Latin Americans sometimes follow this practice, in the less illustrious ranks, the practice of assigning a single surname of the father to his children is still the norm.
First names aren't inviolate either. I know many people who somewhere in their childhoods or young adult years ceased to use the name on their birth certificates in lieu of another name entirely: sometimes a middle name, sometimes a varient version of their original name, sometimes a nickname that sticks (particularly in the case of people with "foreign sounding" names or the same name as one or more of their ancestors), sometimes as a stage name or pen name, sometimes to try on a new identity when living in with a new set of people upon entering college or entering the workforce or the military, sometimes following a religious conversion (for example, the man formerly known as Cat Stevens), or sometimes for other reasons that are simply unfathomable (e.g. the man with the stage name "Prince").
Of course, one could go even further. Someone who takes holy orders in the Roman Catholic church takes an entirely new first name, and changes it again should that person be elevated to be the Pope, a practice also associated with the French foreign legion. Likewise, many Native American cultures had a practice of assigning an entirely new name (in a mononame culture where a name is often a descriptive phrase rather than a pure proper noun) to someone upon coming of age that fits the person that they have become.
The mere fact that the subject of names is so involved is itself symptomatic of the fact that we are still in the "Great Adjustment", a transitional phase of cultural ethnogenesis, rather than an equilibrium point in our society.
04 February 2013
Is Marriage In Equilibrium?
No one can seriously dispute that the institution of marriage as it operates today, in 2013 in the United States, is materially different than it was in 1813 or 1913 or 1963. It is also fair to say that there have been long periods in history in which the institution of marriage as it operated in practice, was stable for many centuries, sometimes even despite periods of significant cultural change (although, the popular notion of a "traditional marriage" is far younger than most people who employ the term realize, and marriage as an institution has experienced other historic shifts in the past).
Are we there yet? Have we now reached a new equilibrium for the institution of marriage (or are we on the verge of this with the global normalization of gay marriage) that has largely assimilated concepts like no fault divorce, birth control and declining lifetime fertility, increased female participation in the paid workforce, increased education for women, reduced needs for housework as a result of changing technologies and economic conditions, shifting religous beliefs, etc.?
Or, do we remain in the throes of a period of rapid change for the institution of marriage? If so, what changes are left to come? What problems with the institution as it exists, or other evolving pressures, will drive continuing change in it? What would have to change in our society and/or the institution to produce a stable modern marriage institution? Some authors have suggested that female roles have changed dramatically while male roles have changed little since 1963 (for example). Does this mean that the most of the future changes will involve revised male roles that respond and react to new female roles?
How many genuinely different models of marriage are in existence in the developed world today (e.g. Japanese, Swedish, American middle class sometimes serial monogamous, African-American, Mormon monogamous, Muslim polygamous, "traditional" monogamous, American-European same sex), and are more than one of them viable options for an eventual equilibrium state of the institution of marriage?
What are the "moving parts" that distinguish different models of marriage and the ways in which they function in the larger cultures in which they are embedded? Is it possible to set out a fairly comprehensive "model space" of potential marriage institutions that isn't just limited to a couple of dimensions?
Are we there yet? Have we now reached a new equilibrium for the institution of marriage (or are we on the verge of this with the global normalization of gay marriage) that has largely assimilated concepts like no fault divorce, birth control and declining lifetime fertility, increased female participation in the paid workforce, increased education for women, reduced needs for housework as a result of changing technologies and economic conditions, shifting religous beliefs, etc.?
Or, do we remain in the throes of a period of rapid change for the institution of marriage? If so, what changes are left to come? What problems with the institution as it exists, or other evolving pressures, will drive continuing change in it? What would have to change in our society and/or the institution to produce a stable modern marriage institution? Some authors have suggested that female roles have changed dramatically while male roles have changed little since 1963 (for example). Does this mean that the most of the future changes will involve revised male roles that respond and react to new female roles?
How many genuinely different models of marriage are in existence in the developed world today (e.g. Japanese, Swedish, American middle class sometimes serial monogamous, African-American, Mormon monogamous, Muslim polygamous, "traditional" monogamous, American-European same sex), and are more than one of them viable options for an eventual equilibrium state of the institution of marriage?
What are the "moving parts" that distinguish different models of marriage and the ways in which they function in the larger cultures in which they are embedded? Is it possible to set out a fairly comprehensive "model space" of potential marriage institutions that isn't just limited to a couple of dimensions?
30 January 2013
The State of the Lutheran Church
The Lutheran church, generally, and in particular, its predominant mainline denomination, is rapidly shrinking and growing less vital in terms of nominal member participation.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a Protestant denomination, is twenty-five years old in 2013. It was formed through a series of mergers of prior mainline Lutheran denominations. The last phase of the process that gave birth to the ELCA, effective January 1, 1988, merged the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the much smaller Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, each of which had already largely shed an ethnic identity vis-a-vis the larger public. This last component of the merger explains why the denomination which would generally be classified as "mainline" rather than part of the Evangelical Christianity movement in the United States, prominently contains the word "Evangelical."
The three merged denominations, in turn, were the product of mergers involving Lutheran denominations that had been mostly organized along ethnic lines by immigrants who had been members of the established Lutheran churches of their home countries. The ethnically based American immigrant denominations merged, in several steps, when the ethnic identity has faded in successive post-immigration generations. The established churches of Northern Europe, in turn, were successors were established when national churches were formed after these nations churches broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the part of the Protestant Reformation that was led by Martin Luther, a German minister, in the 16th century. The Calvinists, whose successors in the U.S. are mostly Presybeterians, and the Episcopalians (from whom the Methodists and United Church of Christ were ultimate derived as well around the 17th century) who made a less complete break of the Roman Catholic church, were the other two biggest components of the Protestant Reformation.
In many other countries, the merger process of mainline Protestant denominations (that are not Anglican), that are successors to leading European denominations went one step further, to form a single dominant "United" or "Uniting" churches (e.g. the "Protestant Church of the Netherlands"). But, in the United States, the ELCA is accompanied by a number of other major mainline Protestant denominations not organized on an explicitly ethnic basis, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presybeterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and the Reformed Church in American. All of the Lutheran denominations and Episcopalians and Methodists are grouped together as "liturgical churches", which share an infant baptism tradition and a mode of worship derived from the Latin mass translated into vernacular English and modified somewhat, by the chaplancy of the United States military.
Almost all mainline Christians who are Lutherans in the United States are members of the ELCA. Historically, the other two main Lutheran denominations in the United States, the socially conservative Missouri Synod Lutherans and the smaller and even more conservative Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, include almost all other American Lutherans. There are, however, about a dozen much smaller bodies of Lutheran churches in addition to the big three, including one that some of my relatives have affiliated with that is between the Missouri Synod and the ELCA if the many social issues and theological questions dividing the movements were abstracted down to an oversimplified single left-right dimension. All or almost all of the smaller Lutheran church movements in the United States are more conservative than the ELCA.
I have personal ties to the denomination and hence I am interested in its progress. My mother was raised in one of the pre-merger denominations with mostly Scandinavian Lutherans, while my father was raised in another one of the pre-merger denominatioon with mostly German Lutherans. My mother was an active member of the ELCA from the time it was formed until her death and my father and stepmother have been active members of the ELCA for its entire existence, as do many (but not all) of my blood relatives (some of my relatives are secular or Roman Catholic, a few belong to the national Lutheran church denominations of Finland or German, and a few belong to Lutheran church denominations that have recently left the ELCA over questions such as the relatively progressive stance of the ELCA towards gay rights). I was an active member of the ELCA for a couple of years after the merger before rejecting Christianity, after spending the rest of my childhood as a baptized and then confirmed member of churches in its antecedent denominations).
There are 9,638 ELCA Lutheran congregations with a baptized membership of 4,059,785 and an average worship attendance of 1.1 million on a given Sunday. Thus, 38% of baptized ELCA Lutherans are inactive; 56% of active ELCA Lutherans don't go to church on any given Sunday; about 26% of baptized ELCA Lutherans do go to church on any given Sunday, according to statistics from The Lutheran (January 2013) at page 9.
The number of new congregations in twenty-five year life of the denomination is less than half of the number of congregations that have closed in the last ten years.
On one hand, the state of the ELCA and almost by definition, the state of the organized mainline Lutheran Church movement in the United States, is in a state of rapid decline. On the other, the ELCA is in many respects more vital than many of the established or recently disestablished Lutheran denominations of Europe, where the secularization trend that the United States is starting to experience is far more advanced. But, this discrepency may cease in a few decades.
There is a certain symmetry to the decline of the Lutheran Church. The countries that joined the Lutheran part of the Protestant Reformation were among the last in Europe to be converted to Christianity (initially, to Roman Catholicism). So, it makes a certain amount of sense that areas where Lutheran churches were established last (and hence where there has been the least amount of time for them to become irrevocably embedded in the culture) have been among the first to become highly secular countries.
The decline in mainline Christianity, more generally, leaves a growing void in the American religious landscape between conservative Evangelical Christianity and the non-Christian America.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a Protestant denomination, is twenty-five years old in 2013. It was formed through a series of mergers of prior mainline Lutheran denominations. The last phase of the process that gave birth to the ELCA, effective January 1, 1988, merged the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the much smaller Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, each of which had already largely shed an ethnic identity vis-a-vis the larger public. This last component of the merger explains why the denomination which would generally be classified as "mainline" rather than part of the Evangelical Christianity movement in the United States, prominently contains the word "Evangelical."
The three merged denominations, in turn, were the product of mergers involving Lutheran denominations that had been mostly organized along ethnic lines by immigrants who had been members of the established Lutheran churches of their home countries. The ethnically based American immigrant denominations merged, in several steps, when the ethnic identity has faded in successive post-immigration generations. The established churches of Northern Europe, in turn, were successors were established when national churches were formed after these nations churches broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the part of the Protestant Reformation that was led by Martin Luther, a German minister, in the 16th century. The Calvinists, whose successors in the U.S. are mostly Presybeterians, and the Episcopalians (from whom the Methodists and United Church of Christ were ultimate derived as well around the 17th century) who made a less complete break of the Roman Catholic church, were the other two biggest components of the Protestant Reformation.
In many other countries, the merger process of mainline Protestant denominations (that are not Anglican), that are successors to leading European denominations went one step further, to form a single dominant "United" or "Uniting" churches (e.g. the "Protestant Church of the Netherlands"). But, in the United States, the ELCA is accompanied by a number of other major mainline Protestant denominations not organized on an explicitly ethnic basis, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presybeterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and the Reformed Church in American. All of the Lutheran denominations and Episcopalians and Methodists are grouped together as "liturgical churches", which share an infant baptism tradition and a mode of worship derived from the Latin mass translated into vernacular English and modified somewhat, by the chaplancy of the United States military.
Almost all mainline Christians who are Lutherans in the United States are members of the ELCA. Historically, the other two main Lutheran denominations in the United States, the socially conservative Missouri Synod Lutherans and the smaller and even more conservative Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, include almost all other American Lutherans. There are, however, about a dozen much smaller bodies of Lutheran churches in addition to the big three, including one that some of my relatives have affiliated with that is between the Missouri Synod and the ELCA if the many social issues and theological questions dividing the movements were abstracted down to an oversimplified single left-right dimension. All or almost all of the smaller Lutheran church movements in the United States are more conservative than the ELCA.
I have personal ties to the denomination and hence I am interested in its progress. My mother was raised in one of the pre-merger denominations with mostly Scandinavian Lutherans, while my father was raised in another one of the pre-merger denominatioon with mostly German Lutherans. My mother was an active member of the ELCA from the time it was formed until her death and my father and stepmother have been active members of the ELCA for its entire existence, as do many (but not all) of my blood relatives (some of my relatives are secular or Roman Catholic, a few belong to the national Lutheran church denominations of Finland or German, and a few belong to Lutheran church denominations that have recently left the ELCA over questions such as the relatively progressive stance of the ELCA towards gay rights). I was an active member of the ELCA for a couple of years after the merger before rejecting Christianity, after spending the rest of my childhood as a baptized and then confirmed member of churches in its antecedent denominations).
There are 9,638 ELCA Lutheran congregations with a baptized membership of 4,059,785 and an average worship attendance of 1.1 million on a given Sunday. Thus, 38% of baptized ELCA Lutherans are inactive; 56% of active ELCA Lutherans don't go to church on any given Sunday; about 26% of baptized ELCA Lutherans do go to church on any given Sunday, according to statistics from The Lutheran (January 2013) at page 9.
Nearly 30 percent of ELCA churches reported an average worship attendance of fewer than 50 people in 2010. From 2003 to 2011, average weekley worship attendance dropped 26 percent. And from 2009 to 2010, ELCA membership decreased 5.9 percent, the sharpest decline among mainline denominations according to the National Council of Churches. . . . "Since the inception of the ELCA, we've seen decline every year, and it has accelerated over the last five years," said Elizabeth Eaton bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod. "It doesn't matter where a congregation is situated, we have congregational decline in every demographic, every geography" . . . Neary every U.S. Christian denomination has seen membership declines in the last two years, including Southern Baptists, who seemed invincible in the 70s, 80s and 90s . . . . More than 1000 ELCA churches have closed over the past 10 years, some merging with others, some simply shutting their doors and dispersing."- Nicole Radziszewski, "The Shrinking Church", The Luthern (January 2013) at pages 23-25.
Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson pointed out in a recent open letter about the anniversary year that in this time we've started 435 congregation, ordiained nearly 8,000 pastors, send more than 2,000 missionaries to serve around the world, and contributed more than $350 million to end hunger and poverty.- Daniel J. Lehmann , Editorial, The Lutheran (January 2013) at page 4.
The number of new congregations in twenty-five year life of the denomination is less than half of the number of congregations that have closed in the last ten years.
On one hand, the state of the ELCA and almost by definition, the state of the organized mainline Lutheran Church movement in the United States, is in a state of rapid decline. On the other, the ELCA is in many respects more vital than many of the established or recently disestablished Lutheran denominations of Europe, where the secularization trend that the United States is starting to experience is far more advanced. But, this discrepency may cease in a few decades.
There is a certain symmetry to the decline of the Lutheran Church. The countries that joined the Lutheran part of the Protestant Reformation were among the last in Europe to be converted to Christianity (initially, to Roman Catholicism). So, it makes a certain amount of sense that areas where Lutheran churches were established last (and hence where there has been the least amount of time for them to become irrevocably embedded in the culture) have been among the first to become highly secular countries.
The decline in mainline Christianity, more generally, leaves a growing void in the American religious landscape between conservative Evangelical Christianity and the non-Christian America.
12 January 2013
The Great Adjustment
What big idea can sum up a whole host of the trends that are at work in our daily lives?
One way to sum it up is that we are in the midst of the "Great Adjustment." We are in the thick of forming a new culture that is adapting to new technologies and new economic realities, to the "Post-Modern" world.
Examples
The notion is easiest to explain with examples.
* We experienced a huge change in how we reproduce in the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of a variety of new contraceptive methods and the legalization of abortion. The sexual revolution followed, but it was followed with a sort of counter-revolution of concern about date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, STDs, teen pregnancy, child sexual abuse and pornography, and human trafficing. A bit later, women who had used these technologies and reacted to these new attitudes by postponing child bearing decided they wanted children and have turned to assisted reproduction technologies to have children late in life. Often this has had the side effect of creating affluent older mothers of young twins or triplets or higher order multiples.
Reliable contraception has also made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for men and women to have long term sexual relationships, within or outside marriage, without a realistic possibility of having children together before deciding to have children together (or not).
It has similarly made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for women to decide to focus on higher education and careers for long periods of time, even their entire lives, without commiting to sexual abstinance or being lesbians. Likewise, it has become much easier for women to have just one, two or three children and then to stop having more children and become employed full time later in life as the children get older.
Where are we now? We are at the tail end of making a permanent, at least for the indefinite future until something changes, adjustment to these realities by incorporating effective ways of managing them into to basic script of our culture.
Pessimists bemoan the end of traditional culture as we head to hell in a handbasket. They are half right. Traditional culture is dying. But, we aren't heading to hell. Instead, we are heading to a new post-modern cultural synthesis that is going to become the new traditional culture, possible for centuries or even thousands of years to come.
* Since the 1970s, our economy has slowly, but surely shifted from valuing labor to valuing intelligence. The economy has always valued both and still does. But, the economic premium that smart people can obtain relative to equally hard working, decent, not stupid people has surged immensely. The former, who make up perhaps 20% of the workforce, have received perhaps 80% of the last four decades of economic growth. The latter, who make up perhaps 80% of the workforce, have received perhaps 20% of the last four decades of economic growth. The upper middle class has grown more affluent at a rate perhaps sixteen times that of the social class rungs below them over the last forty years.
Social class divisions have hardened. After about a half a century in which servants disappeared from economic life and everyone was expected to deal with their own household needs, the older scheme in which there is a reasonably large class of people who have servants in some form or another has started to re-emerge.
The middle class has shrunk, losing "market share" to both the working class and the upper middle class. We are on the verge of seeing a meaningful and potentially long term redrawing of the social class system.
* For most of human history, the fundamental issue was simply getting enough calories. The first big change came in the Neolithic revolution when modern humans domesticated plants and animals, making possible herding and farming, and not long after that in many cultures, developed lactose tolerance, making it possible for adults to digest cow's milk. Yet, even with herding and farming, annual periods of fasting driven by the food production cycle of the seasons and the limited means of perserving food, were the norm. The developed world standard in which almost no one wants for food in their entire lives and diets have almost no connection to the season is recent indeed.
We have also, for most of human history, needed for more physical activity to sustain daily life.
Following old norms and ill advised changes in those old norms (e.g. the switch from butter to margarine, which substituted saturated fats for equally unhealthy or worse transfats), unhealthy obesity has surged. So, we are in the process of changing the food ways of our culture in a way better adapted to the new realities.
* For roughly a century, we have enjoyed an economy fueled by oil obtained easily and cheaply from oil wells. This has revolutionized transporation, urban design, and a whole host of other aspects of how we organize the global economy. This era is winding down. With it, conserving energy becomes more important, more compact land use becomes more attractive, public transit's desirability relative to private automobiles increases, and alternatives with their own demands on our culture emerge.
Oil use has already almost entirely ceased in electricity generation and has dramatically declined in industrial uses and home heating. Very active efforts are underway to find transportation alternatives and alternatives for agricultural fertilizers and chemicals that are less dependent upon petroleum.
As oil becomes more scarce, organic foods will become more attractive, not because the are healtier or more environmentally friendly than non-organic foods, but because they will become less expensive than non-organic foods because petroleum is a less important factor of production for organic foods than for non-organic ones and petroleum will grow more expensive.
Land use has already seen a period in which the affluent are returning to central cities from the suburbs.
Analysis
The examples above aren't exhaustive or even particularly well explained. But, they help illustrate what I mean when I say that we are in the midst of the Great Adjustment.
Technology, demographic change, long term shifts in natural resource availability, global warming and more have made and are continuing to make irreversible changes in the enviroment within which people find themselves and in order to adapt better to these changes, our culture is being remade in a manner that is better suited to this new world order.
The name of the game is to determine what the new synthesis the results in the Great Adjustment will look like.
One way to sum it up is that we are in the midst of the "Great Adjustment." We are in the thick of forming a new culture that is adapting to new technologies and new economic realities, to the "Post-Modern" world.
Examples
The notion is easiest to explain with examples.
* We experienced a huge change in how we reproduce in the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of a variety of new contraceptive methods and the legalization of abortion. The sexual revolution followed, but it was followed with a sort of counter-revolution of concern about date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, STDs, teen pregnancy, child sexual abuse and pornography, and human trafficing. A bit later, women who had used these technologies and reacted to these new attitudes by postponing child bearing decided they wanted children and have turned to assisted reproduction technologies to have children late in life. Often this has had the side effect of creating affluent older mothers of young twins or triplets or higher order multiples.
Reliable contraception has also made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for men and women to have long term sexual relationships, within or outside marriage, without a realistic possibility of having children together before deciding to have children together (or not).
It has similarly made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for women to decide to focus on higher education and careers for long periods of time, even their entire lives, without commiting to sexual abstinance or being lesbians. Likewise, it has become much easier for women to have just one, two or three children and then to stop having more children and become employed full time later in life as the children get older.
Where are we now? We are at the tail end of making a permanent, at least for the indefinite future until something changes, adjustment to these realities by incorporating effective ways of managing them into to basic script of our culture.
Pessimists bemoan the end of traditional culture as we head to hell in a handbasket. They are half right. Traditional culture is dying. But, we aren't heading to hell. Instead, we are heading to a new post-modern cultural synthesis that is going to become the new traditional culture, possible for centuries or even thousands of years to come.
* Since the 1970s, our economy has slowly, but surely shifted from valuing labor to valuing intelligence. The economy has always valued both and still does. But, the economic premium that smart people can obtain relative to equally hard working, decent, not stupid people has surged immensely. The former, who make up perhaps 20% of the workforce, have received perhaps 80% of the last four decades of economic growth. The latter, who make up perhaps 80% of the workforce, have received perhaps 20% of the last four decades of economic growth. The upper middle class has grown more affluent at a rate perhaps sixteen times that of the social class rungs below them over the last forty years.
Social class divisions have hardened. After about a half a century in which servants disappeared from economic life and everyone was expected to deal with their own household needs, the older scheme in which there is a reasonably large class of people who have servants in some form or another has started to re-emerge.
The middle class has shrunk, losing "market share" to both the working class and the upper middle class. We are on the verge of seeing a meaningful and potentially long term redrawing of the social class system.
* For most of human history, the fundamental issue was simply getting enough calories. The first big change came in the Neolithic revolution when modern humans domesticated plants and animals, making possible herding and farming, and not long after that in many cultures, developed lactose tolerance, making it possible for adults to digest cow's milk. Yet, even with herding and farming, annual periods of fasting driven by the food production cycle of the seasons and the limited means of perserving food, were the norm. The developed world standard in which almost no one wants for food in their entire lives and diets have almost no connection to the season is recent indeed.
We have also, for most of human history, needed for more physical activity to sustain daily life.
Following old norms and ill advised changes in those old norms (e.g. the switch from butter to margarine, which substituted saturated fats for equally unhealthy or worse transfats), unhealthy obesity has surged. So, we are in the process of changing the food ways of our culture in a way better adapted to the new realities.
* For roughly a century, we have enjoyed an economy fueled by oil obtained easily and cheaply from oil wells. This has revolutionized transporation, urban design, and a whole host of other aspects of how we organize the global economy. This era is winding down. With it, conserving energy becomes more important, more compact land use becomes more attractive, public transit's desirability relative to private automobiles increases, and alternatives with their own demands on our culture emerge.
Oil use has already almost entirely ceased in electricity generation and has dramatically declined in industrial uses and home heating. Very active efforts are underway to find transportation alternatives and alternatives for agricultural fertilizers and chemicals that are less dependent upon petroleum.
As oil becomes more scarce, organic foods will become more attractive, not because the are healtier or more environmentally friendly than non-organic foods, but because they will become less expensive than non-organic foods because petroleum is a less important factor of production for organic foods than for non-organic ones and petroleum will grow more expensive.
Land use has already seen a period in which the affluent are returning to central cities from the suburbs.
Analysis
The examples above aren't exhaustive or even particularly well explained. But, they help illustrate what I mean when I say that we are in the midst of the Great Adjustment.
Technology, demographic change, long term shifts in natural resource availability, global warming and more have made and are continuing to make irreversible changes in the enviroment within which people find themselves and in order to adapt better to these changes, our culture is being remade in a manner that is better suited to this new world order.
The name of the game is to determine what the new synthesis the results in the Great Adjustment will look like.
11 January 2013
Reality Bites: Career v. Family Edition
Here is a Friday afternoon treat for you (via Marginal Revolution) addressing in an utterly practical and realistic and witty way the fundamental conundrums of modern applied feminism from Penelope Trunk, whose new book: The New American Dream: Blueprint for a New Path to Success a feel obligated to draw your attention to. The fine writing in the linked blog post quite vividly recreates the essence of how decisions on balancing work and family are made by women with a great deal of well substantiated wit and a little more Myers-Briggs personality analysis than is probably reasonably necessary for the task (mostly omitted in the excerpt below). Here is a taste of it:
You cannot pick a husband to have kids with until you know if you want to work full-time while you are raising them. Some women will say they know for sure that they do want to work full-time. Most women will say that they don’t know for sure. But there are actually only two choices: be a breadwinner or marry a breadwinner. . . .
Scenario 1: Be a Breadwinner . . .
Breadwinner option 1: Marry a stay-at-home dad. . . .High-powered jobs leave little time for kids. And people who advance past the age of 35 have a stay-at-home spouse supporting them. If you have kids, the top-tier jobs in the business world are two-people jobs. People who have kids and a stay-at-home spouse advance at a much, much higher rate than people who don’t.
Breadwinner option 2: Nannies . . .
Women who have kids and a big job and no stay-at-home husband have two nannies, and a household staff, because you need to be covered every second of every day because you don’t know what work will need. (Remember: this is from day one of having kids.) . . .
How to pick a husband who will co-exist with a breadwinner and nannies.If you are picking the two-nanny route, you will need to find a husband who earns more than you. Statistically your marriage is high risk if you and your husband are both in the workforce and you earn more than him because surveys show that you will resent him. This is not logical, or social, it is primal. Statistically, you will marry a guy who does not make as much as you and then you will have kids and get a divorce. Because women hate the feeling of out-earning their husbands.
To be clear: there is no scenario where you have a big job but do not work long hours. That does not happen. There are not those jobs in this world. And that is fair: . . . You give something up to get something. Always.
Scenario 2: Be Home with Your Kids
If you want to be home with your kids, you’re going to need a solid plan to make that happen. Pew Research finds that about 60% of all working women with kids want to work part-time and be home with their kids part-time. (Note that Macleans magazine reports that women with kids who work part-time are the happiest in the world.) Gallup reports that about 40% of women don’t want to work at all. (Note that this leaves a statistically irrelevant number of women who have kids and want to work full-time.)
Home with Kids Option 1: Work part-time. Let’s assume you want to work part-time, since this is the more complicated of the two scenarios. The problem with this scenario is that part-time jobs don’t offer advancement or a lot of money, so you need to be with a guy who will work full-time. Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time. Also, parents who do this say it’s total chaos, and in a 50/50 split the women always end up doing way more.
Home with Kids Option 2: Don’t bother with earning money.
If the guy is working full-time, then he is not going to do all the parenting stuff. You are. So you are working part-time and you are a full-time parent. You will have to work hard to not get resentful about this. And really, who could blame you? The best antidote for this resentment is money. If the guy makes a lot of money you can hire people to help you and then you don’t have to be upset that the guy is not helping you.Or not. Or you can just let the guy go to his job, which, you will certainly know, is way easier than taking care of kids, because every job in the whole world is easier than taking care of kids, and you will be home doing everything else. Maybe you will have a part-time job, but that will not be the focus of your energy because the stuff at home is way harder than your part-time job. Your part-time job will be a break from the hard stuff. So pick a guy who will earn enough to ensure that you are not pissed.
Also, pick a guy who will earn enough so that you don’t have to work. Because statistically speaking, you will not want a full-time job, and you definitely won’t want a job where you have to earn six figures, because that’s way more than full-time.
How to find a husband who is a breadwinner.
[E]veryone looks like a breadwinner in their twenties. . . . at some point, the salary gets high enough that you have to actually be good at what you do to continue getting jobs at that salary. Then some people start getting stuck . . . This happens to most people around age 30. . . . So the best thing to do is to assume anyone over 30 is making as much as they will make in their life. . . . (By age 40 almost no one’s salary increases.) . . . If you are marrying young, which I recommend, then you’re playing the odds.
Scenario 3: Denial. Don’t do this.
There will be people who say you can’t choose who you fall in love with. This is a lie, of course. There are a million people you could fall in love with. If one is impractical, just go find another. There will be people who say they don’t know what they want until they see who they marry. . . . the odds are you do not want a huge job and you are in scenario two.
Most people just will not like these choices. Nothing here is good. It’s reality, and of course it’s not as good as fantasy. The only good, real thing is that you have choices, and you can figure out who you are and what you need and you can get what you need. The only thing worse than the choices I’ve just laid out is not making a choice.
16 November 2012
Culture As An Organizing Principle
Deep Thoughts On A Shallow Study
This morning I read an executive summary of yet another fairly shallow, study on parenting in marketing research cluster analysis style from the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies at the University of Virgina. In a nutshell, the study classified the parenting styles of about 90% of American parents into one of four "family cultures" drawing from a representative national survey of about 3,000 parents of school aged children, followed by ninety minute follow up interviews with 101 of them over three years.
The four categories were "Faithful", "Engaged Progressive", "Detached", and "American Dreamers". I've inserted additional comments on each based on the executive summary in italics next to the relevant quotations from the press release below. The added emphasis is mind and some headings have been omitted without indication.
The Centrality of Culture And Limits Of Cluster Analysis
Despite the fact that the study was fairly shallow, it has some resonance and validates the notion of using the organizational unit of "a culture" as an organizing principle in a wide variety of social science disciplines from archaeology, to linguistics, to the study of religion, to political science, to history, to educational theory, to law, to the economics and sociology of social class, to criminology, to applied psychology, to economic development.
Cluster analysis in survey methodology or demographic studies works primarily because there actually is an underlying reality of discrete cultures and subcultures that are internally fairly (although not entirely) homogeneous.
However, the study can be faulted for simply doing raw cluster analysis rather than fitting parenting cultures into the already well established literature of white and ethnic subcultures in the United States, sometimes reflecting different approaches to parenting by members of different social classes who form subcultures within the same culture, and at other times reflecting affiliations with fundamentally separate cultural units.
Raw cluster analysis methods conflate parallel but historically and culturally distinct groups based on superficial similarities in a way that can obscure as much as it reveals. For example, while "Faithful" parenting may accurately reflect to some extent the parenting style of an American Muslim convert who is culturally Southern with Evangelical Christian roots, it is likely something of a false friend that is more likely to be misleading than helpful when used to make generalizations about an American Orthodox Jew or a Muslim in an immigrant community.
Likewise, I suspect that the "Detached" parenting category may be a degenerate category made up of more than one class specific subculture within one of the other sets of parenting folkways that conceals differing sets of parental aspirations that aren't being realized by people who might have been Engaged Progressive or Faithful parents, for example, if they had the resources to do so.
The notion that the most fruitful way to understand political activity is on some platonic multidimensional scale looking at views, for example, on cultural and economic dimensions, is mostly wrong. Instead, political ideology is best understood as the product of a process of building coalitions of coherent, pre-existing, relatively stable discrete cultures and subcultures.
What Is A Culture, In The Sense Of An Analytical Object In The Social Sciences?
To use the analytical framework of Fischer's book "Albion's Seed," white Americans largely derive their own cultures from four English subcultures with roots going back to the colonial era which subsequent waves of immigrants have largely absorbed from local regional culture of the place to which they have migrated within the United States. These four main cultures were those of the New England Puritans, the Mid-Atlantic Quakers, the Royalist in exile lowland South, and the Borderlands Culture of Appalachia and the highlands South (the influences of the Dutch in the greater New York City area, of a small Celtic immigrant community in a small Southern coastal area, a West Indian colonial influenced area in South Carolina, the French influence in Louisiana, Hispanic influences in the American Southwest and Florida, and African American cultures were omitted from that analysis). The first two were particularly influential in the culture "North" which is predominant in Blue State America, while the latter two were particularly influential in the cultural "South which is predominant in Red State America.
Each culture is an organizing unit of analysis shares a rich and multifaceted set of "folkways" that include everything from marriage and parenting practices, to political ideologies, to attitudes towards legal institutions, to moral values, to attitudes towards the supernatural, to predominant means of economic organization, to styles of social interactions, to religious inclinations, to fashions in clothing, household goods, architecture, aesthetic sensibilities and food, to rhythm of the year. A "culture" in this sense, generally corresponds to a particular linguistic dialect, which is one of the folkways that goes into making the culture.
There are gray cases of ambiguous or hybrid individuals, but the overwhelming general rule is that the vast majority of people are easily associated with a particular culture (often specific to their ethnicity, with religion and region being a particular useful proxy for white subcultures that are not formally recognized in a rigorous way statistically).
The processes involved in religious conversions are often part and parcel of the larger process of cultural conversion as religion is an important component of and marker of cultural identity. Mass migrations, and sometimes mass populations replacements or mass "culture shifts" (by analogy to mass language shifts), are also critical mechanisms here. Subcultures with distinct and distant historical sources can experience convergent evolution in given conditions and can also borrow from each other creating areal effects similar to those seen in linguistic families.
The overall structure of variation in culture closely resembles the structure of variation in languages where some features (isoglosses) are particularly diagnostic of the overall nature of the dialect variation that exists as a whole. The concept of a "culture" in this sense is also closely linked to the notion of a "population" in population genetics. Difficulties in definition have more to do with fuzzy thinking about the concept within disciplines than it does with a deficiency of the concept itself as a rigorous and useful one.
The folkways of a culture are deeply intertwined with each other, interdependent and mutually reinforcing. While there is room for innovation and variation within a culture, diversification and assimilation of foreign influences, and the emergence of subcultures, individual pieces of a culture cannot be adjusted a la carte. Instead, a culture as a whole evolves from its historical roots with many interrelated parts changing at the same time in response to particular developments and influences.
Founding cultures are profoundly persistent. They still have clearly visible influences on day to day life two hundred and fifty years after their arrival, despite the fact that to survive every piece of these cultures must be retransmitted at each new generation. Founding cultures are more stable, for example, than the ideology of the political parties whose regional strengths reflect the coalitions built from them.
Cultural Darwinism
More than one culture can co-exist in a single region, and when this happens, it often corresponds, in part, to socio-economic or social class or caste or ethnic divides. Operationally, race is mostly relevant because it is reflective of a cultural package. But, the co-existence of multiple cultures in a single community or society is not necessarily stable.
Most of the interesting political struggles are fundamentally competitions between representatives of particular cultures. This is also the source of a great deal of societal tension and conflict in day to day life. Understanding history in the context of struggles between competing cultures and of the evolutionary history of today's competing cultures can give history much more meaning and relevance than a more traditional presentation of the subject.
While academic and elite etiquette in multicultural society like that of the U.S. nominally assumes that all cultures in the land are equal in dignity, this is a bit like the equality one sees in U.S. Constitutional law. This equality in dignity does not deny the fact that cultures are real functional aspects of how we live our lives and that some cultures may have more of a "selective advantage" in society than another in a particular time and place. In one era, under one set of conditions, for example, in early 18th century Appalachia, a Borderland culture may be the optimal set of folkways from the available choices. In another place and era, for example, in the Mid-Atlantic states as industrialization is becoming a critical economic trend in the mid-19th century, the cultural concepts of the early American Quakers may be more optimal.
Memetic evolution operates to a great extent at the level of diversity within the cultures and subcultures of a region, in a manner parallel to genetic evolution. Variations that are more functional thrive and are transmitted to the next generation both parent to child, and by securing converts who consciously adopt cultural practices different from the ones that they were born to know. Dysfunctional variations wither as adherents of it have fewer descendants biologically and have fewer people who convert into the culture than convert out of it. Cultural co-existence is often unstable, at least until workable institutions of federalism or stable metacultural rules involving relationships between castes or distinct cultures within a society are worked out to form a seamless whole.
Put more brutally, often, when there is more than one culture in a society, one will win and the rest will lose.
Long before that happens, a society will start to have a superstrate or dominant culture, and one or more substrate or subordinate cultures. Ultimately, the subordinate cultures will tend to go extinct entirely.
The stakes in culture wars are high, the process of determining who wins isn't played by the rules of cricket, and as societies increasingly grow in scale as technology makes the world a smaller place, the number of competitors in each ring fighting to the death in these collective culture wars become greater.
The mass gladitorial competition of cultures as the increased scale of society has reduced the number of available cultural niches is going on as vigorously now as it ever has in history. Half of the world's languages, and thus, half of its cultures (defined at the fairly high level of analysis of all of the cultures and subcultures associated with particular mutually unintelligible dialects) will die in a matter of decades.
Well mannered academics and elite culture members may have the luxury of treating the competitors in these culture wars as contestants equal in dignity. But, in general, the competitors are usually going to be distinctly unequal in reality in their fitness within the context of a particular time or place. Some will thrive while others will wither, unless they can evolve to be more competitive or parley themselves into some "ecological niche" within the society's cultural landscape that allows them to persist under conditions that allow the culture to survive - for example, as the Amish and Mormons and ultra-Orthodox Jews have managed to in American society, but the Shakers did not.
This morning I read an executive summary of yet another fairly shallow, study on parenting in marketing research cluster analysis style from the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies at the University of Virgina. In a nutshell, the study classified the parenting styles of about 90% of American parents into one of four "family cultures" drawing from a representative national survey of about 3,000 parents of school aged children, followed by ninety minute follow up interviews with 101 of them over three years.
The four categories were "Faithful", "Engaged Progressive", "Detached", and "American Dreamers". I've inserted additional comments on each based on the executive summary in italics next to the relevant quotations from the press release below. The added emphasis is mind and some headings have been omitted without indication.
The Faithful (20 percent of American parents) adhere to a divine and timeless morality, handed down through Christianity, Judaism or Islam, giving them a strong sense of right and wrong. Understanding human nature as “basically sinful” and seeing moral decline in the larger society, including in the public schools, the Faithful seek to defend and multiply the traditional social and moral order by creating it within their homes and instilling it in their children, with support from their church community. Raising “children whose lives reflect God’s purpose” is a more important parenting goal than their children’s eventual happiness or career success.
This group has a 4-1 ratio of Republicans to Democrats, is concentrated in the South (it is rare in the Pacific and Northeastern States), is heavily middle class white, and contains at least a plurality of Evangelical Christians. They don't trust their children, distrust the larger society, obsess about sex and aren't worried about spanking. But, they do spend a lot of time with their children and get lets of community support through the church. I'm skeptical that many Jews or Muslims actually fit in the designation despite the P.C. inclusively of the label. They have more children - a quarter have four or more.
For Engaged Progressives (21 percent of parents), morality centers around personal freedom and responsibility. Having sidelined God as morality’s author, Engaged Progressives see few moral absolutes beyond the Golden Rule. They value honesty, are skeptical about religion and are often guided morally by their own personal experience or what “feels right” to them. Politically liberal and the least religious of all family types, they are generally optimistic about today’s culture and their children’s prospects. Aiming to train their children to be “responsible choosers,” Engaged Progressives strategically allow their children freedom at younger ages than other parents. By age 14, their children have complete information about birth control, by 15 they are surfing the Web without adult supervision, and by age 16 they are watching R-rated movies.
This group which includes me and most of my parent peers has a 4-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans, they are rare in the South and common in the Pacific states and Northeast, this group is heavily middle to upper middle class white, is secular leaning, trusts their children and the larger world (except religion), disfavors spanking, and is by far the most educated. They have slightly higher divorce rates than the Faithful, but still at the national average level. They are much more likely than the Faithful to see having two children as ideal and live accordingly.
The parenting strategy of The Detached (19 percent of parents) can be summarized as: Let kids be kids and let the cards fall where they may. The Detached are primarily white parents with blue-collar jobs, no college degree and lower household income. Pessimistic about the future and their children’s opportunities, they report lower levels of marital happiness, and do not feel particularly close to their children. They feel they are in a “losing battle with all the other influences out there” and it shows in their practices. They spend less than two hours a day interacting with their children, they do not routinely monitor their children’s homework, and they report lower grades for their children. When they do have dinner together as a family it is often in front of the TV.
American Dreamers (27 percent of parents) are defined by their optimism about their children’s abilities and opportunities. These parents, with relatively low household income and education, pour themselves into raising their children and providing them every possible material and social advantage. They also invest much effort protecting them from negative social influences and shaping their children’s moral character. This is the most common family culture among blacks and Hispanics, with each group making up about a quarter of American Dreamers. American Dreamers describe their relationships with their children as “very close” and express a strong desire to be “best friends” with their children once they are grown.
One comment true for all four categories rang particularly true:
Unlike many parents in the 1960s who faced a “generation gap,” today's parents believe their children largely share their values. Most family arguments and strife center around mundane, day-to-day issues like doing chores.
The Centrality of Culture And Limits Of Cluster Analysis
Despite the fact that the study was fairly shallow, it has some resonance and validates the notion of using the organizational unit of "a culture" as an organizing principle in a wide variety of social science disciplines from archaeology, to linguistics, to the study of religion, to political science, to history, to educational theory, to law, to the economics and sociology of social class, to criminology, to applied psychology, to economic development.
Cluster analysis in survey methodology or demographic studies works primarily because there actually is an underlying reality of discrete cultures and subcultures that are internally fairly (although not entirely) homogeneous.
However, the study can be faulted for simply doing raw cluster analysis rather than fitting parenting cultures into the already well established literature of white and ethnic subcultures in the United States, sometimes reflecting different approaches to parenting by members of different social classes who form subcultures within the same culture, and at other times reflecting affiliations with fundamentally separate cultural units.
Raw cluster analysis methods conflate parallel but historically and culturally distinct groups based on superficial similarities in a way that can obscure as much as it reveals. For example, while "Faithful" parenting may accurately reflect to some extent the parenting style of an American Muslim convert who is culturally Southern with Evangelical Christian roots, it is likely something of a false friend that is more likely to be misleading than helpful when used to make generalizations about an American Orthodox Jew or a Muslim in an immigrant community.
Likewise, I suspect that the "Detached" parenting category may be a degenerate category made up of more than one class specific subculture within one of the other sets of parenting folkways that conceals differing sets of parental aspirations that aren't being realized by people who might have been Engaged Progressive or Faithful parents, for example, if they had the resources to do so.
The notion that the most fruitful way to understand political activity is on some platonic multidimensional scale looking at views, for example, on cultural and economic dimensions, is mostly wrong. Instead, political ideology is best understood as the product of a process of building coalitions of coherent, pre-existing, relatively stable discrete cultures and subcultures.
What Is A Culture, In The Sense Of An Analytical Object In The Social Sciences?
To use the analytical framework of Fischer's book "Albion's Seed," white Americans largely derive their own cultures from four English subcultures with roots going back to the colonial era which subsequent waves of immigrants have largely absorbed from local regional culture of the place to which they have migrated within the United States. These four main cultures were those of the New England Puritans, the Mid-Atlantic Quakers, the Royalist in exile lowland South, and the Borderlands Culture of Appalachia and the highlands South (the influences of the Dutch in the greater New York City area, of a small Celtic immigrant community in a small Southern coastal area, a West Indian colonial influenced area in South Carolina, the French influence in Louisiana, Hispanic influences in the American Southwest and Florida, and African American cultures were omitted from that analysis). The first two were particularly influential in the culture "North" which is predominant in Blue State America, while the latter two were particularly influential in the cultural "South which is predominant in Red State America.
Each culture is an organizing unit of analysis shares a rich and multifaceted set of "folkways" that include everything from marriage and parenting practices, to political ideologies, to attitudes towards legal institutions, to moral values, to attitudes towards the supernatural, to predominant means of economic organization, to styles of social interactions, to religious inclinations, to fashions in clothing, household goods, architecture, aesthetic sensibilities and food, to rhythm of the year. A "culture" in this sense, generally corresponds to a particular linguistic dialect, which is one of the folkways that goes into making the culture.
There are gray cases of ambiguous or hybrid individuals, but the overwhelming general rule is that the vast majority of people are easily associated with a particular culture (often specific to their ethnicity, with religion and region being a particular useful proxy for white subcultures that are not formally recognized in a rigorous way statistically).
The processes involved in religious conversions are often part and parcel of the larger process of cultural conversion as religion is an important component of and marker of cultural identity. Mass migrations, and sometimes mass populations replacements or mass "culture shifts" (by analogy to mass language shifts), are also critical mechanisms here. Subcultures with distinct and distant historical sources can experience convergent evolution in given conditions and can also borrow from each other creating areal effects similar to those seen in linguistic families.
The overall structure of variation in culture closely resembles the structure of variation in languages where some features (isoglosses) are particularly diagnostic of the overall nature of the dialect variation that exists as a whole. The concept of a "culture" in this sense is also closely linked to the notion of a "population" in population genetics. Difficulties in definition have more to do with fuzzy thinking about the concept within disciplines than it does with a deficiency of the concept itself as a rigorous and useful one.
The folkways of a culture are deeply intertwined with each other, interdependent and mutually reinforcing. While there is room for innovation and variation within a culture, diversification and assimilation of foreign influences, and the emergence of subcultures, individual pieces of a culture cannot be adjusted a la carte. Instead, a culture as a whole evolves from its historical roots with many interrelated parts changing at the same time in response to particular developments and influences.
Founding cultures are profoundly persistent. They still have clearly visible influences on day to day life two hundred and fifty years after their arrival, despite the fact that to survive every piece of these cultures must be retransmitted at each new generation. Founding cultures are more stable, for example, than the ideology of the political parties whose regional strengths reflect the coalitions built from them.
Cultural Darwinism
More than one culture can co-exist in a single region, and when this happens, it often corresponds, in part, to socio-economic or social class or caste or ethnic divides. Operationally, race is mostly relevant because it is reflective of a cultural package. But, the co-existence of multiple cultures in a single community or society is not necessarily stable.
Most of the interesting political struggles are fundamentally competitions between representatives of particular cultures. This is also the source of a great deal of societal tension and conflict in day to day life. Understanding history in the context of struggles between competing cultures and of the evolutionary history of today's competing cultures can give history much more meaning and relevance than a more traditional presentation of the subject.
While academic and elite etiquette in multicultural society like that of the U.S. nominally assumes that all cultures in the land are equal in dignity, this is a bit like the equality one sees in U.S. Constitutional law. This equality in dignity does not deny the fact that cultures are real functional aspects of how we live our lives and that some cultures may have more of a "selective advantage" in society than another in a particular time and place. In one era, under one set of conditions, for example, in early 18th century Appalachia, a Borderland culture may be the optimal set of folkways from the available choices. In another place and era, for example, in the Mid-Atlantic states as industrialization is becoming a critical economic trend in the mid-19th century, the cultural concepts of the early American Quakers may be more optimal.
Memetic evolution operates to a great extent at the level of diversity within the cultures and subcultures of a region, in a manner parallel to genetic evolution. Variations that are more functional thrive and are transmitted to the next generation both parent to child, and by securing converts who consciously adopt cultural practices different from the ones that they were born to know. Dysfunctional variations wither as adherents of it have fewer descendants biologically and have fewer people who convert into the culture than convert out of it. Cultural co-existence is often unstable, at least until workable institutions of federalism or stable metacultural rules involving relationships between castes or distinct cultures within a society are worked out to form a seamless whole.
Put more brutally, often, when there is more than one culture in a society, one will win and the rest will lose.
Long before that happens, a society will start to have a superstrate or dominant culture, and one or more substrate or subordinate cultures. Ultimately, the subordinate cultures will tend to go extinct entirely.
The stakes in culture wars are high, the process of determining who wins isn't played by the rules of cricket, and as societies increasingly grow in scale as technology makes the world a smaller place, the number of competitors in each ring fighting to the death in these collective culture wars become greater.
The mass gladitorial competition of cultures as the increased scale of society has reduced the number of available cultural niches is going on as vigorously now as it ever has in history. Half of the world's languages, and thus, half of its cultures (defined at the fairly high level of analysis of all of the cultures and subcultures associated with particular mutually unintelligible dialects) will die in a matter of decades.
Well mannered academics and elite culture members may have the luxury of treating the competitors in these culture wars as contestants equal in dignity. But, in general, the competitors are usually going to be distinctly unequal in reality in their fitness within the context of a particular time or place. Some will thrive while others will wither, unless they can evolve to be more competitive or parley themselves into some "ecological niche" within the society's cultural landscape that allows them to persist under conditions that allow the culture to survive - for example, as the Amish and Mormons and ultra-Orthodox Jews have managed to in American society, but the Shakers did not.
05 November 2012
New England's Forests Mostly Restored
The notion of a post-apocolyptic world, one with a radically different historical course (Greg Bear explores this in his Neanderthal series), or one in which a radical political movement (Ecotopia) restores the environment to a more pristine state is common in speculative fiction. Far less often appreciated is the fact that this is being done quietly, in the present, in the United States without any radical upheavals.
From the Wall Street Journal (reviewing "Nature Wars" (2012) by Jim Sterba) via Gene Expression.
The relocation of agriculture to other places in the United States more suited to it, and the emphasis on high urban densities in the Northeastern United States, where people actually do live, have been key elements of the reforesting on the region. More generally, environmentalism has gone mainstream in American politics and become a consensus value, so long as a non-absolutist approach is taken.
Long after the historical moment when the U.S. was considered to have closed its frontier according to the Census Bureau in 1890, much of its territory now fits that definition (although the larger than you would expect size of Alaska, which was not a U.S. State when the frontier was declared closed, has a lot to do with this stiuation):
Reforestation began in 19th-century New England, when farmers started abandoning marginal pastures and buying cheap feed grain from the rich, relatively flat lands on the other end of the newly opened Erie Canal. Later, petroleum-based fertilizers and gasoline-powered machinery made Midwestern farming more productive and draft animals obsolete, freeing up 70 million acres that were being used to feed them. Many farmers, meanwhile, opted for jobs in town. Trees took back much of their land and, after World War II, nonfarmers began moving onto it.
Today, the eastern third of the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely populated states in the country, not counting forested suburban and exurban sprawl (though a lot of sprawl has enough trees to be called a real forest if people and their infrastructure weren’t there). . . .
White-tailed deer
Pre-Columbian period: 30 million
1900: 350,000
Today: 25 million to 40 million
Source: 'Nature Wars'
From the Wall Street Journal (reviewing "Nature Wars" (2012) by Jim Sterba) via Gene Expression.
The relocation of agriculture to other places in the United States more suited to it, and the emphasis on high urban densities in the Northeastern United States, where people actually do live, have been key elements of the reforesting on the region. More generally, environmentalism has gone mainstream in American politics and become a consensus value, so long as a non-absolutist approach is taken.
Long after the historical moment when the U.S. was considered to have closed its frontier according to the Census Bureau in 1890, much of its territory now fits that definition (although the larger than you would expect size of Alaska, which was not a U.S. State when the frontier was declared closed, has a lot to do with this stiuation):
How much of the U.S. is frontier?
Answer: Frontier is more of a concept than a specific definition, so the number of people living in the frontier and the amount of land that is frontier will vary depending on the definition you select. The North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center's map, Frontier Counties, United States, 2004, identifies 440 counties that meet the frontier definition of fewer than seven people per square mile, with a total population for those counties of nearly 2.9 million people. Based on the USDA Economic Research Service's Measuring Rurality: Urban Influence Codes, over three million people live in rural counties that are not adjacent to a metropolitan or micropolitan county (having an Urban Influence Code of 11 or 12), and these counties cover an area of over 770,000 square miles. Using the counties and areas provided to the National Center for Frontier Communities by the State Offices of Rural Health, 56% of the land area of the United States is frontier and more than 9 million people, or less than 4% of the population of the country live in these isolated regions.
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