DC Public Pools Are Awesome

Kay Steiger reports on her tour of DC Public pools:

Today I went to the second in my exploration of DC’s public swimming pools. This one was south of Dupont Circle, called Francis (25th & N, near Trader Joe’s). It’s a nice pool, divided into three sections: the baby pool, the lap pool, and the diving pool. The diving pool was 12 feet 8 inches deep, probably the deepest you’ll find in the city. The DC pools are free to city residents, and I had a lot of fun.

Wow, that sounds awesome. My swimming options are basically this one private pool, which is part of a larger fitness club that my parents are part of. They have three pools, one solely dedicated to laps, one split  between laps and general usage and a baby pool. But there’s NO DIVING BOARD! Sure, it’s nine feet deep, which is OK, but an extra three feet and eight inches plus a diving board would be awesome. One would think that public pools would have greater liability concerns and thus wouldn’t have features as fun and dangerous as deep diving areas with nice boards, but apparently the DC city government has figured out to provide something that’s a genuine service to its citizens.

Do The Rich Have All The Natural Beauty?

Brade DeLong takes issue with Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay for The Nation, in which she argues that due to skyrocketing inequality, the rich are pushing everyone else out of beautiful places in which to live. She gives the example of Jackson Hole, or more specifically, Driggs, the town one pass over from Jackson Hole, where the low wage workers that support any vacation destination live:

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike along the same pine-shadowed trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs–Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford–transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven’t been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not know.

I think Ehrenreich is confusing a few things here. If she wants to argue that it’s hard for anyone besides the rich to live in beautiful areas - Lake Tahoe, Jackson Hole, any nice beach area - then she’s certainly right. But if she wants to argue that it’s impossible for the non-rich to visit these types of areas, then she’s certainly wrong. Let’s look at Tahoe, the area with natural beauty that I know best. The first dynamic Ehrenreich identifies is certainly going on. From the mid 90s to the mid 2000s, spurred on by the tech boom, property values in the Tahoe area exploded as people began buying second homes. This means that Truckee, which used to be something of a working class area, has turned into second-home land as developments are popping up all over the place. So where do all the bank tellers, check-out clerks and waiters live? Well, lots of them live south on Highway 80, around, say Grass Valley, which doesn’t have the stunning beauty of the Tahoe area. Others live farther north on 89, which is more isolated than the Truckee-Tahoe area. So one can make the case that a fair number of non-rich people are being economically excluded from the stunning natural beauty of Tahoe.

But regular people aren’t! It’s pretty easy to travel for Tahoe, hike in the mountains, swim in the lake and generally experience the environment. There are numerous free, public beaches all over the lake. It’s very easy to camp across the street from the lake. Access to the hiking trails is free. Besides the high cost of driving the three hours from the Bay Area (or farther), Tahoe is remarkably accessible. I guess it’s questionable what the social value of having large number of non-rich people live in the most beautiful places in the world.

There just aren’t that many people who can even live in a place like Tahoe, but if we expand out past Tahoe, Jackson Hole, Key West and into say, Vermont, it’s not clear if Ehrenreich argument still holds up. Sure, even Vermont is getting invaded by people from New York and Boston looking for second homes for skiing, but there’s still a huge amount of low-rent, rural land that is shockingly beautiful. I guess the real question is if rural areas count as naturally beautiful (Vermont, Kentucky, West Virgina), or if only those 1000 Places to See Before You Die (Tahoe, Jackson Hole, Key West) make the cut.

Why Do We Live In A Debt Culture

David Brooks column on our debt culture is very good. From credit cards to home equity loans to payday loans, Americans are all sorts of indebted, and that indebtedness is having incredibly negative effects on our economic and social well being. So why has any cultural or social attachtment to thrift broken down? Brooks doesn’t quite say, and although he says that ultimately its a problem of values, he can only point to particular changes in the economic and policy landscape that have enabled people to drown themselves in debt. So, in absence of Brooks doing his own pop sociology, allow me to fill in. And, like any good speculation, what follows is entirely anecdotal.

My own theory (and I’m sure someone else has said this) is that people are going into debt because they have little experience with real deprivation and thus have the expectation that things will get better financially and that, ultimately, their debt won’t matter. In short, people feel like they can afford to live beyond their means. This is not an attitude, however, that you see in people who have lived through the last period of American mass deprivation - the Great Depression. Using only my grandparents as an example, I can say that these people consistently saved (maybe even too much) and when buying consumer goods, made a point out of being thrifty. Now, there wasn’t a real possibility that they were going to experience deprivation as during the Great Depression ever again, but the ethic of thriftiness was still there. And they passed it on to their kids - my parents. Although my parents came to be far wealthier than my grandparents, we’ve still consistently lived below our means. This means saving as much as possible, no credit card debt and all the rest. Of course, we have the advantage of being squarely in the investor class, so we have access to “tax-deferred savings plans, as well as an army of financial advisers.” But take away UBS’ personal wealth management, and we’d still be saving a lot and investing relatively conservatively.

But of course, this ethic gets diminished with every generation removed from real deprivation, and I’m considerably less conscious of spending than my parents are. For example, when we shop, I always say that small differences of prices don’t really matter (and they really don’t) but there’s that residual norm that my parents observe that there’s no good reason to pay more money for things than necessary. Since I’ve never experienced deprivation or anything remotely close to it, and am two generations removed from those who have, I probably won’t be able to pass down this ethic to my kids, or at least not as strongly as my grandparents and parents were able to.

But while my children could well see a deterioration of Zeitlin-thriftiness, we could see a Great Awakening nationally.When the young people mired in credit card debt have children whose material well being is affected by their parents poor decisions, they could very well snap back in the other direction children of those college students and young who are mired in credit card debt and then become extra careful about debt and consumer spending. But we shouldn’t have to wait for a generational mindset-shift before taking some concrete policy steps. And Brooks has some good suggestions like non profits offering loans that would compete with predatory pay-day lenders, expanding financial planning to everyone or baby bonds to encourage saving from a young age. Sure, values may ultimately be more important than any program or policy, but this is clearly a “both-and” situation, not an “either-or.”

Woo Hoo

Marriage equality makes me happy:

Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

What’s interesting about this decision, especially considering the inevitable cries of judicial activism from conservatives, is that this is exactly what Governor Schwarzenegger wanted to happen. When the California legislature twice passed bills legalizing gay marriage, Schwarzenegger vetoed them, saying that he didn’t want to override Proposition 22, which prevented California from recognizing out of state or international same-sex marriages. He also explicitly stated that he was amenable to either a proposition or the courts settling the issue. And now the courts have settled the issue, despite the fact that there is sure to be another proposition passing a constitutional amendment to get rid of same-sex marriage. But I’m optimistic - it’s unlikely that a socially liberal state will want to nullify the thousands of marriages that are sure to happen before the next election. This would square the circle of the decision being viewed as democratically legitimate - if the people refuse to overturn it, they’d essentially be giving their stamp of approval.

For more on the complicated mess that is California, same sex marriage and the constitution, read Josh Patashnik.

Concerning Flip Flops in Winter

Jill at Feministe excerpts a conversation she had with a fellow student, concering the strange phenomena of preppy, white, college students in cold places (Middlebury, Vermont…Hamilton, New York…Hanover, New Hampshire) wearing flips flops in the dead of winter.  As the Head-Royce Class of 2007’s offical “most likely to wear flip flops in winter” and someone, who, if it all turns out well, will be going to college in a cold, Northeastern place, I’ll give my own take on this strange sartorial choice.

The way I see it, there are two types of people who wear flip flops more than, say, 300 days a year, or at least wear them in cold weather.   The first type is the stoner/hippie/surfer who simply doesn’t care about  fashion or clothing norms, and really wears flip flops all the time because they’re so comfortable.  The second type, of which I’m much more familliar, is someone who also wears flip flops because they’re comfortable, but does so while still being a conscientious, more-fashionable-than-not dresser.  This would be someone who wears Rainbows, nice jeans, a Lacoste polo and a sweater vest (not that I’ve ever sported that look…).  To them, and I really should say us, wearing Rainbows with the normal preppy garb says two things: I’m a well dressed guy, but I’m also more chill than my friend in the LL Bean duck-hunting boots or that jackass in the scarf and the boat shoes.

But why white people?  If by “white,” you mean upper middle class types who dress well and go to schools in the Northeast, the above dynamics apply, but if you want to probe deeper, there’s another, more general motive at play.  If you’re at Dartmouth and intend to become a consultant/investment banker/corporate lawyer, you know that your days wearing flips-flops — in any season — are certainly numbered.  The appropriate dress for The Green isn’t exactly what you wear at McKinsey or Watchell.  And while it would be untenable to totally abandon the dress of your classmates and social class, wearing flip flops in winter can be seen as a silent rebellion against the expectations set out for ambitious, upper-middle class youth.  And they’re so comfortable.

Dog, PhD

I went to Barnes and Noble today to pick up a book for school, and I was browsing in the “Social Sciences” section, and while there were plenty of books by Jonathan Kozol and Thomas Sowell, one book stood out in particular.  That book was You Can Run But You Can’t Hide by none other than Duane Chapman, better known as “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”  That sound you hear is Emile Durkheim going 8000 RPM in his grave.

105 People Think You’re Hot, Go Get a Facebook Group

I imagine that AFP put someone on the facebook beat, so that when a young person gains international prominence, they’ll immediately have a report of their facebook page. Desperate for copy, AFP tells us that there’s a group called “Let’s not assassinate Bilawal Bhutto because he’s hot, ok?” While it may be meaningful that the co-leader of Pakistan’s largest political party has a (small) legion of adoring fangirls; as of now, the group only has 105 members. To give you an idea of how puny that is in facebook world, “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet” has more than 1.2 million members, and even a group devoted to a Head-Royce joke-rap group has 96. On a slightly different note, I wonder if conservatives will freak out over his page, he lists Michael Moore’s movies as some of his favorites.

Levels of Responsibility

While Atrios is showing the correct instincts in criticizing the implicit slut shaming reaction much of the media is having to Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy, I think he wrong in saying that just because teenage sex is perfectly normal behavior that we shouldn’t condemn, it’s wrong to describe teen pregnancy as irresponsible. I simply can not believe that a wealthy 16 year old girl working is Los Angeles is ignorant of contraception or the morning after pill. Same goes for her 19 year old boyfriend, surely he could have been more responsible. Bottom line: teenage sex is fine and shouldn’t be condemned, getting inadvertently pregnant at 16 certainly raises questions about the responsibility and maturity of Jamie Lynn and her baby daddy.

Annika at Campus Progress also has a good post about the Jamie Lynn affair.

Leave Chelsea Alone

T.A. Frank’s TNR piece comparing Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush is funny, but this type of reporting is seriously annoying:

Now, I’m sure many readers will complain that neither Jenna nor Chelsea deserves such scrutiny. But, like it or not, they’re from families that have become dynasties. Bush and Clinton aren’t just names anymore; they’re brands. When Jenna gets sloshed and does the butt dance while others go to war, it hurts the Bush brand. When she interns with UNICEF, it helps the brand. When Chelsea holds hands with her parents while the family is immersed in scandal, it helps the Clinton brand. When Chelsea talks about service and then serves herself some hedge fund megabucks, it hurts the brand. And we care about the brand, because our political hopes often rest on its success or failure.

This doesn’t really follow. Frank seems to be justifying writing a column whose main conceit is that its OK to judge the decisions of a twentysomething because their parents are prominent politicians. But his justification is flimsy: so what if Chelsea “hurts” the brand, is our political process going to be influenced in anyway depending on how many nights a week she goes to Bungalow 8? Maybe this entire issue of liberals implicitly condemning Chelsea for working at McKinsey and then a hedge fund hits a bit close to home. I know a good number of people (liberals, mostly) who have pursued similar careers. And, you know what, why shouldn’t Chelsea be able to do what a good number of her peers at Stanford and Oxford do? And so what if she hangs out with celebrities? It’s not like management consulting or being an analyst at a hedge fund is an easy job. They require a high level of intelligence, diligence and ability.

I think it reflects well on her that she is pursuing a rather “normal” career path for a motivated, ambitious Stanford grad. And if she’s happy with her choices, then we should be as well.

Which Libertarians Believe This?

Amanda Marcotte has some not so nice things to say about libertarians:

Anyway, the whole statement betrays the fundamental issue with libertarianism, which is that it’s not based around a concept of liberty so much as it’s based around the concept that the bodies of the working class are the actual property of the rich. Sending people to die in war while avoiding the service yourself makes perfect sense in this regard; the working class belong to you, and you can dispose of their bodies for your own means if you see fit. Not saying that Megan believes that outright, necessarily, but she clearly from this statement thinks that the use of other human beings lives to advance an imperialist agenda is, on the moral scale, far down the list from asking the worthy rich to pay back to a society that has given them so much while others have so little.

There are many things wrong with libertarianism, but the idea that they see the working classes as their playthings for neo-imperialist adventures is certainly not one of them.  By libertarian, Marcotte seems to mean those conservatives that are pro tax cuts, social spending cuts, talk a good game about how bad the nannie/welfare state is, and also are big Iraq War boosters — kinda like Glenn Reynolds.  Too bad Reynolds isn’t a libertarian.  Surely Will Wilkinson, Brian Doherty, Julian Sanchez and Justin Logan(war opponents all) aren’t cogs in the neoconservative war machine, and they don’t want the “working class” to be their “property” as well.  It’s worth pointing out that it was a libertarian, Milton Friedman, who was the leader in stopping the real conscription of the working classes to fight neoimperialist wars (the Draft).  So it appears as if Marcotte is absurdly slandering an entire political philosophy based on Megan McArdle pointing out that taxes aren’t equivalent to charity.

Marcotte also decides to push my buttons on the marriage and poverty issue:

. This view of social spending infects the government under conservatives—the maudlin concern for the souls of the poor has led BushCo to do things like tie welfare benefits to finger-wagging classes about the importance of marriage, for instance.

While I won’t vouch for the good intentions of the Bush Administration’s social policies, “finger wagging” about marriage isn’t all that objectionable.  We have good data to show that those children who grow up in unmarried households have worse developmental outcomes and that lack of marriage and family breakdown can cement low social and economic status. So, is trying to get the poor to adopt behavioral changes so that they and their children wont’ be impoverished count as “finger wagging.”  I guess, but my concern is with poverty, not whether we should or shouldn’t “finger wag” at the poor.  Apparently, because the Bush administration has launched an awful and destructive war, having a social policy that attempts to encourage poverty fighting behavior that is somehow illegitimate. *Sigh*

Why Should the Culture Wars End?

EJ Dionne pens another column of conventional wisdom that only seems to exist within the Beltway journalistic class, that the “culture wars” are some great confusion, and that their “end” — whatever that means — is not only desirable, but inevitable. While I agree with some of the policies that the Third Way initiative Dionne lauds, the entire framing of it is bizarre.

The differences on abortion and gay marriage, to give two especially potent examples, aren’t the result of polarization or some great misunderstanding - but are the result of the fact that one side sees abortion as murder and gay unions as not deserving of societal recognition and protection, while the other side doesn’t see abortion as murder and thinks that gay unions are as deserving of societal recognition and protection.

The only way that these facets of the culture war will resolve themselves is if one side loses its following and its adherents either die out or go to the other side. These issues are controversial because people disagree about them. The “wars” will end when we reach some sort of overwhelming consensus, and that won’t be because Beltway columnists and think tanks thought up some innovative bit of framing to “reconcile” two mutually opposed camps.

Playing Halo Alone?

The Times has a fascinating article covering the debate in the Evangelical community on whether it’s appropriate for churches to sponsor Halo nights and tournaments despite the game’s direct contravention of “thou shalt not kill.”  The larger point, however, is that conservative institutions like Evangelical churches are the ones having this debate.  As Ezra Klein has argued, “[Evangelical churches] offer community, guidance, advice, charity, social capital, entertainment, and even the occasional shot at transcendence. And in return, their member’s trust their politics.”

Liberals have very few equivalent institutions.  Even while there are a large number of more liberal religious institutions (reform jews, liberal/mainline protestants) it’s hard to build a cohesive community around watered down transcendent principles.  Put simple, evangelical teens come for the Halo, but they stay for the salvation.  Liberals, because of their disavowal of transcendence and pursuance of essentially rational, veil of ignorance defined politics and ideas, do not have a coherent core to build any of these social capital maximizing institutions around.  Jonathan Haidt’s identification of liberals as those who value maximizing reciprocity and minimizing harm in their moral calculus — and do not consider purity, in group identification or hierarchy — gets at the core at why liberals are having difficulty building or maintaining any institutions comparable to the megachurch.  You can’t get a bunch of 15 year olds to play Halo, or adults to form relationships with strangers through their church, around abstract ideals like reciprocity or harm minimization.

It wasn’t always like this — when labor was a larger force in American society, there was a consideration of in group identification that was roughly on par with minimizing harm and maintaining reciprocity as well as the corresponding provision of social services around which to build cohesive bonds and solidarity.  Chris Hayes, social democrat extraordinaire, has been searching for a revival of this spirit in a resurgent labor movement, but as Andy Stern and his service workers are the most important union in the country, and since service workers are a more transitory and diverse workforce than the industrial workers of generations past, the labor movement will not be the locus of liberal community.   In Europe and parts of America, communism, which provided a near-religious eschatology as well as a distinct in-group to identify with, was able to build similar institutions — too bad they all had the hots for Stalin.

This state of affairs is ultimately quite unfortunate, but does it bring up an interesting question.  Are we liberals fated to play Halo alone?

PS - Henry Farrel outlines the fascinating cohesive, small communities in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria that were maintained and encouraged by social democratic governance. Also Reihan Salam on Christian Democracy and “soulcraft” in post-war Germany.

Sports and the Left

Chris Hayes in his TPM Book Club contribution discussing Katha Pollit’s Learning to Drive has a rather disturbing aside about sports:

My ever-growing sports obsession, to name just one example, is a source of guilt, even shame. It feels like some secret endorsement of the patriarchy.

As a committed sports fan and a committed liberal, I find this attitude distressing.  There’s no real connection between left of center views  and a distaste for sports.  Liberals, however, are more likely to be female, which I imagine is associated with less sports fandom.  Of course, this wouldn’t explain guilt over having an intense interest in sports.  Since Chris is a committed feminist, I imagine he’s reacting to how sports tends to celebrate the most brutish masculine bravado and uses sexual exploitation to market and promote itself.  Also, professional athletes tend to be rather sundry characters from a feminist point of view.

But it needn’t be that way.  If liberals who would otherwise like professional sports feel so guilty about it that they become shy about expressing their enthusiasm, then the conservatives get to dominate an important set of cultural institutions that a large portion of America is heavily emotionally invested and interested in.  There is nothing essentially liberal or conservative about football or baseball so it makes no sense to cede the athletic sphere.

More importantly, college and professional sports promote social solidarity and equality.  Since I’m from the Bay Area, specifically the East Bay, my favorite football team is the Raiders, my favorite basketball team is the Warriors and my favorite baseball team is the A’s.  Blacks who are less wealthy than me and who also live in the East Bay support the same teams.  When I go to a Warriors or A’s game, I enter a sphere where socioeconomic status and racial identity matter much less. We’re all cheering the same team and watching the same game.  We can all discuss Baron Davis’ knee issues or Dan Haren’s fastball on roughly equal terms.

When the Warriors were making their miraculous play off run, all of Oakland — in which there is gaping educational and wealth inequality — was wearing the same “We Believe” shirt and going nuts every time we beat the Mavericks.  In the presence of Baron Davis, we were all equal. This is the best of what American progressive and leftists ideals have to offer. Should a self-identified social democrat turn his back on such solidarity?

Marriage Is Doing Just Fine, For Some

Since I’ve been waving the bloody shirt of the institution of marriage being in a state of decay, I should link to UPenn economist’s Justin Wolfers renunciation of this alarmism.

those married in the 1990s have proved less likely to divorce than those wed in the 1980s, which were less likely to divorce than those wed in the 1970s. The Divorce Facts are that divorce is falling, and marriages are more stable. What is surprising, is just how easily and how often the Divorce Facts lose out to the Divorce Myth. The Divorce Myth is that divorce is rising. When the latest divorce numbers came out last week, they once again confirm this quarter-century long decline in divorce, but the media (including the Times, Post, and the Inquirer) chose instead to write (incorrectly) about rising divorce. (In their defense, the data were presented in a way that invited misinterpretation, a subject that I shall return to in a future post.)

My basic understanding of how this is working out is that in the late 60s and early 70s demand for divorce rose as women’s education and workforce entry increased.  With more financial and personal independence, as well as political support for basic women’s liberation, divorce laws were liberalized and divorce became more socially acceptable.  Thus, the divorce rate spiked as women abandoned bad marriages.  What we’re seeing now is the settling down of that effect — people are getting married later and with more financial independence — making marriage a choice, not a necessity — so their marriages are likely to last longer.   This is a positive trend that displays how liberal social values can strengthen and transform institutions that are otherwise quite conservative.

The problem is that among the poor, the effect is different.  Here’s a quote from the  Economist’s special report on marriage in America.  If I had my way, the bolded statistics below would be the one domestic social issue everyone was talking about.

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

 

Am I A Social Conservative? Are You?

You want to see me come out as a social conservative? Well, I kinda-sorta do so, in a 1400 word way. Check it out below the fold.

Fall Fecundity

One of the great things about Facebook is that it tells you when a friend’s birthday is coming up.  My informal observations have shown that there’s a big spike in mid to late September.  I’m used to having 1 or 2 birthdays everyday among my friends, but in the past weeks I’ve seen many more 4,5 or 6 person birthdays.  It turns out that September and August really are the most fecund months.  My own naive hypothesis is that the influx of births has something to do with the Christmas-New Years run 9 months before…

The “I’m Really Smart” Bias

Here’s my attempt at an Overcoming Bias type post, but I won’t really do any Bayesian reasoning, so maybe it will be a pale imitation.

Tyler Cowen has a post where he tries to divine the reasons men cruising in public bathrooms have an elaborate call and response of signals to see who they should pair off with, or as he puts it - in an impossibly Cowenesque fashion - “how [do] such trade-maximizing conventions get started?”  He lists off six potential and plausible explanations for this “trade maximizing convention.”  The problem with his exercise is that there is one explanation that is actually correct.

Signal something harmless and non-incriminating and hope for reciprocation.

As Laura M. Mac Donald’s recent New York Times Op-Ed puts it:

various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

In short, this is a simple, single, empiric answer to Tyler’s question.  I don’t want to impugn Tyler’s thought process, but why didn’t he try to seek that answer, especially when he knew there was probably one answer, instead of any combination of the six he gave? My own hypothesis is that there is some sort of “intelligence bias” or even better “self perceived intelligence bias.”

Simply put, if you think you’re really smart and can solve interesting problems that have potentially hard to find empirical answers, you’ll try to apply your (considerable) reasoning abilities to these type of problems as often as possible.  It makes sense, if you’re smart enough, you can figure many things out without wasting time researching them to confirm your reasoned answer.  The problem comes when the empirical answer doesn’t make a ton of (immediately apparent) sense or if you use the Tyler Cowen shotgun approach and throw out a bunch of plausible answers, when less intelligent people (like me!) can figure out the single, correct answer out with a little research.

PS - Tyler’s off the cuff game theoretical explanations and Darwinian “just so” stories are, in my experience, the most common type of these off the cuff explanations.  Why?

The Feminist Marriage

Discussion of the “traditionalizing” effect has percolated throughout the blogosphere, with Michelle Cottle, Jon Cohn and Matthew Yglesias making very similar points to mine.  The weakest part of the study, which was even flagged by the researchers themselves, was whether the shift in housework towards women and getting married was causal, and not simply selective bias due to those with more traditional gender notions being more likely to get married or how children can change the previous spousal balance.  They even said “when it comes to the issue of causality–whether cohabitors are more egalitarian because they are cohabiting–the data here cannot provide a clear-cut answer.”

The implication that there was some sort of mechanistic effect of crossing the altar seemed weak because it essentially drained agency from the two parties.  Were we to believe that all notions of balance, even the ones that held out before, were just going to magically change with marriage? Especially when better explanatory mechanisms were out there — men making more money and the presence of children are just two of the highly plausible alternate explanations. Well, one person was willing to drink the kool aid and take the research to mean that marriage has a brainwashing effect — Jessica Valenti.

Valenti, reacting to the research, wrote a post  implying that this research would deter her form getting married, because she “hates to do dishes.”  This could very well be tongue and cheek, but the symbolism and implications of these types of remarks regarding marriage are very important.  As a peremptory note, I really like feministing and Valenti’s entire project.  I have no problem with about 95 percent of their posts, but because of the nature of how I blog, I generally write about bloggers and writers when I disagree with them.

The Traditionalizing Effect

GFR points us to a report showing that married women do more housework than their live in counterparts, and married men do less housework than those who forgo the ring:

“Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia…

The scientists analyzed surveys gathered in 2002 from 28 nations, from 17,636 respondents (8,119 males and 9,517 females) as part of the Family and Changing Gender Roles III Survey. All respondents were either married or cohabiting with a significant other.

Overall, they found men spent about 9 hours a week on housework compared with women, who spent more than 20 hours weekly.

Now, as an on the record defender of marriage, despite it’s ritual patriarchal baggage, these results should concern me, but they raise more questions then it provides a concrete basis for conclusions about marriage as an institution(I discuss my support for marriage in this post).

The data compares live in and married couples, but the article doesn’t discuss if there is any correction for time. For example, what are the comparable household work ratios for couples that lived together for two years and have been married for five compared to couples that have lived together for seven? Also, how does having children fit into the mix? Are live in couples still more egalitarian after they have children?  It’s easy to imagine there being a post childbirth housework shift, but this article doesn’t discuss it.  If married couples are more likely to have children, and then childbirth causes the responsibilities/work shift, then marriage wouldn’t be prescribing these norms per se.

Also, there is some selection bias at play, though the study shows that even avowed gender egalitarians have a (smaller) housework shift, surely a higher percentage of gender egalitarians are choosing to maintain live-in relationships instead of getting married. This is why part of me hopes that people don’t consider this research as very important. What I mean is that there is a possibility of a feedback loop — if a gender egalitarian couple sees this research or has an impression of marriage being an institution that “traditionalizes” them, ie enforces patriarchial norms, they are more likely to opt out of the institution all together, thus making it more patriarchal.  Instead, they could participate in the institution, and transform it — which I imagine is happening anyway. And since marriage is a wealth building, efficient and positive institution, such a negative reaction would be unfortunate.

There is another reason this research doesn’t seem particularly meaningful - there is less and less of a difference between live-in couples in married couples. Where 50 or so years ago, people got married and then moved in together, today people are more likely to live together for 2-5 years and then get married. In some ways, the marriage threshold for behavior should be getting less signifigant, which it could very well be, but I don’t have data over a range of time. This also means that those who do have live-in relationships and don’t get married are likely to either a. be on the marriage track or b. to be outliers in a whole range of attitudes concerning relationships, and thus the divergent household responsibilities would say more about those not getting married than those who are.

I also disagree with the implication Garance draws from the research, that the traditionalizing effect could explain falling marriage rates.  Taken literally, this line of argument implies that married couples have no agency  — that there is something mechanistic going on about crossing the altar and women working in the house more,  which is unlikely considering that couples oftentimes seamlessly transition from live-in to married.  Though changing social attitudes, ie women wanting to be more independent, could be part of the explanation for falling marriage rates, it’s more likely to be a related phenomena — that as women’s educational opportunities increase and the average first marriage age goes up, women are more likely to be financially and emotionally self sufficient by the time they would otherwise get married and are thus less likely to need to get married.

Rockin’ the Suburbs

Urban snob Matt Yglesias knows not of what he speaks:

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous this becomes. How do we know teenagers won’t cut down on babysitting because of the income effect? I feel like it’s plausible that teenagers are lazy and just want to earn a certain baseline income and then will want to spend more time in the Taco Bell parking lot wishing they had fake IDs (this is my impression of suburban adolescence, we didn’t have Taco Bell parking lots in Manhattan). They’ve gone and asked a complicated question that should be researched properly.

Psh, don’t go talking about what you don’t know. I think I’m a fair repersentative of suburban life, or at least low density urban teenage life. If my friends I end up hanging out in a fast food parking lot…it’s to get their food. And it’s usually an In n’ Out or Wendy’s lot, because their food isn’t as disgusting as Taco Bell. Wendy’s has the advantage of being open quite late, thus inducing late night teenager hanging out, while In n’ Out is simply the best fast food joint in the world.

On the broader question of whether teenagers would work more if their hourly wages for things like babysitting went up, effete urban snob is definitely right. Most teenagers work for two reasons - 1) their parents make them or 2) they want to earn some fixed amount of money. There’s also added on time constraints - laziness and other activities, whether they be school or hanging out in parking lots, place an upper bound on how many hours teenagers work. The fact that 80 percent of teens think that they would work more if wages went up for babysitting might invalidate the Two Matts’™ thesis , but clearly more investigation is needed.