A Child Is Born

December 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

France’s minister of justice is unmarried and very pregnant, yet she still refuses to identify the father of the child. Gossip speculation on the matter includes several prominent Europeans including the former prime minster of Spain.

I’m not sure how that scenario would play in this country, but I do remember that Bush’s first Attorney General, John Ashcroft, an Evangelical Christian, had the DOJ spend $8000 for drapery to cover the bare breast on a statue.

But the Evangelical relation to sex and pregnancy is complicated. At first blush, it seems monolithically puritanical – no unmarried sex, no sex education, abstinence pledges. But as the evangelical reaction to Bristol Palin showed, it is also understanding and forgiving. When it was revealed that Palin, seventeen and unmarried, was pregnant, evangelicals were not the first to cast stones. Instead, they seemed to accept the pregnancy as one of those things that just happen. And since Bristol was not going to have an abortion, and since she was going to marry the father, a difficult situation would be resolved for the best. Difficult, but for evangelicals, not at all unusual. Palin’s mother Sarah seems to have taken a similar path (either that or her eldest child was several weeks premature).

As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.”

That’s from “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker last month. Evangelicals, especially teenagers, face a large gap between values and beliefs on the one hand and behavior on the other. Compared with other teens, they favor abstinence (by a wide margin), fear that partners will lose respect for them if they have sex, and do not anticipate that sex will be pleasurable. Yet on average, they start sex at an earlier age (16) and get pregnant more often. I’m not sure how they handle the cognitive dissonance.

Talbot cites the work of some sociologists (Peter Bearman and Hannah Brückner, Mark Regnerus) on factors that influence whether virginity pledges work – mostly how embedded a teen is in networks (friends, family) that support abstinence. The basic data on abstinence seem to reinforce what should by now be a sociological truism: situational forces matter far more than personal factors like character or statements of intent.

Oh to be in Finland

December 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

This is just a coincidence, right?

Which countries would you rank the highest in terms of education?
Darling Hammond: Finland ranks the highest generally across the board.
(From a Newsweek interview with “Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond [who] has been the brains behind Obama's education policy over the past year as a lead education advisor on the campaign and during the transition.”)


The [survey] results were combined into an index of . . .“sociosexuality” . . . a measure of how sexually liberal people are in thought and behaviour. Most individuals scored between 4 and 65.
The country with the highest rating was Finland, with an average of 51.
(The London Times reporting on a survey of 14,000 people in 48 countries, a project headed by David Schmitt of Bradley University. )

Sending a Message - But Who's Listening?

December 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Republicans tried to run on symbolic issues – Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers. The Republicans cried “country first” and whined that Obama “pals around with terrorists.” You’d have thought that once elected Obama was going to make Al Qaeda his chief of staff.

It didn’t work. People voted for Democrats mostly because the Republicans had done so disastrously on real issues – the war and the economy.

Now it’s the left’s turn. Obama chooses Rick Warren to give the Inauguration invocation, and people on the left are up in arms, as though a 30-second prayer were the equivalent of a cabinet appointment.

Symbolic gestures like this appeal to our emotions; they make a difference in how we feel. Symbols are easy to respond to, and the response is often binary. Us vs. them, good vs. evil. Rev. Warren opposes gay marriage, therefore he’s a bad guy.

Policy is different. It’s about what actually happens on the ground, and it’s far more complex. It doesn’t lend itself to Manichaeanism (that’s one of the reasons the Bushies messed up so badly). It doesn’t require emotion, it requires thought . . . and data.

Still, the moralists must insist that symbolic issues are real. They must also claim not just that evildoers are evil, but that “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them here.” Iraq was no threat to the US, but the invasion would “send a message” to the terroists. War as candy-gram.

Similarly, the anti-Warrenists insist that his half-minute as invocator-in-chief, will “send a message” that anti-gay bigotry is all right. As Andrew Perrin over at Scatterplot puts it, “That message will be heard, loud and clear, and it’s quite reasonable to expect that real people’s real lives will really be affected by it.”

Now, I’ve always thought that when someone says, “It is reasonable to expect,” what they really mean is “I have absolutely no evidence to support this.” But Andrew is an honorable man, and presumably he does know of evidence. Still, I’ve been skeptical about send-a-message arguments ever since my days in the crim biz.

Back then, send-a-message was usually a call for harsh sentences in celebrated cases. The death penalty would “send a message” to potential murderers. Long and mandatory sentences would “send a message” to drug dealers, robbers, Enronistas, or whatever evildoer was currently in the headlines. Whatever this week’s crime of the century was, an acquittal or a sentence less than the maximum would send a message that this crime was O.K., a message which would be heard loud and clear, and nobody would be safe.

The trouble was that evidence of actual deterrence was hard to find, and to the extent that punishment does deter, it’s more a matter of increasing the certainty of arrest, not the severity of sentences.

The symbolic messages of celebrated cases make for good TV – the sorts of things Bill O’Reilly types get all riled up about – and they may be morally satisfying. But they have no impact on what people actually do.

If I were concerned about gay marriage, I’d be much more worried about who’s getting out the vote and who’s getting appointed to the judiciary than about who’s praying at the Inauguration.

Deflationary Psycholoogy

December 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Are lower prices bad? In Monday’s Times, David Leonhardt explains the dangers of consumer thinking.

There is good reason to fear deflation. Once prices start to fall, many consumers may decide to reduce their spending even more than they already have. Why buy a minivan today, after all, if it’s going to be cheaper in a few months? Multiplied by millions, such decisions weaken the economy further, forcing companies to reduce prices even more.”

This seemed reasonable to me. Then I thought about all those digital cameras and flat-screen TVs and computers and flash drives and all other electronic gadgetry. People buy this stuff even though they know that in a few months they’ll be able to get either the same thing for less money or a better version for the same money.

With all the doubt cast recently on economic rationality, it would be nice to have some evidence on what really happens during deflation. Do economists have such evidence, and if so, where did they get that evidence? How many deflationary periods are there for us to sample?

Does consumer spending rise in tandem with inflation? And even if it does, there are two possible explanations. One is the flip side of the deflation mentality Leonhardt mentions: buy it now before the price goes up. The other is that inflation means higher wages, and people with increased incomes feel they have more money to spend.

I should know this, but I don't. Economic sociologists, please speak up.