Put a Ring on It?

January 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Get married?  Or just live together?

Lisa Wade’s “Why I Am Not Married” post was one of the most popular Sociological Images entries of 2011.  It elicited over 100 comments – high even for SocImages. 

Lisa included a defense of her partner’s and her decision not to seek the state’s approval of their relationship.  The statement was personal (and courageous).  But the only systematic research cited was, I think, the Pew report on the decline in marriage in the US.

Clearly, fewer couples are putting a ring on it. Since 1960, the percent married has declined from 72% to just above half.  During this same period, the percentage of couples living together increased by a factor of ten.  Many of those couples eventually marry, and many break up.  Only about 10% remain living together unmarried for more than five years. (See the Annual Review article here.)

As you can imagine, there is much hand-wringing in certain quarters over the decline in marriage.  And indeed, some research supports the idea that marriage is the way to go – that married couples are healthier, wealthier, happier, less likely to break up, and just generally better.  (For an example of the pro-marriage view –  “Why Marriage Is Better than Cohabitation” – go here and probably lots of other places).  However, most of  these comparison studies are cross-sectional.  They compare the married and the cohabiting at a single point in time, so it’s hard to know what is causing what.  If we find that marrieds are happier, for example, we still don’t know whether it’s because marriage causes happiness or because happy people are more likely to marry.

Determining cause and effect requires longitudinal analysis – following couples over time.  A new study by Kelly Musick, to be published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, did just that, looking at data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH).  She tracked data on marrying and cohabiting couples over six years.  Here’s her conclusion as reported in a National Council on Family Relations press release (they publish the journal).

We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth.

Civil Rights and American Conservatism

January 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

With all the tributes to Martin Luther King, it might be difficult to remember that in his lifetime, Americans were not always so aligned with Dr. King and the goals he worked for.


In August, Gallup (here) published some of their polling from the 1960s. The contrast with opinions today, when only 4% are unfavorable, is remarkable.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

(Note: these results include all races.  The data for whites only would surely show a higher percent unfavorable and a lower percent favorable.)

Except for 1966, the total favorable and unfavorable are fairly close.  (The change in 1966 is a result of King’s opposition to the Vietnam war.  He was right about that too.)  But of those with strong opinions, the “highly unfavorables” always outnumber the “highly favorables.” 

The unfavorables weren’t just those rabid Southern whites so familiar from the historical news footage. The same ideas could be found among seemingly temperate, sophisticated, and intellectual conservatives. Affable Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

In 1957, William F. Buckley, Jr. supported the suppression of black votes in the South

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.  (The full article is excerpted by Brad DeLong here.)

That was before the rise of the Civil Rights movement.  Six years later, when Dr. King had come to prominence, a black church in Birmingham was firebombed.  Four young girls died.  Here is how Buckley’s National Review responded.

The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away from the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. [emphasis added]

The suggestion that the firebombing was committed by “a communist or a crazed Negro” is a fantasy of pure desperation and wish-fulfillment.  Note also NR’s concern for “the cause of white people.”  As for the church bombing, the beatings, the tortures, the murders, and other acts of terrorism (“convulsions” as the NR calls them), committed against blacks and civil rights workers, just blame it all on the Supreme Court. 

All this would be laughable if the events were not of such grave importance and if the commentary were from some obscure, racist corner.  But National Review, then as now, was the main voice of intellectual conservatism. 

Eugene Volokh, in an appreciation of Buckley (here), notes that it wasn’t until the late 1960s, after the passage of the major civil rights laws and probably after the King and RFK assassinations, that Buckley and NR finally gave up defending segregation.  Volokh also says, approvingly,

Buckley tried very hard to create a genial and friendly image for conservatism as opposed to one that projected anger, intolerance, and rage.

Michael Harrington made the same observation but phrased it somewhat differently:

William Buckley is an urbane front man for some of the most vicious emotions in this country.

Governing and Creative Destruction

January 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mitt Romney’s work at Bain was basically “creative destruction” – capitalism, rational and ruthless, making money by reforming or trashing businesses.* No Bain, no gain.  Romney emphasizes the creative part; his critics emphasize the destruction.  But is any of this relevant to the Presidency? 

Nearly a year ago, I expressed my skepticism (here) about business executives’ claims that their business skills would transfer to their government work.  I contrasted these claims with this more realistic self-assessment by a former pimp, who, in an interview with Sudhir Vankatesh,  was asked how his skills in that job might transfer to legitimate work.

You learn one thing [as a pimp]:  For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.

 Will Wilkinson at The Economist blog asks the skills-transfer question about Romney.

Even if Mr Romney's firm did in the end create more jobs than it killed by increasing the allocative efficiency of the market, what does this have to do with the tasks facing a president?

Wilkinson’s answer is Yes.  He quotes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry**  to the effect that what a president does “is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers.”

This seems a bit of a stretch.  Look at Obama’s difficulties in putting his policies (analyses and strategies) into effect.  Even in his hiring of managers (i.e., making appointments), Congress has thwarted him.

George W. Bush ran for president touting his own business credentials and, once in office, styled himself “the CEO president.” Unlike Obama today, Bush had the benefit of a co-operative Congress.  But the outcomes of the CEO presidency don’t seem to have been so wonderful.   The last president before Bush to have been successful in business was the wealthy peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.

---------------------------------
*Those corporations, presumably, were people too, my friend.  But capitalist efficiency and profits required that friends be fired and businesses bankrupted, while Bain made out like bandits.

** Gobry is not exactly Romney’s biggest fan – “a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens.”

UPDATE Jan. 13.  Paul Krugman in today’s Times (here) draws a conclusion similar to mine though for a different reason:  business strategies that are good for company profits are far different from economic policies that will be good for a country.  :

Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery. 

Krugman also skips over Bush and Carter as businessman-presidents.  

the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover.

Vacations

January 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these signs is what I typically see in New York.  The other is what I saw in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where I’m spending a brief vacation (and not spending much time on the Internet).

The Mexican sign is the one on the right.

Cabo seems to exist only for the sake of American tourists.  When I travel, I usually like to to get a sense of how life is lived in another country.  That’s not what you get in Cabo.  All livelihoods here are related to the tourist trade – the restaurants and gift shops, the time share complexes, the pharmacias selling Viagra and Cipro.  It feels like being in some amalgam of a theme park and a colonial enclave.