First of all Arnold, thank you for the first link. I sent that one to my family and bought the book. Your first link is usually your best link, except for when you sometimes link to you own work in the last link. The first link today was outstanding, just as your entire post and link from yesterday. I’m putting you down for back-to-back grand slams. One grand slam each day for two days. Can you pull off a third tomorrow? I’m beginning to wonder if you might be juicing. BALCO anyone?
"This makes me wonder if the main causal factor here is the fundamental realignment of labor demand away from working with things and instead toward working with people or working with symbols."
That seems likely. I can think of a couple other possibilities.
1 the shift from one-income household to two affected them differently.
2 the growth of the welfare state removes benefits of the relationship and makes it seem more optional.
It’s fascinating to me that the same folks who ridiculed concerns about population growth, which have utterly proven true in terms of ecosystems, wildlife, and plant diversity - have, without apparent self-awareness, jumped headlong into over-the-top panic mode about a contraction in the world’s population. 8 billion people: we’re going to be fine. Lots of things will be lost, heterogeneously over the globe - but lots of things were lost on the way up, and no one cared. If you’re a good reductionist, why worry? People are not going extinct.
Like you, I have long been concerned about population growth. I hated The Population Bomb, which I thought was a screed, but loved Lincoln and Alice Taylor Day's 1964 (!) Too Many Americans. So I would have been happy if the world's population had stopped at 2 billion instead of 8.
But there are real problems with a declining, especially a quickly declining, population. Basically, you get lots of old people and relatively few young people. For one thing, old people will have to work a lot longer or give up things they've been promised, like open-ended medical care. This is a recipe for social strife.
It might seem like the problem is solved by saving: support yourself in old age by the money you saved when younger. But money isn't magic. It can only buy things that someone has created. And if there aren't many young people to work and create, there isn't much there to buy. Imagine earth is a space ship ...
“Not enough to buy” seems to have a little recency bias built in.
Don’t care about old people’s soiled bottoms, and can happily live the rest of my life without seeing it referenced on the internet every damn day.
Not sure how we got to the point of worrying about this problem which so self-evidently solves itself in short order.
Oh yeah, I do know! It’s part of the project to weaponize every dumb thought anyone ever had in service of unlimited immigration and the intentional breeding of people for same. The proof of its wisdom is in everyone’s financial portfolios.
And wow, can we just pause to admire how robust those have been made to be? Maybe that’s why the election is about as important as the Super Bowl.
I'm not sure what you mean in the first sentence. I fear I didn't express myself well. I'm not talking about accumulating more stuff. I'm talking about buying food, gas, medical care, etc. Somebody has to grow, process, and transport the food; pump, refine, and transport the gas; provide the medical care; etc. Think of everything you spend money on over the course of a year--and the things that other people pay for if you receive some sort of government assistance or goods or services paid by some government agency.
Well sure - but that was baked into the cake of how the population rise was managed. And make no mistake, it was managed - the product of ideology.
It will be a consequence of the rise, more than of the fall with which it will be correlated (should it happen).
And even that could be handled locally - unless we are to imagine that prosperity was a pan-global exercise. Hunanity has faced far worse problems, obviously.
But the same ideology that brought us the problem, will be singularly incapable of approaching the amelioration with any sense.
There are many reasons to worry. For just one thing, read Hanson's recent posts for coverage of the logic connecting growing or stable population size to the incentives necessary to sustain innovation and economic growth. The argument is subtle but solid, especially when the important constraints are not "capital" and the marginal productivity one can squeeze out of augmenting a worker with yet more capital is low (so simple Solow-model gains per capita from declining population growth rates are small.)
For another, a society where the dependent old outnumber the productive young and the interests of older cohorts prioritized over younger ones is bad in all kinds of ways, and we all already approaching gerontocracy with leaders exploiting apparently increasing incumbent advantages to remain in their positions decades longer than their own predecessors.
If one believes the arguments in Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource (i.e., innovative people incentivized to innovate) and Garett Jones' Hive Mind (one's welfare depends on the size and innovative activity of one's country's smart fraction), then one should be more worried about accelerating loss of the ultimate resource than about declining population stress on less important resources.
Your 3rd paragraph veers into a question of values. If humanism is the credo, all that matters is the survival of the human race. If my concerns have no validity, fine - but I certainly didn’t come up with them. They were the values and concerns of the successful people of the past. They were the highest expression of prosperity. If they are moot, the whatever yours are in re “innovation” are as well. Anyway, I was just schooled on another blog that Lagos is the desirable end state of human life, so I’m sure if aggregation and quantity are all that matters, all will be well - for your values, if not mine.
I don't think urbanization-related causes of low fertility are necessarily self-reversing. As like as not, the dwindling number of people will just keep cramming themselves into fewer and fewer remaining urban centers. As usual in these matters, Japan, being 20 years further along the road than everyone else, furnishes examples of this process: as its overall population falls and its countryside and smaller towns are emptying out, the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area - which has the lowest TFR* in Japan - is actually growing.
* For all that per-area TFR figures are misleading when people move around a lot and their decisions about moving correlate with their decisions about having children - e.g. if one composed a "census area" consisting of all US residential colleges it would have an extremely low TFR - they are still indicative of where people choose to/succeed at reproducing.
Re: "[Rob Henderson's] claim is that upper classes have always behaved conscientiously, with some exceptions. Pre-1960s, they also encouraged such behavior among middle and lower classes. Post-1960s, the upper classes encouraged the reckless behavior, even though they continued themselves to behave conscientiously. The lower classes listened to the new advice, with bad consequences."
Compare the divorce trends in the U.S. in the four Figures at the link below:
• In the first sixty years of the 20th century, the divorce rate increased by a factor of 2.5.
• In the next twenty years, from the early Sixties to the early Eighties, the divorce rate again increased by a factor of 2.5.
• From the early Eighties to 2018, the divorce rate decreased. In 2018, it was two-thirds of what it had been at its peak in the early Eighties.
B) Figures 3 and 4 show the percentage of ever-married women 1940-2018 who are separated or divorced, by race (Figure 3) and by educational attainment (Figure 4).
• Since 1950, Asian Americans have relatively few break-ups (11% of ever-married Asian Americans in 2018). Blacks have had relatively many break-ups (33% of ever-married Blacks).
• Circa 2000, ever-married women with college degrees begin to exhibit relatively few break-ups, compared to ever-married women with less educational attainment. By 2018, the figures are 16% among ever-married women with a B.A. and 24% among ever-married women who are dropped out of high school.
If these data are correct, then the impact of educational attainment is fairly recent, and race has been a large factor since WWII.
(A neglected factor might be differences in re-marriage rates. Perhaps divorcées with a B.A. have higher rates of marrying again?)
Of course, one reason that ever-married women with college degrees exhibit relatively few break-ups is that they also wait longer, and are pickier about who they marry, and also just marry less. So the universe of ever-married women with college degrees is self-selected to break up less.
"Post-1960s, the upper classes encouraged the reckless behavior, even though they continued themselves to behave conscientiously. The lower classes listened to the new advice, with bad consequences."
??? I've heard this often, but it often just turns into the bad consequences of bad behavior decreased because of a stronger safety net and, for criminals, less chance of apprehension and trail and punishment.
It's worth pointing out that elites of yesteryear are not necessarily the same as those of today. Families move in and out of the upper strata of society. It's a mistake to speak of these people as if they were monolithic.
FWIW, Henderson's claim that "In dual-income households within the top socioeconomic quintile, only 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands, whereas in the bottom quintile, an incredible 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands." is not supported by the link he provides. I assume he is taking the 69% and 29% figures from table 2 at: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/breadwinning-mothers-are-increasingly-the-u-s-norm/
That table does not purport to show "dual-income households." Rather, it shows "share of breadwinner mothers." The article states "The term 'breadwinning mothers' refers to single working mothers and married mothers who earn as much as or more than their husbands." The article only addresses dual-income households in column one of table one showing share of married breadwinning mothers by ethnic category which shows that 55% of white married mothers are "breadwinners" presumably out earning their spouse. As a side note, however, it appears that women are not out-performing men across the board, as women in poverty out number men in poverty in every age group: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233154/us-poverty-rate-by-gender/
One might also consider whether AI's superior symbol manipulation abilities will disproportionately impact employment of women. Might displaced female workers reconsider their fertility preferences? I don't know, but Yogi Berra's wisdom comes to mind: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Woke ideology reared its head around the same time that these countries fell into depopulation and below replacement fertility. Thoughts on this correlation? I’m not implying causation here, but looking for the silver lining. Do you expect woke ideology to do better or worse in sub-replacement societies?
I think Dr. Henderson makes many valuable points in his essays, but the claim that somehow elites caused the family formation behavior of the lower class does not seem correct to me. I wrote about it here:
The whole story that elite beliefs changed and then percolates to the masses, but only the masses’ behavior changed, does not seem to fit with the available data. Perhaps there are better data that are consistent with that story, but I missed ‘em.
I am not sure that is an accurate description of the claim- at least it isn't how I read it. My interpretation is that the elites enacted certain policies starting in the 1960s that caused family formation behaviors to change in the lower classes but not as a goal of changing those behaviors but, rather, the deleterious side effect of income supplementation.
I have not had a chance to read this particular essay yet, but please see his original NY Post article and his book on family formation (quoted in my post). He ties it specifically to the spread of beliefs there.
If here he is arguing for a good ol’ incentive-based argument on the relative benefits of maintaining two-parent families, then my comment does not apply At All.:)
If you give my bit a read, please let me know what you think (also, if the more recent essay is arguing a different point than the one I address from his NY Post piece). Stu gave it a read and isn't buying it, so maybe it doesn't have legs.
I think you raise a good question. Do the luxury beliefs Henderson lists have a casual relationship with outcomes of lower classes?
I agree it is an unproven hypothesis but I think there are problems with your critique. I read your linked piece, stopping when you switched to religion. What I see is an argument that elites didn't hold these opinions and transfer them to lower classes early enough for it to be casual. Maybe that's true but it is far from a complete contradiction. First, in your piece, you never quote Henderson as saying elites had these ideas first and then transferred them to lower classes. What you quote is "the ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class." This makes no claim where the ideas came from. Similarly, one of the "ideas" is no-fault divorce. Obviously this doesn't explain anything with never-marrieds or elites but it might be part of why divorce increased in the lower classes. Also, even if your premise was completely correct, it might be that subgroups within lower classes and elites were driving changes you note prior to 1988. For example, elite liberals, lower class from broken homes, or lower class not from broken homes.
Straight from the NY Post: "Relaxed attitudes about marriage trickle down to the working class and the poor. In the 1960s, marriage rates between upper-class and lower-class Americans were nearly identical. But during this time, affluent Americans loosened social norms, expressing skepticism about marriage and monogamy." If it trickles down to the working class and the poor, does that not indicate it starts with the upper class? And that the change in social norms begins with the upper class?
I said this in the post and I will ask it here: if the story *that Henderson lays out* is that the beliefs harm the lower class *because the beliefs spread from the upper class to everyone else* (which is how I read the quoted sentences. Is that not how others read them?), and we don't have evidence that (a) the beliefs started with the upper class and (b) that the beliefs were widely held at the time of the behavioral changes, then why would we accept the concept?
Ok, you've called into question the hypothesis that it started among elites. You haven't proven it didn't. It could have been elite liberals, elite social scientists, liberal journalists, elites who don't belong to country clubs, etc.
But even if it didn't start there, that seems a minor part of the whole. What I quoted before seems far important. It affects lower classes different from elites.
Stu, that seems exactly backward to me. Henderson is advancing a claim that it *did*. I can't find evidence of that. Also, we don't have evidence that the belief causes (or significantly precedes) the behavior. In the absence of that evidence, it seems just as reasonable to me to go with your alternative causes (the economic incentives around marriage changed), and that as we had less family formation, beliefs changed.
To me, those are radically different stories, even though the end result is the same. In one, elites, through spreading a belief that, if sincerely acted upon, leads to bad outcomes, *did something* to lower classes. In the other, economic incentive changes (which could include poverty programs, but also, e.g., a decline in manufacturing employment due to technological improvements) lead to changes in behavior and worse outcomes, and people's beliefs change (why? Because we're not casting judgement on people because... that's where I lack any info to make a good guess. Ex post rationalization?) after or concurrently. But if you see those as the same story, then I'm just not very convincing.:)
Henderson made a hypothesis. You are correct he has no proof of most or all of it. You've given good reason to question various parts of it, especially that it started among the elite and lower classes copied them. That said, you haven't proven any of what he proposes is wrong.
I don't know what or why anything seems backwards.
Two anecdotes that seem to support him:
1 Baby names change over time and have a tendency for new names to be selected by the wealthy first and gradually gain acceptance with lower classes, which causes the names to lose favor with the wealthy.
2 In the 50s there was much shame attached to new mothers who weren't married. When there wasn't an illegal abortion, those who could afford it sent the pregnant girl out of town to finish the pregnancy and give up the baby. Those who couldn't afford that, and some who could, forced a marriage. It was considered low class (or worse) to keep the baby and not marry. Until it wasn't. Maybe it is still considered low class by elites but that's not what they say.
“…wonder if the main causal factor here is the fundamental realignment of labor demand away from working with things and instead toward working with people or working with symbols.” The shift from “things” to “symbols” may affect lower class bad behavior being influenced by upper class, but it’d be interesting to see more empirical evidence for it. Other variables influencing behavior, such as genetics, economic factors, education, and cultural shifts (our drift from the real world to the “screen” world) have considerable impact. But poor choices are routine among hoi polloi throughout history.
Charles Murray will turn 82 soon, so it's good that we have Rob Henderson now to repeat all the things Murray wrote decades ago.
LOL!
First of all Arnold, thank you for the first link. I sent that one to my family and bought the book. Your first link is usually your best link, except for when you sometimes link to you own work in the last link. The first link today was outstanding, just as your entire post and link from yesterday. I’m putting you down for back-to-back grand slams. One grand slam each day for two days. Can you pull off a third tomorrow? I’m beginning to wonder if you might be juicing. BALCO anyone?
"This makes me wonder if the main causal factor here is the fundamental realignment of labor demand away from working with things and instead toward working with people or working with symbols."
That seems likely. I can think of a couple other possibilities.
1 the shift from one-income household to two affected them differently.
2 the growth of the welfare state removes benefits of the relationship and makes it seem more optional.
It’s fascinating to me that the same folks who ridiculed concerns about population growth, which have utterly proven true in terms of ecosystems, wildlife, and plant diversity - have, without apparent self-awareness, jumped headlong into over-the-top panic mode about a contraction in the world’s population. 8 billion people: we’re going to be fine. Lots of things will be lost, heterogeneously over the globe - but lots of things were lost on the way up, and no one cared. If you’re a good reductionist, why worry? People are not going extinct.
Like you, I have long been concerned about population growth. I hated The Population Bomb, which I thought was a screed, but loved Lincoln and Alice Taylor Day's 1964 (!) Too Many Americans. So I would have been happy if the world's population had stopped at 2 billion instead of 8.
But there are real problems with a declining, especially a quickly declining, population. Basically, you get lots of old people and relatively few young people. For one thing, old people will have to work a lot longer or give up things they've been promised, like open-ended medical care. This is a recipe for social strife.
It might seem like the problem is solved by saving: support yourself in old age by the money you saved when younger. But money isn't magic. It can only buy things that someone has created. And if there aren't many young people to work and create, there isn't much there to buy. Imagine earth is a space ship ...
The saved resourced go into machines that let fewer young people care for more old people. Yes, "retirement" gets re-defined. No big deal!
“Not enough to buy” seems to have a little recency bias built in.
Don’t care about old people’s soiled bottoms, and can happily live the rest of my life without seeing it referenced on the internet every damn day.
Not sure how we got to the point of worrying about this problem which so self-evidently solves itself in short order.
Oh yeah, I do know! It’s part of the project to weaponize every dumb thought anyone ever had in service of unlimited immigration and the intentional breeding of people for same. The proof of its wisdom is in everyone’s financial portfolios.
And wow, can we just pause to admire how robust those have been made to be? Maybe that’s why the election is about as important as the Super Bowl.
I'm not sure what you mean in the first sentence. I fear I didn't express myself well. I'm not talking about accumulating more stuff. I'm talking about buying food, gas, medical care, etc. Somebody has to grow, process, and transport the food; pump, refine, and transport the gas; provide the medical care; etc. Think of everything you spend money on over the course of a year--and the things that other people pay for if you receive some sort of government assistance or goods or services paid by some government agency.
Well sure - but that was baked into the cake of how the population rise was managed. And make no mistake, it was managed - the product of ideology.
It will be a consequence of the rise, more than of the fall with which it will be correlated (should it happen).
And even that could be handled locally - unless we are to imagine that prosperity was a pan-global exercise. Hunanity has faced far worse problems, obviously.
But the same ideology that brought us the problem, will be singularly incapable of approaching the amelioration with any sense.
There are many reasons to worry. For just one thing, read Hanson's recent posts for coverage of the logic connecting growing or stable population size to the incentives necessary to sustain innovation and economic growth. The argument is subtle but solid, especially when the important constraints are not "capital" and the marginal productivity one can squeeze out of augmenting a worker with yet more capital is low (so simple Solow-model gains per capita from declining population growth rates are small.)
For another, a society where the dependent old outnumber the productive young and the interests of older cohorts prioritized over younger ones is bad in all kinds of ways, and we all already approaching gerontocracy with leaders exploiting apparently increasing incumbent advantages to remain in their positions decades longer than their own predecessors.
If one believes the arguments in Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource (i.e., innovative people incentivized to innovate) and Garett Jones' Hive Mind (one's welfare depends on the size and innovative activity of one's country's smart fraction), then one should be more worried about accelerating loss of the ultimate resource than about declining population stress on less important resources.
Your 3rd paragraph veers into a question of values. If humanism is the credo, all that matters is the survival of the human race. If my concerns have no validity, fine - but I certainly didn’t come up with them. They were the values and concerns of the successful people of the past. They were the highest expression of prosperity. If they are moot, the whatever yours are in re “innovation” are as well. Anyway, I was just schooled on another blog that Lagos is the desirable end state of human life, so I’m sure if aggregation and quantity are all that matters, all will be well - for your values, if not mine.
I don't think urbanization-related causes of low fertility are necessarily self-reversing. As like as not, the dwindling number of people will just keep cramming themselves into fewer and fewer remaining urban centers. As usual in these matters, Japan, being 20 years further along the road than everyone else, furnishes examples of this process: as its overall population falls and its countryside and smaller towns are emptying out, the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area - which has the lowest TFR* in Japan - is actually growing.
* For all that per-area TFR figures are misleading when people move around a lot and their decisions about moving correlate with their decisions about having children - e.g. if one composed a "census area" consisting of all US residential colleges it would have an extremely low TFR - they are still indicative of where people choose to/succeed at reproducing.
Re: "[Rob Henderson's] claim is that upper classes have always behaved conscientiously, with some exceptions. Pre-1960s, they also encouraged such behavior among middle and lower classes. Post-1960s, the upper classes encouraged the reckless behavior, even though they continued themselves to behave conscientiously. The lower classes listened to the new advice, with bad consequences."
Compare the divorce trends in the U.S. in the four Figures at the link below:
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-divorce-century-change-1900-2018-fp-20-22.html
A) Figure 1 shows divorce rates 1900-2018:
• In the first sixty years of the 20th century, the divorce rate increased by a factor of 2.5.
• In the next twenty years, from the early Sixties to the early Eighties, the divorce rate again increased by a factor of 2.5.
• From the early Eighties to 2018, the divorce rate decreased. In 2018, it was two-thirds of what it had been at its peak in the early Eighties.
B) Figures 3 and 4 show the percentage of ever-married women 1940-2018 who are separated or divorced, by race (Figure 3) and by educational attainment (Figure 4).
• Since 1950, Asian Americans have relatively few break-ups (11% of ever-married Asian Americans in 2018). Blacks have had relatively many break-ups (33% of ever-married Blacks).
• Circa 2000, ever-married women with college degrees begin to exhibit relatively few break-ups, compared to ever-married women with less educational attainment. By 2018, the figures are 16% among ever-married women with a B.A. and 24% among ever-married women who are dropped out of high school.
If these data are correct, then the impact of educational attainment is fairly recent, and race has been a large factor since WWII.
(A neglected factor might be differences in re-marriage rates. Perhaps divorcées with a B.A. have higher rates of marrying again?)
Of course, one reason that ever-married women with college degrees exhibit relatively few break-ups is that they also wait longer, and are pickier about who they marry, and also just marry less. So the universe of ever-married women with college degrees is self-selected to break up less.
"Post-1960s, the upper classes encouraged the reckless behavior, even though they continued themselves to behave conscientiously. The lower classes listened to the new advice, with bad consequences."
??? I've heard this often, but it often just turns into the bad consequences of bad behavior decreased because of a stronger safety net and, for criminals, less chance of apprehension and trail and punishment.
Do you think there is more?
It's worth pointing out that elites of yesteryear are not necessarily the same as those of today. Families move in and out of the upper strata of society. It's a mistake to speak of these people as if they were monolithic.
FWIW, Henderson's claim that "In dual-income households within the top socioeconomic quintile, only 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands, whereas in the bottom quintile, an incredible 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands." is not supported by the link he provides. I assume he is taking the 69% and 29% figures from table 2 at: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/breadwinning-mothers-are-increasingly-the-u-s-norm/
That table does not purport to show "dual-income households." Rather, it shows "share of breadwinner mothers." The article states "The term 'breadwinning mothers' refers to single working mothers and married mothers who earn as much as or more than their husbands." The article only addresses dual-income households in column one of table one showing share of married breadwinning mothers by ethnic category which shows that 55% of white married mothers are "breadwinners" presumably out earning their spouse. As a side note, however, it appears that women are not out-performing men across the board, as women in poverty out number men in poverty in every age group: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233154/us-poverty-rate-by-gender/
This might be related to the ongoing and increasing demand for people who work with things: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/tradespeople-wanted-the-need-for-critical-trade-skills-in-the-us
One might also consider whether AI's superior symbol manipulation abilities will disproportionately impact employment of women. Might displaced female workers reconsider their fertility preferences? I don't know, but Yogi Berra's wisdom comes to mind: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Woke ideology reared its head around the same time that these countries fell into depopulation and below replacement fertility. Thoughts on this correlation? I’m not implying causation here, but looking for the silver lining. Do you expect woke ideology to do better or worse in sub-replacement societies?
I think Dr. Henderson makes many valuable points in his essays, but the claim that somehow elites caused the family formation behavior of the lower class does not seem correct to me. I wrote about it here:
https://jaredpbarton.substack.com/p/luxury-beliefs-isnt-a-necessary-idea
The whole story that elite beliefs changed and then percolates to the masses, but only the masses’ behavior changed, does not seem to fit with the available data. Perhaps there are better data that are consistent with that story, but I missed ‘em.
I am not sure that is an accurate description of the claim- at least it isn't how I read it. My interpretation is that the elites enacted certain policies starting in the 1960s that caused family formation behaviors to change in the lower classes but not as a goal of changing those behaviors but, rather, the deleterious side effect of income supplementation.
I have not had a chance to read this particular essay yet, but please see his original NY Post article and his book on family formation (quoted in my post). He ties it specifically to the spread of beliefs there.
If here he is arguing for a good ol’ incentive-based argument on the relative benefits of maintaining two-parent families, then my comment does not apply At All.:)
Well, then, you could be right and I am wrong. It would also explain the use of "hypocrisy" which did puzzle me.
Yancey,
If you give my bit a read, please let me know what you think (also, if the more recent essay is arguing a different point than the one I address from his NY Post piece). Stu gave it a read and isn't buying it, so maybe it doesn't have legs.
I think you raise a good question. Do the luxury beliefs Henderson lists have a casual relationship with outcomes of lower classes?
I agree it is an unproven hypothesis but I think there are problems with your critique. I read your linked piece, stopping when you switched to religion. What I see is an argument that elites didn't hold these opinions and transfer them to lower classes early enough for it to be casual. Maybe that's true but it is far from a complete contradiction. First, in your piece, you never quote Henderson as saying elites had these ideas first and then transferred them to lower classes. What you quote is "the ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class." This makes no claim where the ideas came from. Similarly, one of the "ideas" is no-fault divorce. Obviously this doesn't explain anything with never-marrieds or elites but it might be part of why divorce increased in the lower classes. Also, even if your premise was completely correct, it might be that subgroups within lower classes and elites were driving changes you note prior to 1988. For example, elite liberals, lower class from broken homes, or lower class not from broken homes.
Stu,
Thank you for replying!
Straight from the NY Post: "Relaxed attitudes about marriage trickle down to the working class and the poor. In the 1960s, marriage rates between upper-class and lower-class Americans were nearly identical. But during this time, affluent Americans loosened social norms, expressing skepticism about marriage and monogamy." If it trickles down to the working class and the poor, does that not indicate it starts with the upper class? And that the change in social norms begins with the upper class?
I said this in the post and I will ask it here: if the story *that Henderson lays out* is that the beliefs harm the lower class *because the beliefs spread from the upper class to everyone else* (which is how I read the quoted sentences. Is that not how others read them?), and we don't have evidence that (a) the beliefs started with the upper class and (b) that the beliefs were widely held at the time of the behavioral changes, then why would we accept the concept?
Ok, you've called into question the hypothesis that it started among elites. You haven't proven it didn't. It could have been elite liberals, elite social scientists, liberal journalists, elites who don't belong to country clubs, etc.
But even if it didn't start there, that seems a minor part of the whole. What I quoted before seems far important. It affects lower classes different from elites.
Stu, that seems exactly backward to me. Henderson is advancing a claim that it *did*. I can't find evidence of that. Also, we don't have evidence that the belief causes (or significantly precedes) the behavior. In the absence of that evidence, it seems just as reasonable to me to go with your alternative causes (the economic incentives around marriage changed), and that as we had less family formation, beliefs changed.
To me, those are radically different stories, even though the end result is the same. In one, elites, through spreading a belief that, if sincerely acted upon, leads to bad outcomes, *did something* to lower classes. In the other, economic incentive changes (which could include poverty programs, but also, e.g., a decline in manufacturing employment due to technological improvements) lead to changes in behavior and worse outcomes, and people's beliefs change (why? Because we're not casting judgement on people because... that's where I lack any info to make a good guess. Ex post rationalization?) after or concurrently. But if you see those as the same story, then I'm just not very convincing.:)
Henderson made a hypothesis. You are correct he has no proof of most or all of it. You've given good reason to question various parts of it, especially that it started among the elite and lower classes copied them. That said, you haven't proven any of what he proposes is wrong.
I don't know what or why anything seems backwards.
Two anecdotes that seem to support him:
1 Baby names change over time and have a tendency for new names to be selected by the wealthy first and gradually gain acceptance with lower classes, which causes the names to lose favor with the wealthy.
2 In the 50s there was much shame attached to new mothers who weren't married. When there wasn't an illegal abortion, those who could afford it sent the pregnant girl out of town to finish the pregnancy and give up the baby. Those who couldn't afford that, and some who could, forced a marriage. It was considered low class (or worse) to keep the baby and not marry. Until it wasn't. Maybe it is still considered low class by elites but that's not what they say.
“…wonder if the main causal factor here is the fundamental realignment of labor demand away from working with things and instead toward working with people or working with symbols.” The shift from “things” to “symbols” may affect lower class bad behavior being influenced by upper class, but it’d be interesting to see more empirical evidence for it. Other variables influencing behavior, such as genetics, economic factors, education, and cultural shifts (our drift from the real world to the “screen” world) have considerable impact. But poor choices are routine among hoi polloi throughout history.