Democrats: Losing their Religion

November 5, 2012 By 7 Comments

It’s election week, and we’re inundated with polls, predictions, and predilections, so I’ll keep this short. While I was crunching NFSS data for an unrelated set of analyses, I stopped to dwell on an interesting survey question on perceived change in religiousness. We asked the 2,988 respondents:

Compared to today, were you more or less active in organized religion when you were growing up?

Given that we’re talking to 18-39-year-olds, and that young adulthood can often exhibit a notable decline in religiousness—something I’ve written about more extensively here and here—and that former US senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum misinterpreted here, it’s of course not at all surprising to see that most respondents said they were less active in organized religion now than when they were growing up. Fully 53 percent said that, whereas 34 percent said they were “about the same” and 13 percent reported being “more active” than when they were younger. But what aggravates these numbers in either direction?

My first guess is that age and marriage are apt to boost religiosity in some who had been flagging, while sexual “deviance” (from religious expectations about it) can cause it to lag some. Keep in mind, of course, that the question begs an unknown answer about just how religious respondents were when they were “growing up,” so a “more active” or a “less active” response is connected to a level known to them, but not to us. So be it. It’s still illuminating: only 8 percent of the youngest group (18-23-year-olds) reported becoming more religiously active, compared with 13 and 18 percent of the older two groups (24-32 and 33-39-year-olds, respectively). Makes sense.

Both married and divorced respondents reported comparable levels of growing religiousness, at 18-19 percent, while 63 percent of cohabiters said they had become less religious.

The most dramatic shifts, however, appear around personal politics. Political affiliation—a one measure, 1-5 scale of just how politically conservative or liberal our respondents consider themselves—takes the cake for shifting the bar on perceived growth or decline in organized religious involvement. Only 23 percent of respondents who said they were “very conservative” politically reported being less active in organized religion today, while 31 percent said they were more active than as a youth. Keep in mind that’s compared with 53 and 13 percent of the total population, respectively.

It’s a linear association, too: 48 percent of just plain “conservative” respondents reported being less active religiously, compared with 52 percent of moderates, 62 percent of those who said they were “liberal” and 76 percent of those who self-identified as “very liberal.” That’s quite a span–from 23 percent (among the most conservative) to 76 percent (among the most liberal).

The Democrats truly are losing their religion. Or perhaps these are persons who lost their religion and then decided the Democratic Party seemed most in line with their sentiments. There is probably plenty of both types.

This is not new news, I know. See here. But it’s heartwarming and confirming to me to see the NFSS data continue to make rational sense in so many domains of research questions, even while critics remain convinced that I got the basic story wrong in the July Social Science Research article on the adult children of parents who’ve had same-sex relationships. (I didn’t.)

Happy voting…

 

 

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Is Massive Job Creation Likely?

October 29, 2012 By 14 Comments

While the third and final presidential debate focused on foreign policy, it was notable that even there—if my memory serves me—the answers offered regularly managed to find their way back to domestic economic policies. Unemployment and job creation have played a central role in this campaign.

But is it just me, or does anyone else wonder whether the information-based economy that is ours today simply cannot sustain the sort of job-creation demands we are placing upon it? Talk of creating 12 million private-sector jobs—or even 6 or 4 million—ought to give us pause, not because it’s not possible, but because it might be quite improbable, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office (or in Congress, for that matter).

As sociologist James Hunter astutely points out in his book To Change the World, much of what drives and sustains the economy and so much of what it sells today is knowledge, information, images, symbols, and entertainment. According to the NFSS, one in three young adults—a significant group of consumers—spends more than an hour a day on social networking sites like Facebook. (I suspect that may quickly become an undercount.) That’s a ton of person-hours spent on something that’s delivered for free from a company that has less than 4,000 employees. By contrast, Ford still has 164,000 employees worldwide, but reported 300,000 a mere six years ago. Shell, the second-largest corporation behind Wal-Mart, only employs 97,000 people worldwide, compared to the 2.1 million that work for Wal-Mart. (And we all know how much Wal-Mart pays…)

The expansion of the State that we have witnessed is perhaps not due directly or even primarily to the heightened influence of decision-makers who wish for a more centralized State-shaped economy, but due to the State’s historically-stable role in the production of knowledge and information. In other words, when we made material objects with manual and skilled labor, the State’s role was less pivotal or obvious. (Think regulatory.) But in an economy like ours that privileges things like the health care industry, information technology, and social media—basically the creation and application of knowledge—the State has been and will likely continue to be more involved. We have countless state universities, training the software engineers and physician’s assistants of tomorrow. We have NIH grants to improve health (whether they genuinely accomplish this is not obvious), and NCI grants to combat cancer. We have a large population of aging persons, courtesy of the baby boom and improved ability to sustain (their) life, and hence the emphasis on health care delivery. Over a billion people have a Facebook account, and many use it daily. In other words, our economy is reliant on technologies (and their development) that require more and more knowledge—and hence historically greater State involvement—but fewer and fewer people. Of course we have unemployment issues. It should surprise us that unemployment isn’t notably higher than it is.

Add to this our expectations that if persons wish to be employed, they ought to be so. This seems comparatively new in human societies. Fewer women were consistently in the full-time labor force as recently as a couple generations ago. Now they are, and we generally encourage everyone to consider what they “want to do with their life,” by which we tend to mean careers in the paid labor-force. (When is the last time you heard a college student state they intend to graduate, marry, and then become a full-time, stay-at-home parent? I cannot recall one.) We expect everyone to seek work. In the past, we did not. The voluntary sector has given way to the demand for paid non-profit sector jobs. So we’re quite possibly trying to cram more people into the paid labor force than ever before, at a time when the sort of economy we have requires fewer and fewer people.

I’m not sure it’ll fly. I just don’t see how we in the West will witness an economy of the sort wherein nearly all of the people who wish to find paid, full-time work can do so. It’s not that kind of world. Of course there are partisan ideas about how best to help alleviate unemployment and foster better jobs—from tariffs to ease of access to education to unionization to stimulating lending. I get it, and some of these strategies could very well work.

But shouldn’t admitting the blunt truth about a very different sort of economy today be a good place to start? (Probably not at this point in the election, I understand…) Eight percent unemployment may not just be the new normal or benchmark. Someday we may well consider it an impressive accomplishment.

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The Closing Gender Gap in Infidelity

October 22, 2012 By 2 Comments

A friend passed along this article from the Wall Street Journal, about the shrinking gap between men and women in terms of who reports marital infidelity. It relies on the good old General Social Survey, whose numbers can be compared from year to year for the purpose of assessing trends in Americans’ social behavior. It states:

Among the most reliable studies on this issue is the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which has been asking Americans the same questions since 1972. In the 2010 survey, 19% of men said that they had been unfaithful at some point during their marriages, down from 21% in 1991. Women who reported having an affair increased from 11% in 1991 to 14% in 2010.

Since I included a comparable question in the New Family Structures Study, I thought it’d be good to compare the NFSS and see what it says about the gender gap in infidelity. The NFSS surveyed a nationally-representative sample of 18-39-year-olds, albeit a more narrow range of persons than the GSS, which goes up to age 72 (if I recall). And my question is a bit different, in that it includes not only married (or previously-married) couples but currently-cohabiting ones as well. It reads:

Have you ever had a sexual relationship with someone else while you were married (or living with another romantic partner)?

So the NFSS widens the scope of relationships about which respondents will answer, while narrowing the age range, thus limiting the duration of time that people will be reflecting about when they answer. (In other words, a 60-year-old likely typically has more time-opportunity to stray than a 35-year-old). So what does the data say? The same thing as the GSS. The gender gap is indeed narrowing, and in the NFSS it does not appear at all: 19 percent of women report having ever had a sexual relationship with someone else while married or cohabiting, while the same is true of 18 percent of men. The difference is not statistically significant.

As the WSJ article goes on to detail, it’s not about declining support for fidelity. Although the NFSS can’t measure decline in support for fidelity over time–as the GSS can–such support indeed is strong among both men and women in the NFSS: only 3 percent of women and 6 percent of men agreed (or strongly agreed) that “it is OK for a married person to have sexual relations with someone other than his/her spouse.”

So why the likely uptick in cheating but stability in valuing monogamy? That’s a much deeper well to excavate, and I’m out of time today to discuss it at length, but in a nutshell, it likely has to do with expanded female opportunity and economic power, stability in what people wish for in a relationship, shifts in the mating market, online exposure to emotional relationship opportunities, etc. More on that some other day.

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Why “Fact Checking” Falls Short

October 22, 2012 By 2 Comments

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but “fact checking” this election season seems to have reached a fever pitch. This despite the historically weak tie between facts and politics in general, it would seem. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to it, given the word-by-word scrutiny to which my own work and media interviews have been subject recently. (Not that the media would ever misquote someone…)

But after “lecturing” to a class of 12-year-olds yesterday on some themes in the book of Exodus, I am reminded again of the difference between moderns’ assumptions about detailed history–what we often mean by “the facts”–and historiography, the telling of history over time and from particular perspectives. Moreover, the former is not very easy to accomplish, and always, always misses material and meanings. It’s partial by definition. This came to mind when I briefly noted to the class that Exodus 1:6 simply states, “Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and that whole generation.” The author (or authors/redactors) of that text clearly was not interested in conveying the details of the aging and death of the sons of Jacob–indeed, most of their lives and that of their children and their families–but rather with the rise of Moses and the Mosaic Law, from the perspective of those under it. So they paid some things no attention. So be it. (Then you have the lengthy lineages found in a variety of places in the Pentateuch, where we moderns feel like they paid too much attention to detail.)

People are often tempted to think that such a peculiar way of doing history is flawed, but in reality all accounts of “news” or “facts” are perspectival and partial. There is what actually happened–if it can be known–and then there’s the teller, who is a complex person (or organization) with interests, by default. There’s a philosophy of history embedded in all history writing, and indeed even in all news media. In a world increasingly short on attention span but long on bandwidth, this should only grow more familiar to us, not less. Take, for a recent example, the recent death of our Libyan ambassador. There are the facts, and frankly they may never be known with certainty, not simply because some people “won’t tell,” but because eyewitnesses saw different content and perceived different meanings, and have complex interests in relating “the facts” to those different sorts of persons (with quite different interests) who ask them. Add to that the untimely occurrence of this in an election season, and Senate and/or House hearings on the matter, and political sabre-rattling, and you can see how layers of interpretation are added.

And yet we still speak glowingly of “the facts.” In the Era of Science, we sense somehow that facts are always knowable. We presume someone is guardian of The Truth About Things.

This is normal behavior. What’s not normal, because it’s not really possibly in a strong way, is to have a very good grasp of “all the facts.” What’s relevant, after all? Even what counts (or is ignored) as evidence is constituted by particular perspectives. A recent critic of mine suspects I have been directly aiding the Romney campaign, but I’m not sure that the utter lack of evidence will convince them that I am not. To the critic, it’s simply evidence that my aid is more clandestine and thus I am even more suspect.

So it’s often an unrealistic challenge to learn all the facts about events that have already occurred, even recent ones, let alone those that have not. So “fact-checking” presidential candidates and their promises, budgets, plans, etc., is almost a joke. Almost. Moreover, to flippantly accuse one of them (but not the other) of lying–a ubiquitous occurrence of late–is to misunderstand all this.

It would behoove us all in this election season to understand that all politics involves some deceptions, and that human memory fails, and that people misspeak. We ought to remember that the public will always dislike “the facts” if they were all laid bare (and in today’s world, more are laid bare than ever before). This is true about most any of us, for that matter. Let’s be grateful that our thoughts–and for many, their words and actions–aren’t always an open book. We are flawed persons electing flawed candidates who will no doubt run flawed administrations. The two candidates for highest office have quite different philosophies on governance, rights, goods, economics, the role of the State, etc. (and probably most importantly, very different teams of trusted advisors and assistants). Vote on those. Not on some wistful idea of honesty and commitment to “the facts.” Politics has never dealt deeply in that.

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