The 2010s were a disaster for social conservatives and eugenicists

Whether you are a social conservative or a eugenicist (let me know if there is a less loaded term), we have experienced an unmitigated disaster in the 2010s.  Both camps want healthy married parents having lots of healthy kids that are raised in a safe home.  Here are a series of graphs to document trends away from this:

The percent married has dropped from 68% in the 1970s to 44% in the 2010s. And look at the trend in never-marrieds: the rate doubled over the past five decades from 14 to 28%.

The trend is sharper if we only look at young people (ages 18-34). Among this group, the percent married has plummeted from 61% to 30% while the percent never-marrieds jumped from only 30% to 64%. In a word, early marriage is collapsing.

Accompanying the decline in the institution of marriage is fertility among intelligent women. This graph shows the number of kids for women ages 40-59 with IQs of 118 or higher.

We see a collapse in the number of these women having four children, a strong increase in the percentage having two kids, and most disturbingly, a doubling of childless women--from 15 to 31%.

A current priority of elites is to get women as educated as possible so they can have the type of careers that give them maximum autonomy.

The social conservative and the eugenicist, by contrast, know that prioritizing female education kills fertility among intelligent women and renders a society incapable of replacing itself with talented people. Maybe there is no necessary connection between education and fertility, but under current conditions, the link is very strong.

The above graph shows the tremendous growth in four-year and advanced degrees among American women. The number of intelligent women like my mom who finished high school, got married, and had four healthy children has become a rarity.

The success of the gay marriage movement might be the most visible family-related loss that we social conservatives experienced in the past decade. The graph above shows the complete reversal of attitudes among young people (ages 18-34) concerning gay sex. (The General Social Survey doesn't have a question about gay marriage that spans the decades.)

The popularity of same-sex marriage is an important indication that Americans are replacing the belief that an important life purpose is to have a large biological family with the belief that the purpose of life is self-fulfillment and that being married or having one or two kids (biological or not) might work toward fulfillment for some people.

I suspect over the long-term that reproductively-oriented people tend to inherit the earth. Muslims and Africans might eventually displace Western Europeans. More virile people might eventually displace sterile Americans as well.

Catholics are NOT social conservatives

I scratch my head every time pundits refer to Catholics as social conservatives. As a group, they simply are not. Exit polls show that in the Michigan primary a plurality of Catholics voted for Romney, not Santorum. The church has little influence over parishioners.

Predictors of wanting porn to be illegal

GSS participants were asked if they thought that porn should be illegal. I looked to see which characteristics predict answering yes (sample size = 12,246):


Logistic Regression Coefficients

Age .03
Sex .81
Educ -.04
IQ -.01
Income -.01
Church attendance .19
Conservatism .21
Year -.01

All the relationships are statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level (two-tailed test).  Making porn illegal is favored by people who are: older, female, less educated, less intelligent, poorer, more religious, and more conservative. In addition, support for getting rid of the stuff has dropped over the past 40 years.

The coefficients are not standardized, so don't try to estimate the strength of a relationship from the numbers. Actually, it looks like the most powerful predictors are: age, religiosity, sex, and conservatism, in that order. I was surprised to see that almost half of women support banning pornography, and this number has changed little in 40 years.

Dana Carvey was on to something with his SNL "Church Lady." Funny stuff, but call me crazy: I respect old religious women.

Hispanics are natural social... liberals

Some Republicans claim that immigration from the south is a good thing since Hispanics are natural social conservatives. Just the other day Rick Santorum was arguing on Fox that emphasizing social conservatism is an essential way to attract Latino voters.

Such a view is just plain idiotic. I regularly check attitude surveys and cannot remember the last time I saw Hispanics with more socially conservative views than whites. Here is the latest from Pew:

The share of Hispanics who think homosexuality should be accepted is six points higher than the white number. Latinos line-up closely with self-described Democrats. They are almost 30 points away from conservative Republicans.

You might have expected their Catholicism to shift them right. But look at the Catholic estimate: 64 percent feel that homosexuality should be accepted. There is a huge gap between Catholic doctrine and social reality.

Liberals are not smart, but they are geniuses compared to Republican leaders. They know that, chances are, each new Hispanic citizen is a new Democrat. And that ain't gonna change.   

Mexican Americans and social conservatism: Let me follow-up the last analysis by linking to a recent post by Razib. Using General Social Survey data, he shows that, while blacks are less in favor of gay marriage than whites, Mexican Americans are not.

Social conservatives who think we can win future battles by importing loads of Mexican immigrants are wrong. (I'll concede that it's not an argument I see many social conservatives making). Mexicans who come to this country tend to absorb liberal social values. I showed in a previous analysis that Mexican immigrants are a somewhat less in favor of abortion than whites, but the gap basically disappears within a generation. As Steve Sailer has written, behaviorally they assimilate more toward the black mean than the white one, and the white mean ain't so hot. Anyone who claims that this group is giving America a traditionalist shot in the arm is ignorant of the facts. Unless he means treating one's wife like crap.

Faith in science and social conservatism: In the comments of the first post on evolution and barbarism, Jason Malloy reported his analysis of GSS data which showed that faith in science is correlated with favoring abortion, independent of the influence of a liberal political orientation.

That made me wonder if social liberalism in general is common among those who really trust in science. I found six GSS questions concerning social issues:


Logistic Regression Coefficients, IV = Faith in science

Dependent variable
Prayer in schools -.872**
Suicide if disease is incurable .387**
Favors gun permit law .179
Marijuana should be legalized .416*
Homosexual sex is wrong -1.687**
Courts are not tough enough -.260

** p < .01, two-tailed test
* p < .05, two-tailed test

Except for crime and gun control, faith in science is associated with socially liberal positions. For guns and crime, the direction of the relationship is liberal, but the relationships are not statistically significant.

It looks like there is a strong tension between faith in science on the one hand and traditional morality on the other. Guns and crime are perhaps seen as practical matters, but the rest of these are morally tinged. Perhaps secularists are drawn to science while being turned off by religion.

Of course, we could focus on the religious side of the coin. Ever since Scopes, evangelicals have felt assaulted by science. When told by elites that you must make a choice, science or superstition, religious folks will throw the former overboard. It looks like Dawkins is doing the same thing to Muslims that Mencken did to evangelicals.