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.