Slate’s got an interesting column today regarding the “fertility class divide” as they call it.
The basic structure is: Richer people have fewer kids. Poor people breed like rabbits.
Of course, this is nothing new. Jonathan Swift, ages ago, posited that the lower classes of Britain and Ireland had an overpopulation problem. The extent to which portents of a “decline” in British society resulted thereof, can be discussed ad nauseum. It doesn’t seem to have been as bad as the doomsayers indicated, though there’s definitely room to conclude that British society is not the world-spanning empire it once was.
However, today, we have some evidence to back up the problems of too many babies being born to the poor. To wit:
Setting aside the potentials of genetics - there’s still room for this to create some phenomena, even in the society of 2011, that are scarily similar to the following:Research shows that women with unplanned pregnancies are more likely to smoke, drink, and go without prenatal care. Their births are more likely to be premature. Their children are less likely to be breastfed, and more likely to be neglected and to have various physical and mental health effects. Then, reinforcing the cycle, the very fact of having a child increases a woman’s chances of being poor.
I was absolutely shocked by something in the article: ***53%*** of Asian-American women between 33 and 46 with professional level jobs are childless. Totally stunning.
Comment by Peter — September 27, 2011 @ 2:36 pm
I was absolutely shocked by something in the article: ***53%*** of Asian-American women between 33 and 46 with professional level jobs are childless. Totally stunning.
Comment by Peter — September 27, 2011 @ 2:36 pm
Peter was so stunned that he stuttered.
I read the article in Slate as well, and it made good, if obvious, points. I don’t think the situation in the UK is analagous because there the class structure was an artificial construct. In other words, the lower class people were inferior de jure, not de facto.
In modern America, lower class people are generally there for a reason, as stone can tell you from her dealings both at directional state college and at work. Hopefully she can find time to comment. There may be some diamonds in the rough, like she was, but those are few and far between, especially in 2011.
Comment by Mike Hunt — September 27, 2011 @ 6:05 pm
I was absolutely shocked by something in the article: ***53%*** of Asian-American women between 33 and 46 with professional level jobs are childless. Totally stunning.
I was shocked to find out that 48% of black women have genital herpes.
Comment by Kirk — September 28, 2011 @ 12:30 am
I read the article in Slate as well, and it made good, if obvious, points. I don’t think the situation in the UK is analagous because there the class structure was an artificial construct. In other words, the lower class people were inferior de jure, not de facto.
Recommended reading: Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple. The British underclass is recognizably self-destructive.
Comment by trumwill — September 28, 2011 @ 12:10 pm
And in Slate, of all places. I’ve often argued that the zero percent genetic position that is almost uniform on the left (at least in public) is a fad, a transient reaction partly to the Holocaust, but mainly to Southern whites. As events and social structures fade into the past, “Hitler believed in genetics” will seem as foolish as “Hitler was a vegetarian.” People who pride themselves (can one do that to oneself?) on being reality-based will eventually come around to believing in reality, especially once all the other options failed, the problems are bigger, and the means to solve or bandaid them over are stretched. Traits that we care about, and have good reasons for caring about the distribution in others, like intelligence, conscientiousness, etc. have reasonably high heritabilities.
There are some intractable problems dear to liberals that suddenly become a whole lot more tractable when you start believing in biology like you believe in gravity. Cycles of poverty in urban black communities, where most men invest almost nothing in their children, who inherit your favorite/least favorite stereotypical traits? That problem can be greatly ameliorated with better sperm donors. I’d write more about this, but I’m gonna go watch “Ow, My Balls” instead.
Comment by rob — September 28, 2011 @ 6:44 pm
There was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
Comment by trumwill — September 28, 2011 @ 7:06 pm
According to Ron, fertility is modestly positively correlated with income, other factors held constant, but the large negative correlation is with education.
Comment by ? — September 30, 2011 @ 4:26 am