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Steve Sailer

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November 16-30, 2004 Archive

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#pregmap

More "Baby Gap:" Ethan Herdrick has built a new U.S. map adding the pregnancy and abortion statistics to the Bush vote and white fertility numbers. 

(Keep in mind that the pregnancy, abortion, and live birth numbers are for all races, and there are big differences in the abortion rate with blacks having the most, Hispanics in between, and whites the fewest.)

One important question that I don't have a grip on yet is whether the higher abortion rate in blue states is causing their lower birth rate. It sounds obvious, right? But, there's another, even more disturbing possibility, which is that a pro-abortion culture simply encourages carelessness, leading to far more unplanned pregnancies that would occur if people didn't expect to use abortion as a back-up plan.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#dynast

The Upside of a Dynasty: Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's 29-year-old son Patrick has enlisted in the Army, shortly after getting his MBA from the U. of Chicago. I've written in the past about how the Daleys take seriously the concept of a dynasty, which includes making investments that will pay off in family prestige decades down the road. This is an example of old-fashioned noblesse oblige that will probably redound to the benefit of the next generation of Daleys when one of them runs for mayor. 

I haven't heard of any other politician's son enlisting, however. If the President's nephew George P. Bush is serious about running for President someday, he should enlist.

***

Daniel McCarthy on the politics of Oliver Stone's Alexander -- Here's a highly informative overview from LewRockwell.com of Stones' left-neocon Hitchensian take on Alexander the Great. Lot's of useful historical perspective on Alexander too.

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The War Nerd's new column is a long one about who is in a worse quagmire: Russian in Chechnya or America in Iraq.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#bgup

The Importance of the Baby Gap Is Growing: In my American Conservative article, I pointed out the extraordinarily high correlation between Bush's share of the vote by state in 2004 and the states' total fertility rate (estimated average number of babies lifetime) for white women in 2002: 0.86. You square that number to get the percentage of the variation in Bush's share predictable from the fertility rate: 74%. Has this always been the key to explaining the outcome of Presidential elections by state?

To find out, I've gone back into the National Center for Health Statistics document (warning: it's a big PDF), and pulled out the corresponding white TFRs for 1995 and 1990. (I couldn't find the figures for other years). If we use the 1990 white fertility rates by state and compare them to George H.W. Bush's share of the vote by state in his 1988 victory over another Democrat from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, then the correlation, while still strong, is significantly lower than in recent years: r=0.71, r-squared=51% versus the 74% in 2004. So, fertility by state was only about 70% as strong a factor 16 years ago compared to this year's election. The Baby Gap has always been a big deal, but it's turning into a bigger deal.

Bush the Elder's correlation with the 1990 TFRs dropped sharply in 1992 down to an r-squared of only 28%, but that was mostly because of Ross Perot's strong run. If we sum Bush's and Perot's shares, the R-squared goes back up to 59%, up from 51%. 

Dole was up to 61% in 1996, correlated with the 1995 TFRs, and Dole + Perot was at 68%. 

Bush the Younger hit 73% in 2000 versus the 2002 TFRs, and 74% in 2004. 

Another question is whether changes in fertility per state are driving changes in voting behavior by state? The answer appears to be: a little, but not a huge amount. The correlation between change in white TFR from 1990 to 2000 and change in Republican share of the vote from 1988 to 2004 is only 0.31 or 9%. 

However, if this was weighted by population size of the states, it might be more impressive because of the huge change in California. Nationally, white fertility is down 1% from 1990 to 2002, but in California, it plummeted 14%. From 1988 to 2004, the GOP candidate's share of the vote dropped 2 percentage points nationally, but 7 points in California.

Generally speaking, white fertility from 1990 to 2002 has dropped the most in the Far West and upper New England. It has grown the most in Washington D.C., New Jersey, and Connecticut. My guess is that the big drop in crime with the end of the crack epidemic made the cost of insulating children a little less in those densely populated areas. 

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#vindich

I am vindicated: As you no doubt know, I've been scoffing for weeks at the NEP exit poll's claim that Bush won 44% of the Hispanic vote. My first VDARE article after the election focused on the implausibility of the exit poll's claim that Bush's share grew from 43% to 59% in Texas. I wrote:

"I can't find much evidence in the actual vote totals to support the idea that Bush won even a majority of Hispanics in Texas, much less 59 percent."

Now, the Associated Press has announced:

Correction: Texas Exit Poll Glance
Mon Nov 29, 5:13 PM ET
By The Associated Press

In the Nov. 3 BC-ELN--Texas Glance and BC-TX Exit-Poll Excerpts, The Associated Press overstated President Bush's support among Texas Hispanics. Under a post-election adjustment by exit poll providers Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, 49 percent of Hispanics in the state voted for Bush, not a majority. The revised result does not differ to a statistically significant degree from Bush's 43 percent support among Texas Hispanics in a 2000 exit poll.

The revised BC-TX-Exit-Poll Excerpts showed that 20 percent, not 23 percent, of all Texas voters were Hispanic. They voted 50 percent for Kerry and 49 percent for Bush, not 41-59 Kerry-Bush. 

That reduction of 10 points in Texas would appear to knock almost 2 points off Bush's national Hispanic share by itself, and the reduction in the Hispanic share of the Texas vote from 23% to 20% would reduce Bush's national Hispanic share as well. Then, there are the other problems with the Hispanic share that I highlighted in my two subsequent VDARE columns (second and third). My estimate remains that the real Hispanic result was Kerry 60% - Bush 39%.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#risefall

The Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll -- Rolling Stone magazine put together a panel of mostly Baby Boomer music establishment big shots and they came up with a list of the the top 500 rock and roll songs of all time. Rolling Stone's list was suspiciously "rolling stone"-centric, with #1 being Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," #2 being "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and the oldest song on the list was "Rollin' Stone" by Muddy Waters.

The top of the list is weighted toward songs that espouse some heavy ideas, man (e.g., John Lennon's "Imagine" is #3 -- is that really a rock and roll song?), but the list improves once you get past the pompous top 50 and ultimately includes an awful lot of fun stuff. 

Obviously, it's weighted toward songs from the good old days, but I pretty much have to agree with its biases, so I thought I'd chart The Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll from 1948 to 2003. I think its an interesting example of the dynamics of an art form over time, and lots of other art forms would trace somewhat similar patterns of rise, fall, revival, and decadence.

The table below shows for each year the number of songs that made the Top 500 and their aggregate "points" based on their rankings. (Points are calculated by subtracting Ranking from 501. Thus "Like a Rolling Stone" gets 500 points [501-1], while #500, Boston's "More than a Feeling," gets 1 point (501-500]). The annus mirabilis of 1965 has the most songs on the list of any year (35), but it really stands out because it has so many high ranking songs, with "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Satisfaction" accounting for 999 points between them. The last column is a simple graphical representation of how many points in the year.

You can see that rock and roll really got started in 1954, reached a peak during Elvis's golden years of 1956-1957. Then it faded and puttered along until 1963, really taking off during the British Invasion of 1964, reaching an all-time high of creativity in 1965. It remained very strong through 1969, then at a lower but still credible plateau through 1973. The notorious mid-1970s slump actually consisted of two very weak years, 1974 and 1976 sandwiching a decent 1975. The punk-new wave year of 1977 only registers as a blip in an overall downward descent. That generation had good years again in 1979-80, but quickly burned out. Nothing much happened in the 1980s, and even the much-hyped Grunge year of 1991 turned out to be mostly the great Nirvana and a supporting cast of nobodies. After 1991, the voters can barely remember any songs.

I'm sure the poor showing of recent years is partly caused by the age bias of the voters, but there is a lot of evidence that kids these days aren't as interested in music as the previous generations. Movies, TV, and videogames are outcompeting music compared to back in the day. When I was an undergraduate from 1976 to 1980, we almost never went to first run movies during the school year, almost nobody had a TV in their dorm room, and videogames weren't introduced in bars until about 1980, and nobody had their own. And we didn't have the Internet. But we all had stereos and we went to a lot of rock concerts.

A reader writes:

The secret of the great pop music of the late 50s and the 1960s is that the boys let the girls buy the records and pick the concerts. It worked sort of like the 19th Century invention of the novel. Women have better taste.

Teenyboppers did have good taste for a long time -- they were the first to idolize Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. But, that streak seems to have run out at some point, and since then they have gone nuts over Bobby Sherman, the Bay City Rollers, the Backstreet Boys, etc. I've never heard a good explanation for this change.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#babygaptac

More reader responses to my article "The Baby Gap:"

Adam Carstens looked up some useful information in the General Social Survey database. He found that for incomes below $50k (in 1998), white Republicans only have a very small advantage in number of children over white Democrats. But at higher incomes, Republicans have significantly more children. For example, white "Strong Republicans" with incomes of $50k or more average 2.16 children versus 1.62 children for white Democrats of either "Strong" or "Not Strong" fervency of the same income range. That's 1/3 more children. 

At $90k and above, "Strong Republicans"  average 2.47 children versus 2.04 kids for "Not Strong Republicans," and 1.56 for Democrats as a whole. The sample sizes are little small for slicing and dicing too narrowly, but the pattern seems apparent.

*

Readers write:

The only county-level natality data (SPSS or SAS) I know of is Local Area Summary Data Files, but you have to be a member of an ICPSR-affiliated institution to download it, or you have to be affiliated with institutions that have the data like UCLA.

Anybody know how I can get my hands on this data?

*

I wonder if it is possible to merge your lifetime fertility theory with some data about domestic migration. I have long believed that the profound domestic migration southward and westward is disproportionately made up of people prone to vote Republican (simplistically, it seems quite likely that the union workers, government workers and blacks stay behind). My guess would be that those moving consist of large corporation employees (dozens of Fortune 500 companies have moved to Texas and Georgia) and the small business entrepreneurs that spring up to service them. And guess what--the women have subordinated their careers to that the husbands can have the necessary career mobility.

*

You mention in passing how the cost of private schools factor into attutudes in the South, and you're correct that most whites, especially those dedicated to education, find public schools unacceptable. Part of it is that public schools have become vehicles for social engineering rather than education, and there's also less geographic distance between social classes or races than elsewhere. Tracking might offer a solution, but the educational profession won't permit it and the stakes of ending in the wrong track are just too high. While wealthy, professionals with bright, well-adjusted children might take the risk, most people won't; as you say, people want to keep their daughter's off the pole and their son's out of trouble. So I've noticed lot of working class families work an extra job to pay for tuition at a private academy, and the local academy where I live is a lot more diverse in terms of income and parental education level than the private schools my children attended in the Northeast.

Health insurance is another big issue that's as important as private schools. Few jobs provide family coverage, and the employee contribution for a family eats into monthly salary. While I haven't done the numbers, it would be interesting to see (1) whether the cost is constant across the country and (2) how it relates to average salaries in different regions. Self-employed people and small businesses have a very hard time with insurance. Living without insurance risks catastrophic costs in case of major surgery. While young singles may run the risk when they're healthy and getting by with low salaries as they enter the professional work force, its just not the sort of thing responsible parents do. And the whole point of your article is that middle class parents have middle class standards and aspirations for the children.

The cost structure of housing, health care, and schooling (including college, because there's a vast gap between institutions that have competitive and non-competitive admissions) provides a massive disincentive for families to have children. Indeed, it makes having a family a potential step toward downward social mobility unless you have two upper-end professional salaries. How can this be fixed? Or does everyone have to live in Idaho and homeschool?

*

Maureeen Dowd's siblings and the Baby Gap: Nicely illustrating my new article "The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue," snippy NYT columnist Maureen Dowd lets her ultra-Republican brother write her column for her. Maureen, of course, is an unmarried 52-year-old liberal woman who lives in Washington D.C. (average number of babies per white woman: 1.1; not coincidentally, Bush's share of the vote: 9%). The underlying theme running through her writing is her desperate effort to silence the little voice in her head that tells her she has wasted her life by not getting married and having babies.

Maureen comes from what I presume is a big Irish Catholic family (she's a 1973 graduate of Catholic U.) and her brothers and sisters are staunchly Republican. Her brother Kevin, a salesman, writes:

My wife and I picked our sons' schools based on three criteria: 1) moral values 2) discipline 3) religious maintenance - in that order. We have spent an obscene amount of money doing this and never regretted a penny. Last week on the news, I heard that the Montgomery County school board voted to include a class with a 10th-grade girl demonstrating how to put a condom on a cucumber and a study of the homosexual lifestyle. The vote was 6-0. I feel better about the money all the time.

Now, if only Kevin lived in suburban Virginia (a red state) instead of suburban Maryland (a blue state), the Dowd clan would fit my thesis perfectly. 

*

One important point that I might not have made hugely clear in my article is that this red-blue fertility breakdown probably works even better at the county level than at the state level that I used. All  states are a mix of urban, suburban, exurban, small town, and purely rural counties, so all we can do at the state-level is look at a continuum from blue Rhode Island at one end of the density scale to red Alaska at the other end. The one exception is purely urban Washington D.C., which is off by itself with an ultra-low white fertility and ultra-low Bush percentage. It's probably fairly representative of big cities, although it suspect it's a bit of a caricature. 

If you know where I could find fertility or family size data by county, please let me know.

*

Reponses to my article "The Baby Gap:" (see below for an excerpt from my article)

One thing that I find very frustrating is the way journalists use statistics to create an argument.

TWO IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS:

- Fertility rate: the number of children born to women of child bearing years (typically described as 13-48 years old)

- Birth rate (which you do not mention, but should!): the number of births in a given year per 100,000 women

Your argument selects one statistic (FERTILITY RATE) that has no meaning unless it is correlated to the BIRTH RATE. Here's why:

Nebraska (a red state) has a relatively high FERTILITY RATE. However, the BIRTH RATE is quite low. Why? Because many YOUNG (white) WOMEN leave Nebraska and there is a larger percentage of older/non-fertile women there. Nebraska has one of the oldest populations in the country. It has fewer white children per 100,000 white people than Massachusetts has.

Utah (a red state) has the highest FERTILITY RATE, and has a VERY HIGH BIRTH RATE because Utah has tons of young people as a percentage of the population.

If you correlate BIRTH RATE into the picture, you'll be surprised to learn that the percentage of white children in states like Massachusetts and Washington are not that different from Nebraska and South Carolina and Virginia. (Utah is and will probably always be an exception because of Mormonism). You will find that white children make up a larger PERCENTAGE of the population in many blue states than they do in some red states.

I think that the failure to include BIRTH RATE into your calculations is key. You may want to run the numbers again. THE STATISTIC YOUR REALLY WANT TO USE TO SEE IF YOUR PREMISE HOLDS ANY WATER IS: The number of white children per 100,000 white residents.

Thanks. Very helpful and informative.

However, I think the lifetime total fertility of white women remains the statistic of relevance because it captures precisely the kind of behavior I'm interested in, which is: what causes people to move from one type of state to another or what causes them to stay home. My model suggests that the key figure in terms of affecting social and political attitudes is not the % of children in a population but the average number of children per family.

As you say, Nebraska is losing many of its more career ambitious young women to blue states, leaving behind the ones more oriented toward having bigger families (and Nebraska also picks up a few refugees from high density blue states looking for a cheap place to raise a large family). This churning of the population will have a big impact on the type of adults living in Nebraska and on their social and political attitudes, which they will likely continue to espouse even after their children eventually leave home.

In contrast, Massachusetts attracts a lot of young people for college or technology jobs, but has a hard time holding on to the ones who want more than one or two children and are willing to give up the more sophisticated culture of an adult-oriented state to move to a family-oriented state.

That's why total fertility works so well as a predictor of Bush's vote in the last two elections, while share of the population that is children does not.

Indeed, I think the statistics actually underestimate the extent of the family size gap between the states. 

First, white women in red states tend to have their first child at an earlier age. I believe blue Massachusetts recently became the first state ever where the age of first time mothers was over 30. So, people in red states tend to spend less of their lives as single and/or childless. 

Second, young urbanites often have one or even two children in the city, and then flee to cheaper and safer surroundings when they decide the toddlers need a yard or are ready to start school. So, the births get credited to the blue region but the bulk of the child-rearing is done in the red region.

*

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovB.htm#abstats

Abortion Statistics: One interesting question is how much differences in the abortion rate account for differences in the birth rate by state. A reader sent me this table, which is for all races. Another complication is that abortion statistics are often recorded by the state of the clinic not the state of the client. So, a woman from red West Virginia might drive into blue Pennsylvania for an abortion. Still, by looking at mostly white blue states like Vermont and Oregon versus mostly white red states, it does appear that pro-life red states do indeed practice what they preach -- the denizens of Nevada being an obvious exception to that rule. (I continue to be amazed that large numbers of parents of little girls are moving their families to booming Las Vegas. As Chris Rock says, "Fathers, your prime duty is to keep your daughters off The Pole.")

I was a little surprised by this. I sort of expected Massachusetts women to be well enough organized that they wouldn't have many unwanted pregnancies, but that turned out not to be true.

It's not clear whether legalized abortion actually reduces the total fertility rate among whites by very much. A recent Rand Corp. study estimated that outlawing abortion would raise the average number of babies per white woman only from 1.83 to 1.89. Without legal abortion to fall back on in case of unplanned pregnancies, white people would plan better and thus avoid unplanned pregnancies, according to the Rand researcher.

*

"The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue," my cover story in the Dec. 20th issue of The American Conservative is now available to electronic subscribers. An excerpt:

Clearly, the "issues" that so excite political journalists had but a meager impact on most voters... If a demographic or regional group supported Bush's "humble" foreign policy in 2000, they supported his Alexandrine ambitions in 2004, and vice-versa.

Still, this doesn't mean voters are choosing red or blue frivolously. Indeed, voters are picking their parties based on differing approaches to the most fundamentally important human activity: having babies. The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions. The more kids whites have, the more pro-Bush they get...

The single most useful and understandable birthrate measure is the "total fertility rate." This estimates, based on recent births, how many children the average woman currently in her childbearing years will end up with. The federal National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 2002 the average white woman was giving birth at a pace consistent with having 1.83 babies during her lifetime, or 13 percent below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. This below-replacement level has not changed dramatically in three decades.

States, however, differ significantly in white fertility. The most fecund whites are in heavily Mormon Utah, which, not coincidentally, was the only state where Bush received over 70 percent. White women average 2.45 babies in Utah compared to merely 1.11 babies in Washington D.C., where Bush earned but 9 percent. The three New England states where Bush won less than 40 percent -- Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island -- comprise three of the four states with the lowest white birth rates, with little Rhode Island dipping below 1.5 babies per woman.

Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule...

In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats' anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites.

Among the fifty states plus Washington D.C., white total fertility correlates at a remarkably strong 0.86 level with Bush's percentage of the 2004 vote. (In 2000, the correlation was 0.85). In the social sciences, a correlation of 0.2 is considered "low," 0.4 "medium," and 0.6 "high."

You could predict 74% of the variation in Bush's shares just from knowing each state's white fertility rate. When the average fertility goes up by a tenth of a child, Bush's share normally goes up by 4.5 points.

Here's a scatter plot showing how closely Bush's share of the vote in a state correlates with the number of babies per white woman. The blue dot way down in the lower left corner represents Washington D.C. and the red dot way up in the right corner is Utah.

Ethan Herdrick has kindly plotted the Total Fertility Rate - Whites and Bush's Share of the Vote on a nifty map of the U.S. -- Just hover your cursor over the two white boxes on the top and the map will flip from one variable to another. We're still fooling around a little bit with the color schemes, but you'll see that California, for example, doesn't change color because its white fertility and Bush share fall right on the best fit line.

Here's the data: