I didn't say anything about divorcees. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where they fit into this. Again, "divorced," "widowed," and "single" are different marital statuses.
However, it absolutely is true that women who have children out of wedlock tend to be less intelligent than women who do not. If you look at Murray and Herrnstein's analysis of the NLSY data, for example, they found that 32% of white women with IQ < 75 had children out of wedlock, with that percentage declining steadily as IQ rose down to only 2% for women with IQ > 125.
They also did find that people with above-average IQs had lower rates of divorce in the first five years of marriage, but that there was essentially no difference in divorce rates between people with average and below-average IQs.
I suspect you'll be tempted to roll your eyes at anything related to The Bell Curve, but keep in mind that most of the controversy was around the 10% of the book related to race, and that the APA pretty much backed them up on the rest of the book.
I'm having trouble finding research directly addressing the question of the correlation between conscientiousness and single motherhood, but I'll see if I can find something later.
Actually, yeah, kind of. The father can serve as a positive role model even in death, through the mother and other family members telling the child about him. But what I was really getting at is that "single" refers specifically to the state of never having been married. And the kind of women who have children in that state are different from the kind of women who have children while married and then lose their husbands in a war.
Which is to say, I don't think that the primary problem with single motherhood is the absence of a father, but rather that single mothers themselves tend to have significantly lower intelligence and conscientiousness than married mothers.
What I kind of suspect is going on here is that people strongly associate reproduction with sex, and thus the aversion to regulating one transfers to regulation of the other. But reproduction really isn't anything like sex when it comes to justifications for regulation. Sex doesn't have externalities. Reproduction does, especially in the context of a welfare state. It's not inherently illiberal to regulate actions that have externalities for the purpose of reducing or internalizing those externalities.
The government (well, state governments collectively) has enough workers to test everyone who wants a driver's license. On average, people renew their driver's licenses more often than they have children. I don't see why the logistics of licensing parents are any worse.
And, on top of that, there’s only one gender that will be sitting the chair across from the desk of the bureaucrat.
Says who? I assume that the proposal was to have both parents get licensed. If not, it should be. Obviously that's going to be problematic when the father can't be identified or located, but I'm fine with the mothers receiving extra scrutiny in these cases, because single mothers as a group don't have a great parenting track record. It's profiling, sure, but it's profiling that's entirely appropriate.
Additionally, when it comes to licenses denied because of tests failed, the people most ill-served by the worst schools are most likely to do poorly on the (surely multiple-choice) test.
But that's the whole point, isn't it? Licenses would be denied to people who can't answer basic questions about parenting, and they would not be denied to people who could. Just like with driver's licenses. Yes, this would mean that poor people would be overrepresented amoung those denied licenses, but that's because poor people are overrepresented among bad parents. Test-taking isn't just some parlor trick they teach rich kids so they'll fit in at the yacht club, it's demonstration of actual knowledge.
The bottom line is that reproduction has huge externalities, and as such there's nothing illiberal about regulating it, any more than there is about regulating driving on public roads.
On the other, much more disturbing hand, Ron Paul’s successes demonstrate how thin the line is between the libertarianism that many of us like to think we desire and the “fascist fist in a libertarian glove” represented by the newsletters and described by Horwitz.
What? I don't recall anything in the newsletters that even hints at fascism, except insofar as fascism is defined as anything leftists dislike.
Also, I don't see any good reason why Obama should get a pass on his association with Wright, while Paul doesn't get a pass on his association with Rothbard and Rockwell. The latter, at least, were apparently strategically pandering (and let's face it, pandering is what politics is all about), while there's been no suggestion that Wright's bigotry was anything but sincere.
Actually, Gelman's post doesn't really even accurately characterize the distinction between the rich and the middle-class in the general case. Yes, a few people get rich just by being very lucky and/or naturally talented. But when I think of all the ways that I could plausibly become rich (surgeon, lawyer, investment banker, starting a business), they all involve a hell of a lot more work than I do in my upper-middle-class job. With a few lucky exceptions, I think that the rich really do (or did, before they got rich) work harder than the middle-class.
I should mention here that I get the usual concerns about legislative incompetence. I expect that any legislation actually produced based on this idea would get it horribly wrong, because that's what government does. But I don't see why there's anything wrong with the idea in principle.
Instead of wasting your time with yet another list of reasons that this is morally reprehensible and not-exactly-libertarian (I’m sure you wrote one in your own head by the time you got to this paragraph)
You're confused. It's social conservatives, not libertarians, who object to giving teenagers access to birth control. People who disagree with you are not actually interchangeable.
It's not that money buys virtue; it's that virtue buys money, up to a point. I don't think that the rich are as a rule morally superior to the middle class, but you do have to be a bit of a fish-up to be chronically poor in the first world. By and large, the poor are poor because they lack basic middle-class virtues like conscientiousness.
The distinction between the rich and the middle class is not the same as the distinction between the middle-class and the poor, and Gelman's post doesn't really address that.
I'm not in principle opposed to parental licensure. People don't have the right to pollute the air, or drive recklessly on public highways, or litter, because these things impose negative externalities on others. Likewise, people don't have the right to bear children they can't afford to take care of, because this imposes a negative externality on those of us who have to pick up the tab. There's nothing illiberal about forcing people to bear the costs of their own decisions.
I'm not terribly keen on this particular implementation, though, because instead of internalizing the costs of reproductive decisions, it forcibly externalizes them.
What exactly are the policy implications of the Ron Paul newsletters that concern you?
A second Obama term might not be so bad if the Republicans can hold the House. Doesn't matter who's in the White House if Congress won't give him the legislation he wants to sign. And one-party Republican rule didn't go so well. Not sure how I feel about Obama potentially nominating Scalia's replacement if he should die, though.
I don't like the Paulite messianicism much more than the Obamunist messianicism, but there is a fundamental difference between what Paul is promising and what Obama promised. Obama promised to take the decisions that the government currently makes for us and make them differently. Paul promises to take many of those decisions out of the political realm entirely, devolving the power to make them to individuals.
Those decisions may currently, in theory, be in the hands of us, collectively. But they're not in the hands of us, individually. This seems to me to be a distinction that antilibertarians obstinately refuse to acknowledge. Now, there are respectable arguments to be made for the proposition that it's better that these decisions should be made collectively than individually. And even the vast majority of libertarians agree that this is true of at least some decisions. But simply pretending that there's no valid distinction between individual choice and collective democratic choice is not a respectable argument against libertarianism.
As the head of the executive branch, wouldn't he have considerable ability to restrain the DEA's enforcement of federal drug laws? I actually don't know how this works. Can Congress sue the president and get the court to compel him to enforce their laws?
What I think a lot of people are overlooking is that pandering to stupid people is pretty much essential to electoral success under mass democracy. And just because you're pandering to them doesn't mean that you're actually going to give them what they want.
If Lew Rockwell, or Murray Rothbard, or whoever it was, thought that pandering to racists would allow him to transmute their racial anger into anger against the government, resulting in a freer country, I'm not sure that I can really condemn him for that, because frankly, I don't have any better ideas. I mean, Rothbard pandered to communists, supposedly for similar strategic reasons. It seems pretty bogus to me that he gets a pass on that, but not on pandering to racists.
I assume that you don't consider killing animals to be a moral evil on par with murdering humans. I mean, I wouldn't keep on paying someone to murder people and give me their meat just because I'd acquired a taste for it when I didn't know any better.
If you do consider killing animals to be a lesser evil than murdering humans, how much of a difference is there? How do you measure it? What is the salient difference that makes killing lesser animals less evil than killing humans? Is it possible that it's not evil at all?
"That most meat animals wouldn’t have been born at all were they not bred to be eaten rather balances out 'taking their lives,' at least on some metaphysical level."
This proves too much, unless you're willing to argue that it also justifies raising humans for meat.
I love that opposition to a policy of institutionalized racism is considered evidence of being a racist. The left-wing mind is truly a remarkable thing.
That depends on whether people are in debt because they objectively don't have enough money to get by, or because they have a tendency to spend money as fast as or faster than it comes in.
I suspect the latter.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Reproductive Rights and Libertarianism”
Am I misreading this, or are you asking us why we're not single-issue voters?
All of the candidates are unacceptable, but we still have to pick one.
On “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public 2011”
Tod:
I didn't say anything about divorcees. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where they fit into this. Again, "divorced," "widowed," and "single" are different marital statuses.
However, it absolutely is true that women who have children out of wedlock tend to be less intelligent than women who do not. If you look at Murray and Herrnstein's analysis of the NLSY data, for example, they found that 32% of white women with IQ < 75 had children out of wedlock, with that percentage declining steadily as IQ rose down to only 2% for women with IQ > 125.
They also did find that people with above-average IQs had lower rates of divorce in the first five years of marriage, but that there was essentially no difference in divorce rates between people with average and below-average IQs.
I suspect you'll be tempted to roll your eyes at anything related to The Bell Curve, but keep in mind that most of the controversy was around the 10% of the book related to race, and that the APA pretty much backed them up on the rest of the book.
I'm having trouble finding research directly addressing the question of the correlation between conscientiousness and single motherhood, but I'll see if I can find something later.
"
Do you actually believe that this is false, or just that people shouldn't point it out?
"
Actually, yeah, kind of. The father can serve as a positive role model even in death, through the mother and other family members telling the child about him. But what I was really getting at is that "single" refers specifically to the state of never having been married. And the kind of women who have children in that state are different from the kind of women who have children while married and then lose their husbands in a war.
"
Other way around. I think poor people are poor for sucking.
"
Which is to say, I don't think that the primary problem with single motherhood is the absence of a father, but rather that single mothers themselves tend to have significantly lower intelligence and conscientiousness than married mothers.
"
Widows aren't single mothers.
"
What I kind of suspect is going on here is that people strongly associate reproduction with sex, and thus the aversion to regulating one transfers to regulation of the other. But reproduction really isn't anything like sex when it comes to justifications for regulation. Sex doesn't have externalities. Reproduction does, especially in the context of a welfare state. It's not inherently illiberal to regulate actions that have externalities for the purpose of reducing or internalizing those externalities.
"
The government (well, state governments collectively) has enough workers to test everyone who wants a driver's license. On average, people renew their driver's licenses more often than they have children. I don't see why the logistics of licensing parents are any worse.
And, on top of that, there’s only one gender that will be sitting the chair across from the desk of the bureaucrat.
Says who? I assume that the proposal was to have both parents get licensed. If not, it should be. Obviously that's going to be problematic when the father can't be identified or located, but I'm fine with the mothers receiving extra scrutiny in these cases, because single mothers as a group don't have a great parenting track record. It's profiling, sure, but it's profiling that's entirely appropriate.
Additionally, when it comes to licenses denied because of tests failed, the people most ill-served by the worst schools are most likely to do poorly on the (surely multiple-choice) test.
But that's the whole point, isn't it? Licenses would be denied to people who can't answer basic questions about parenting, and they would not be denied to people who could. Just like with driver's licenses. Yes, this would mean that poor people would be overrepresented amoung those denied licenses, but that's because poor people are overrepresented among bad parents. Test-taking isn't just some parlor trick they teach rich kids so they'll fit in at the yacht club, it's demonstration of actual knowledge.
The bottom line is that reproduction has huge externalities, and as such there's nothing illiberal about regulating it, any more than there is about regulating driving on public roads.
On “Left-Libertarianism and Ron Paul”
On the other, much more disturbing hand, Ron Paul’s successes demonstrate how thin the line is between the libertarianism that many of us like to think we desire and the “fascist fist in a libertarian glove” represented by the newsletters and described by Horwitz.
What? I don't recall anything in the newsletters that even hints at fascism, except insofar as fascism is defined as anything leftists dislike.
Also, I don't see any good reason why Obama should get a pass on his association with Wright, while Paul doesn't get a pass on his association with Rothbard and Rockwell. The latter, at least, were apparently strategically pandering (and let's face it, pandering is what politics is all about), while there's been no suggestion that Wright's bigotry was anything but sincere.
On “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public 2011”
Actually, Gelman's post doesn't really even accurately characterize the distinction between the rich and the middle-class in the general case. Yes, a few people get rich just by being very lucky and/or naturally talented. But when I think of all the ways that I could plausibly become rich (surgeon, lawyer, investment banker, starting a business), they all involve a hell of a lot more work than I do in my upper-middle-class job. With a few lucky exceptions, I think that the rich really do (or did, before they got rich) work harder than the middle-class.
"
I should mention here that I get the usual concerns about legislative incompetence. I expect that any legislation actually produced based on this idea would get it horribly wrong, because that's what government does. But I don't see why there's anything wrong with the idea in principle.
"
Instead of wasting your time with yet another list of reasons that this is morally reprehensible and not-exactly-libertarian (I’m sure you wrote one in your own head by the time you got to this paragraph)
Not really, no. what are those reasons?
"
You're confused. It's social conservatives, not libertarians, who object to giving teenagers access to birth control. People who disagree with you are not actually interchangeable.
"
It's not that money buys virtue; it's that virtue buys money, up to a point. I don't think that the rich are as a rule morally superior to the middle class, but you do have to be a bit of a fish-up to be chronically poor in the first world. By and large, the poor are poor because they lack basic middle-class virtues like conscientiousness.
The distinction between the rich and the middle class is not the same as the distinction between the middle-class and the poor, and Gelman's post doesn't really address that.
"
I'm not in principle opposed to parental licensure. People don't have the right to pollute the air, or drive recklessly on public highways, or litter, because these things impose negative externalities on others. Likewise, people don't have the right to bear children they can't afford to take care of, because this imposes a negative externality on those of us who have to pick up the tab. There's nothing illiberal about forcing people to bear the costs of their own decisions.
I'm not terribly keen on this particular implementation, though, because instead of internalizing the costs of reproductive decisions, it forcibly externalizes them.
On “Not Ron Paul or Huntsman – Maybe Johnson, Maybe Obama”
What exactly are the policy implications of the Ron Paul newsletters that concern you?
A second Obama term might not be so bad if the Republicans can hold the House. Doesn't matter who's in the White House if Congress won't give him the legislation he wants to sign. And one-party Republican rule didn't go so well. Not sure how I feel about Obama potentially nominating Scalia's replacement if he should die, though.
On “The Lazy Anti-Politics of the Paulites”
I don't like the Paulite messianicism much more than the Obamunist messianicism, but there is a fundamental difference between what Paul is promising and what Obama promised. Obama promised to take the decisions that the government currently makes for us and make them differently. Paul promises to take many of those decisions out of the political realm entirely, devolving the power to make them to individuals.
Those decisions may currently, in theory, be in the hands of us, collectively. But they're not in the hands of us, individually. This seems to me to be a distinction that antilibertarians obstinately refuse to acknowledge. Now, there are respectable arguments to be made for the proposition that it's better that these decisions should be made collectively than individually. And even the vast majority of libertarians agree that this is true of at least some decisions. But simply pretending that there's no valid distinction between individual choice and collective democratic choice is not a respectable argument against libertarianism.
On “Passing on Paul”
Dogwhistling: Leftist for "We don't need no stinkin' evidence!"
On “Ron Paul, Racism, and War”
As the head of the executive branch, wouldn't he have considerable ability to restrain the DEA's enforcement of federal drug laws? I actually don't know how this works. Can Congress sue the president and get the court to compel him to enforce their laws?
"
What I think a lot of people are overlooking is that pandering to stupid people is pretty much essential to electoral success under mass democracy. And just because you're pandering to them doesn't mean that you're actually going to give them what they want.
If Lew Rockwell, or Murray Rothbard, or whoever it was, thought that pandering to racists would allow him to transmute their racial anger into anger against the government, resulting in a freer country, I'm not sure that I can really condemn him for that, because frankly, I don't have any better ideas. I mean, Rothbard pandered to communists, supposedly for similar strategic reasons. It seems pretty bogus to me that he gets a pass on that, but not on pandering to racists.
On ““Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy””
I assume that you don't consider killing animals to be a moral evil on par with murdering humans. I mean, I wouldn't keep on paying someone to murder people and give me their meat just because I'd acquired a taste for it when I didn't know any better.
If you do consider killing animals to be a lesser evil than murdering humans, how much of a difference is there? How do you measure it? What is the salient difference that makes killing lesser animals less evil than killing humans? Is it possible that it's not evil at all?
"
"That most meat animals wouldn’t have been born at all were they not bred to be eaten rather balances out 'taking their lives,' at least on some metaphysical level."
This proves too much, unless you're willing to argue that it also justifies raising humans for meat.
On “Ron Paul and the racist newsletter”
I love that opposition to a policy of institutionalized racism is considered evidence of being a racist. The left-wing mind is truly a remarkable thing.
On “Missing the Forest for the Walton Trees”
That depends on whether people are in debt because they objectively don't have enough money to get by, or because they have a tendency to spend money as fast as or faster than it comes in.
I suspect the latter.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.