seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
With academic social studies you can usually assume they've controlled for the basics like that, especially if the conclusions are unfortunate for the left which always means rigor gets ramped up significantly. They're working from large scale surveys and controlling for simple confounders is easy.
Sure enough:
> Arpino & Mogi explored mechanisms behind this reproductive pattern, finding that extreme right individuals were 4–5 percentage points more likely than centrists to intend having a child within three years. This effect persisted after controlling for religiosity, education, and income
You can just grep papers for "control" to check this sort of thing, as terminology is quite consistent.
There are big differences between left and right in fertility (=how many children you choose to have, in demographic discussions) and this isn't at all a controversial claim in social studies. The question is not does it exist or is it confounded but why does it occur - or if you really want, what underlying factors strongly correlated with leftism are the true cause. You can think of that as confounders if you like.
One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
I'm not in the US but it's been years since I had a coworker with more than 2 kids (or they're so many departments apart I simply don't know). None of my closer friends has more than one kid (ok, that might be a bit of an exception). None of the families in my huge apartment building has more than 2 kids. I'm actually hard pressed right now to name 5 people I know who have 3 or more kids or 2 siblings (and the kids/siblings being younger than 30). (and I am including all my US acquantainces (sorry, no real friends over there for me))
I just don't understood what this has to do with "online".
Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?
You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.
Far less need for fertility treatment for those trying in their more fertile years (late teens to early 30s); that's when for the most part things "just work".
Just like there's a natural selection to those with religious beliefs (and active killing of those without) there's probably active selection to those with conservative beliefs like raiding a family, a desire to teach their values to their children, producing as many children as possible - values that correlate with conservatives.
I’ve also noticed fertility is high among certain immigrant demographic groups. Near me, it’s refugee groups (asylum applicants) where families very typically have 4 or more kids. In a couple decades I can see the demographics being very different in America, but especially Europe. It’ll probably look more brown, more Islamic relative to today.
What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation.
If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.
The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.
I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
Providing a childhood that's as good as their own should be easy given the general increase in wealth, improvements in medical care and other technology, fall in violent crime and so on. Being better than your own childhood is the default even if you aren't more successful in a relative sense than your parents.
It seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.
Isn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children.
Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
I didn't read the full paper only the abstract, but bc the political spectrum is correlated with education level or urban vs rural or multiple other factors that deeply impact what it is like to have kids.
Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Or does the opportunity cost on careers plus the high cost of childcare plus the cost of living space impact conservatives and progressives alike? And among rural people without a college degree, do progressives still have fewer kids than their conservative neighbors?
When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
Yes they do. Just grep the paper for the word "control" and you can quickly find the answers to these questions. This isn't a new finding and they've controlled for all the obvious factors.
I did grep through the paper, and ... no not really.
"Urban" and "rural" never appear. Among uses of "control", for their own work they have controlled for sex and race. Their Table 2 and Figure 2 are the same data displayed different ways and from the same analysis. In their mentions of other work they note related work on Europe that controlled for religiosity, education and income, and socioeconomic and attitudinal factors.
Their table 1 actually shows that the p-value for religious attendance, education, two race variables , and birth year, were all tied with the politics variable, and showed that education, and both race variables had larger-magnitude estimates and z-values.
After reading some of the paper, while I still think there's a relationship between political beliefs and number of kids, I don't see that their methods are convincing that this is more important than other such correlations.
I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter.
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
I also follow this space but can't agree with the claim that "No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions". There are pretty strong theories and ideas about the root causes, and those also lead to solutions. However they are anathema to the left so depending on what exact subspace you follow you may never see them (they'd be censored immediately).
For the same reason you won't get much of that kind of discussion here on Hacker News.
Here's an organically written summary of the paper.
This is a plain vanilla regression analysis on the US GSS, which is a large poll of Americans done every year since the 1970s. Being a study of demographics it defines fertility to mean the number of children a couple has or doesn't have for any reason, a number which is driven primarily by people's decisions and not biological ability.
It shows only two things:
• The correlation between politics and fertility changes over time. It becomes really pronounced in the 1980s-1990s but during the baby boom years there is no link.
• It only applies to white Americans. Black Americans show no such correlation. However the study cites a paper claiming that black Americans don't understand the terms liberal and conservative well, and suggests that may be the cause of the divergence (a data quality issue not a real difference in fertility).
N.B. the title of the paper is deceptive. It claims a causal link but the paper itself admits the study is correlational and cannot establish causality. Misleading titles or abstracts are normal in academic social studies, unfortunately.
They cite other papers showing the same correlation holds in Europe. Rest of the world isn't considered.
It's surprising this paper got any attention and I'm not sure it'll get published in the end (it's early access). Regressions on US GSS are easy to do and many of them have been done before, there is nothing really new here.
Makes sense. Family creation and maintenance is a core philosophy of the right (see the various concerns surrounding family planning, education, queers, etc). There is a sort of Darwinian thing happening as a side effect of the held philosophies.
30 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 61.7 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY
It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
Sure enough:
> Arpino & Mogi explored mechanisms behind this reproductive pattern, finding that extreme right individuals were 4–5 percentage points more likely than centrists to intend having a child within three years. This effect persisted after controlling for religiosity, education, and income
You can just grep papers for "control" to check this sort of thing, as terminology is quite consistent.
There are big differences between left and right in fertility (=how many children you choose to have, in demographic discussions) and this isn't at all a controversial claim in social studies. The question is not does it exist or is it confounded but why does it occur - or if you really want, what underlying factors strongly correlated with leftism are the true cause. You can think of that as confounders if you like.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
I just don't understood what this has to do with "online".
You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
1. It's been tried and doesn't work.
2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.
What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.
The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.
I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
"Urban" and "rural" never appear. Among uses of "control", for their own work they have controlled for sex and race. Their Table 2 and Figure 2 are the same data displayed different ways and from the same analysis. In their mentions of other work they note related work on Europe that controlled for religiosity, education and income, and socioeconomic and attitudinal factors.
Their table 1 actually shows that the p-value for religious attendance, education, two race variables , and birth year, were all tied with the politics variable, and showed that education, and both race variables had larger-magnitude estimates and z-values.
After reading some of the paper, while I still think there's a relationship between political beliefs and number of kids, I don't see that their methods are convincing that this is more important than other such correlations.
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
Again, it's a weird little sub domain.
For the same reason you won't get much of that kind of discussion here on Hacker News.
This is a plain vanilla regression analysis on the US GSS, which is a large poll of Americans done every year since the 1970s. Being a study of demographics it defines fertility to mean the number of children a couple has or doesn't have for any reason, a number which is driven primarily by people's decisions and not biological ability.
It shows only two things:
• The correlation between politics and fertility changes over time. It becomes really pronounced in the 1980s-1990s but during the baby boom years there is no link.
• It only applies to white Americans. Black Americans show no such correlation. However the study cites a paper claiming that black Americans don't understand the terms liberal and conservative well, and suggests that may be the cause of the divergence (a data quality issue not a real difference in fertility).
N.B. the title of the paper is deceptive. It claims a causal link but the paper itself admits the study is correlational and cannot establish causality. Misleading titles or abstracts are normal in academic social studies, unfortunately.
They cite other papers showing the same correlation holds in Europe. Rest of the world isn't considered.
It's surprising this paper got any attention and I'm not sure it'll get published in the end (it's early access). Regressions on US GSS are easy to do and many of them have been done before, there is nothing really new here.