- The complex reasons behind the drop in fertility;
- Mike Johnson is literally illiterate;
- Texas Christians are trying to define Muslims out of existence;
- Trump is trying crush California’s environmental policies, of course;
- Robert Reich explores who’s benefiting from the explosion in the national debt;
- Heather Cox Richardson on Natalie Harp, if we still care;
- Von Karajan does Bruckner 7.
Testing provisional conclusions. Is this just about primitive tribal priorities for survival, in a world that doesn’t actually need more children? Or something else?
The Atlantic, Olga Khazan, today: Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives, subtitled “People on the right tend to have more kids than people on the left. Why?”
…several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.
Several theories. Liberals are more anxious about the state of the world. Liberals and conservatives have different values. And both sides tend to live in bubbles. The rest of the article expands on these.
