Brief: Do trust levels predict sexual activity among the young?

I'm becoming more convinced that the decline in trust levels during the late 1980s may have a lot to do with the decline starting a few years later in all sorts of risky behavior. The logic is simple: the more (or less) trusting you are of others, the more (or less) risk you're willing to take in social life, and also exploiters will have a more (or less) easy time finding "suckers." We looked before at homicide rates. Now let's turn to sexual activity among young people.

For trust levels, I use the General Social Survey's question on whether you think others can be trusted, and restricted respondents to those from 18 to 25 years old. The GSS doesn't survey minors, so I used this age range for "young people." The time series for trust doesn't seem to vary wildly based on which age range you restrict it to, so it seems OK to use trust levels among young adults as a proxy for trust levels among adolescents. For risky sexual activity, I use the pregnancy rate among females ages 15 to 17 (here), which are yearly from 1972 to 2006; and the percent of high schoolers who have had sex before age 13 (here), which are bi-yearly from 1991 to 2007. The trust data are from 1972 to 2008, and coverage is usually bi-yearly or more frequent.

Here are the results. Trust levels are in blue and sexual activity measures in red.



Although the relationship is not perfect, there's a close match overall, and the timing looks like the trust level changes first, followed by a change in sexual activity. That fits with trust being the cause and risky behavior the effect. The correlation across years between trust and the pregnancy rate is +0.47, and between trust and the early sex rate it is +0.44. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey that I got the early sex rate data from has three other measures of teenage sexual activity, and the relationships are similar but not quite as strong.

The correlations with trust are: +0.15 for percent of high schoolers who'd had sex at least once in the past 3 months; +0.21 for the percent who've had 4+ partners in their life; and +0.23 for the percent who've ever had sex. * I also created an index of young sexual activity, which is just the sum of the fraction of students responding positively to each of the 4 questions. This is the expected number of "yes" answers that a high schooler would give while reading off the check-list of risky sex behaviors. The correlation between this index and trust is +0.25.

In general, I think these correlations are weaker just because there are fewer data -- 1991 to 2007, every other year -- than in the case of pregnancy rates. I suspect that the pre-1991 picture for the 4 behaviors surveyed in the YRBS would have looked highly similar to the teen pregnancy rate, so if we had those data, they would probably make the pattern even stronger. In any case, it seems clear that, while not the entire story, how trusting people are of one another plays a substantial role in how willing young people are to engage in risky sexual behavior. That's not too surprising if we think of trust as a form of insurance, but it's still something that's been completely overlooked as far as I know from the social science lit on these two topics that have previously been studied independently of each other.

If I can find good data on cross-national differences in number of lifetime sex partners, or other measure of promiscuity, I might use the national trust level data from the World Values Survey and turn this into a fuller post. It depends on how easy the former data are to get. Informally, though, my impression is that the low-trust countries are more sexually conservative, while the high-trust ones are more sexually liberal.

* The sexual activity correlations paired the sex activity variable and trust variable for the same year if possible (for 1991 and 1993), but since the data use different sets of alternate years after that, I paired the sex variable in a certain year with the trust variable in the following year.

GSS variables used: trust, age, year

Brief: Did third-wave feminism ruin Gen-X guys' sex lives?

There was a society-wide hysteria that reached a fever pitch in 1991, encompassing the rebirth of identity politics, feminism ("third-wave"), gay rights, and political correctness in general. The panic was still pretty high through 1994, although it died off afterward. Compared to second-wave feminism -- which focused more on equal pay, a lower housework burden, and so on -- third-wave feminism was much more focused on sexual harassment, rape, male libido, etc.

Was all that paranoia about all men being crypto-rapists just cheap talk, or did it have real consequences for the relation between the sexes? An easy way to test this is to look at how likely men were to remain virgins after graduating college through their 20s. I used the General Social Survey to focus on males aged 21 to 29 when they were surveyed. I grouped them into 3-year birth cohorts, except for the last one, where a tiny number of late-'80s males were lumped into the previous cohort just to make the sample sizes better.

Here is the percent of 20-something respondents who said they'd had 0 female partners since turning 18 -- which in context I take to mean 0 partners ever -- shown by the middle year of the 3-year cohort (or by 1986 for the '84-'89 cohort):


The long-term trend looks like between 6% and 7% fall into the 20-something virgin group. The early-'60s cohort is much lower, which makes sense because that cohort was completely unaffected by feminist hysteria. They were born too late to come of age during the counter-culture and too soon to come of age during the early-'90s hysteria. As I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog, the late '70s and early '80s were a remarkably non-ideological and hysteria-free period. However, those who came of age during the early-'90s hysteria show much higher rates of virginity in their 20s -- about double the long-term trend, or 5 to 6 percentage points higher. The effect even lasts through those who came of age in the mid-'90s, although their departure from the trend isn't so extreme. It isn't until those who were born in the early '80s, who came of age in the late-'90s or later, that the rate returns to the trend.

People often poo-poo the framework of generations -- there's so much variation within generations, not as much across generations, no sharp changes, etc. Well here's a very clear demonstration of an abrupt and gigantic change in a key rite of passage for males, and the timing is not mysterious given what we know about larger cultural changes afoot in the early-'90s. This also supports my approach to see generations as a cohort of vulnerable individuals who are struck by a huge but passing hysteria (a shock to the social system). There's some age range in which people are vulnerable to bearing the scars of the hysteria -- not younger or older -- and those indelibe impressions cause a lot of them to look similar to each other and different from other groups. That's why you can still tell who was coming of age during the counter-culture even though that was 40 years ago.

GSS variables used: numwomen, cohort, sex, age

Brief: Intelligence and age at first birth

I've seen many pictures and tables showing that smarter people get married later and have fewer children. But what about when generation length -- how long do people wait until they actually have their first kid? I'm sure those data are out there, but I don't recall them off the top of my head, so they can't be too well known.

The General Social Survey asks what age you were when your first child was born, and also gives them a makeshift IQ test. Here is the relation between them:


Generation length increases as you look at smarter people, but it only becomes pronounced in the average-and-above range (6 to 10 words correct). Among those below-average in intelligence, there is no strong tendency toward longer or shorter generation length. So not only do below-average people reproduce more in terms of number of children, but they also reproduce faster. Over the course of a century, below-average people with a generation length of about 22.5 years will have had 4.4 generations, while the smartest people with a generation length of about 27 years will have had only 3.7.

To put this in an evolutionary context, think of a new selection pressure on both populations that was strong enough to cause a new mutant to reach fixation within 50 generations (a pretty strong pressure). It would take the below-average population 1125 years to get there, 225 years before the smartest group would get there (1350 years in total). These are not necessarily the *same* pressure for each group -- it doesn't matter what direction they are pushing adaptation in, just that the two pressures are pushing equally strongly on their respective populations. This huge split between smart and dull is pretty new, and who knows how long it will last, but over the next millennium we may see the duller people adapting at more impressive rates on a genetic level. Hopefully the smarties will figure out non-genetic ways to adapt just as impressively to their environment.

GSS variables used: wordsum, agekdbrn

Brief: When statesmen weren't elderly

A book that I'm reading casually mentioned that the English politician Bolingbroke became Secretary at War in 1704 -- at age 26. When something seems like it's from another world, it probably reflects the massive changes that the West has seen since making the transition to a society characterized by open entry and competition in both the economic and political spheres. To check this, I've plotted over time how old the entering British Secretary at War was (or whatever new title he may have had, such as Secretary of State for Defence). Here are the results:


Sure enough, up through the first quarter of the 18th C., the Secretary at War's age hovers around 30. By the end of the century, his age has moved to the upper 30s and 40s. During the 19th C. there is more variance, with a handful of Secretaries in their early 30s, but the trend is still upward into the 40s and 50s. After 1900, the youngest has been 38, the oldest 73, with the average at 52. The men with heavy war responsibilities are about 20 years older in post-industrial than in pre-industrial times.

One reason may be that everyone started living longer with industrialization, not just the statesmen. But when you think about it, that cannot explain things. Presumably the 17th C. counterparts of today's lead singers of a rock band were also in their 20s. Elite athletes were likely also in their 20s, as they are today. If there were supermodels back then, you can bet they would have been in their 20s as well. Instead, there has been a shift in what type of people are considered fit for war secretary, which in turn reflects a change in the job description itself.

Violence and Social Orders, the book I'm reading, posits a framework for understanding history through the lens of controlling violence. In a primitive social order, such as those of hunter-gatherers, there is continual violence, no state, and mostly no social organizations beyond kin networks.

The limited access order (or "natural state") controls violence by using the state to create rents for elite members of a dominant coalition. Each elite gets his own piece of turf to extract rents from, and each elite respects the turf of the others because otherwise violence will break out, and that disorder would destroy the rent-creation. To make sure that the rents are sufficient to persuade elite members to refrain from violence, access to the elite is restricted -- if it were open, lots of people would pour in and shrink the amount of the rents going to each person. Still, the shadow of violence always looms over the society, since the means of violence are spread out over the entire elite -- not monopolized by the state -- and they only refrain as long as no one trespasses against them. The threat is always there.

Open access orders are the ones we live in today, where there is political control of the military, the state is used to provide public goods for the masses rather than private rents for the elites, and where the economically powerful earn their money through profits -- doing something productive -- rather than parasitizing rents from the peasants under their control. Violence is rare because the state monopolizes the legitimate use of violence, rather than every elite member being a violence specialist himself or closely allied with one. Elites compete on the basis of the price and quality of the goods and services they provide -- not based on who can defeat whom in a violent battle.

My guess for why open access orders have older statesmen is that since the shadow of violence has been largely removed, you don't need people running military affairs who are itching to pick up arms and go kick some ass. Being a hormone-crazed young person is great in a natural state -- your hair-trigger emotions are suited to a world where you always have to be prepared to fight, and your choleric temper provides a credible threat to would-be trespassers during peacetime. For example, Alexander the Great became King of Macedon at 20 and had conquered much of the known world by his death at 32.

But in open access orders, violence has been stripped from the broad elite and concentrated in the state, and civil war -- that is, intra-elite war -- is rare. So, too, are elite uprisings against the state -- before, these resulted from elites losing their rents and going after the people who were supposed to be providing them. So in these societies hot-headed young people are only going to threaten the peace. The elites are no longer constantly prepared to battle each other, so we only require a calm person to make sure everyone continues to get along. A 26 year-old in charge of the army, by contrast, would grow bored with peace so quickly that he'd want to stir things up "so we at least have something to do."

It's funny that we worry today about how to control young males' violent impulses, which threaten the peace. Only 300 years ago, we would have been grateful to have a young violent male in our social circle -- he would've been extracting rents from us, but at least we'd have someone to protect us from all those other specialists in violence. We truly live in a different world.

Brief: Generational views of communism

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, let's take a look at how the various generations viewed communism.

The General Social Survey asked a question from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s about your view of communism. I've restricted the respondents to those between the ages of 18 and 30 to make sure that we're looking at those most prone to idealistic foolishness of one stripe or another. The generations I've chosen are earlier Baby Boomers, later Baby Boomers, the disco-punk generation (perhaps Second Silent Generation is better), earlier Generation X-ers, and later Generation X-ers. Here are the results:


I knew beforehand that those born between the two most recent loudmouth generations (Boomers and X-ers) would be the least sympathetic to commies because they came of age during a decidedly non-ideological period -- roughly the late '70s and early '80s, in contrast to the highly ideological Sixties and early '90s that the other two generations grew up during. Young people during the social hysterias felt compelled to embrace the larger world in order to change it for the better, while young people during a period of relative social calm felt like telling the larger world to go get a life of its own, leave us alone, and let us have fun.

I'm putting together a more detailed post about generational differences in voting patterns across the years, so stay tuned.

Brief: Are teachers more likely to be perverts?

One stereotype has it that adults who seek out jobs where they interact with teenagers all day every day are at least somewhat motivated by sexual desire. It raises our suspicions to see a 45 year-old man coaching a high school girls' soccer team, for instance.

The General Social Survey doesn't ask about the ages of the people you work with or are responsible for, but it does ask if you've volunteered in the education sector. If the above idea holds water, surely we should see it at work here. The GSS also asks whether you think pre-marital sex between two 14 - 16 year-olds is wrong or not. Surely those volunteering in education for ulterior motives would be more likely to say that it's OK. Here are the results of how wrong or right someone believes teen sex is, by whether or not they volunteered in education:


Clearly those who seek out (unpaid) work in education, compared to those who don't, are less tolerant of teen sex. Education volunteers are half as likely to say that it's merely "sometimes wrong" or "not wrong at all." This mirrors the belief pattern of adults who have varying numbers of teenagers in their household:


So, those who have greater day-to-day interaction with teenagers, whatever the reason, are less tolerant of them having sex. Adults are more likely to have a "let the kids be free" attitude if they don't get daily reminders of how young people actually behave. Those who seek out education work, then, are motivated to be guardians or something similar to parents, not by ulterior motives. An alternative explanation is that these more intolerant views are defense mechanisms so that their minds "don't even go there," preventing them from viewing their charges as potential mates.

The picture doesn't change if we throw the volunteer's sex into the mix. A multiple regression that predicts tolerance by sex and volunteering shows that women and education volunteers are less tolerant. In this model, the effect of sex is statistically significant, and the effect of volunteering in education is marginally significant (p = 0.064). There are only 243 volunteers, so presumably if we had a larger sample size, the p-value would dip below the arbitrary 0.05 level.

The most likely reason for the stereotype of the pervert who seeks out work with young people is what psychologists call the availability bias -- we think events are more likely if we can remember examples of them more easily. Given that we have little direct experience with people who work in education, we rely on news stories, whether from the mass media or spread by word-of-mouth. The cases where the teacher and soccer coach behave themselves don't merit any attention; it's only when they do something unseemly that we talk about working in education and being a pervert. Emotionally charged events like that also stick better in memory, as opposed to bland examples of well behaved teachers and coaches.

Since it's easier for us to recall examples of a teacher or coach who acted like a perv, we think that that's more likely for them than for someone with a job not involving young people. This is another reminder of the value of checking the data rather than relying on our impressions.

GSS variables used: teensex, voleduc, teens, sex

How are religiosity and teen pregnancy related?

Razib points me to a new study showing that, controlling for various factors, states with greater religiosity scores tend to have higher teen birth rates. So, compared to more secular states, the states in the Bible Belt are more likely to supply underage guests for the Maury Povich show who shout at their parents and the audience that, "I don't care what you think -- I'm gonna have that baby!"

But does this state-level pattern hold up at the individual level or not? To be clear what the question is, it could be that it's primarily the non-religious girls who give birth as teenagers -- say, because both traits reflect an underlying wild child disposition -- and perhaps the religiosity of their community is a response to tame this problem. So, for whatever reason, some states might have a greater fraction of devil-may-care girls, which would cause the state to have a higher teen birth rate as well as a greater religiosity score. (These states would have more of a teen pregnancy problem to deal with, hence a greater community policing response via religion.)

Or the patterns could be the same at the individual and the state levels -- that is, there's something about a highly religious life that makes a female more likely to give birth. For instance, if they thought it was their religious duty to be fruitful and multiply, or if they saw something sacred or divine in conceiving and giving birth -- rather than view it as a threat to their material or career success -- then the more religious teenagers would have higher birth rates.

To answer this, I went to the General Social Survey, which has data on individuals. There is no variable for age at first birth, so I simply created a new variable which is the year of the first child's birth minus the year of the mother's birth. Unfortunately, this restricts the data to just one year, 1994. Still, that was before the teen pregnancy rate had really plummeted, so there should be enough variety among those who gave birth as teenagers for any patterns to show up. In order to get larger sample sizes, I grouped female respondents into four categories for age at first birth: teen mothers (9 to 19), young mothers (20 to 24), older mothers (25 to 29), and middle-aged mothers (30 to 39).

A lot of the questions about religion were not asked in 1994, but I managed to find three each for religious beliefs and religious practice. For beliefs, the questions measure whether she has a literal interpretation of the Bible, how fundamentalist she is (now and at age 16), and whether she supports or opposes a ban on prayer in public schools. For practice, the questions measure how often she attends religious services, how strong her affiliation is, and how often she prays. (See note [1] for how "rarely," "occasionally," and "frequently" are defined.)

First, let's look at how religious beliefs vary among women who gave birth first at different ages:


The pattern is stark: the earlier she had her first child, the stronger her religious beliefs, whether that means Biblical literalism, fundamentalism (now as well as at age 16), or opposing a ban on prayer in public schools.

Now let's look at how religious practice varies:




Here the story is a bit different. Teen mothers have lowest religious attendance, although young mothers have the greatest, while older and middle-aged mothers are in between. Also, teen mothers are tied with middle-aged mothers for lowest religious affiliation, whereas the young and older mothers have more strongly affiliated women. The pattern for prayer is the same as for attendance: teen mothers pray the least often, while young mothers pray the most, with the older and middle-aged mothers in between.

Putting these two sets of results together, we see that both of the plausible explanations for the state-level pattern show up at the individual level. Teen mothers are more delinquent in their religious practice, which supports the view that they have some basic wild-child personality that influences their attitudes toward giving birth and going to church. However, we know it cannot be some underlying antipathy toward religion that causes them to miss church or prayer because they are actually the most likely to hold fundamentalist or literalist beliefs. That supports the view that there's something about having a strong personal religious conviction that gives them a more favorable view of conceiving and giving birth.

Thus, the overall profile of a teen mother is a girl who is passionate enough in her religious beliefs that she sees something wonderful in giving birth, even at such a young age, but whose lower degree of conscientiousness keeps her from performing the institutional rituals as often as she should. Not being so well integrated into the institution, she doesn't feel whatever dampening effects the institution may have exerted through peer pressure (for lack of a better term). Indeed, if you've ever seen one of those teen mother episodes of Maury Povich, this portrait should be eerily familiar -- a misfit who isn't going to change her behavior just to lessen the authorities' social disapproval (whether her parents, Maury, or the jury in the audience), but who finds fulfillment in her private faith and in the ineffable bond between her and her child.

[1] For attendance, "rarely" is never, less than once a year, or once a year; "occasionally" is several times a year, once a month, or 2-3 times a month; and "frequently" is nearly every week, every week, or more than once a week. For prayer, "rarely" is less than once a week or never; "occasionally" is several times or once a week; and "frequently" is once or several times a day.

GSS variables used: sex, kdyrbrn1, cohort, bible, fund, fund16, prayer, attend, reliten, pray.

What predicts income dissatisfaction?

Let's test the idea that as people attain higher status, they believe that their income is increasingly not enough to cover their expenses -- after getting that big promotion and moving to a better neighborhood, you've got more income, but it sure seems like life is more expensive, what with the private tutors and sports coaches for your kids, higher home prices, replacing the IKEA furniture with stuff from Crate & Barrel, etc. Life felt more affordable before.

The General Social Survey asks the following question:

Do you feel that the income from your job alone is enough to meet your family's usual monthly expenses and bills?

Note that the wording does not refer to things in the "take only what you need to survive" category. If you pay for tutoring, that's a usual monthly expense. If you go out to McDonald's several times a month, that's a usual monthly expense. So it's referring to whether the person's income is enough to support their broader lifestyle.

If the above idea is right, the percent who answer Yes should decline as we go up the status scale. In fact, the effect should be especially strong since this question was only asked in 2002 and 2006 -- right before the recent boom, and then during the height of the boom. People were furiously maxing out their credit cards, and they were surrounded by other people with lots of cool new stuff that they bought using maxed out credit cards. A feeling of income inadequacy at the higher status levels should have been particularly acute.

Out of curiosity, I also checked to see how income dissatisfaction varied within other demographic groups. Here are the results (click to enlarge):



The lowest income groups are the least satisfied, although once family income hits $20,000, dissatisfaction stays pretty constant. However, the very rich actually feel even more satisfied than other income groups. The same pattern holds for job prestige (socioeconomic index), education level, and self-reported economic class. Income dissatisfaction is basically constant across IQ levels (the lowest levels, 0 - 2, show funny results because of very small sample sizes). So, there is no evidence that higher-status people -- however measured -- are more bitter about their income level than lower or middle-status people. Quite the opposite.

As for age, surprisingly there is no big change from the college years through middle age, although by the time people are in their 60s, they are a bit more satisfied than before -- perhaps due to the falling need for social preening and oneupsmanship by then. Before then, though, more than 50% of each age group feels inadequate -- just unhappy in its own way (not getting a hot car when young vs. not finding a nice home when older).

Also surprisingly, there are are no race differences at all. We might have expected whites to feel more satisfied since they score higher on average for the above measures of social status. I fooled around by restricting the social status variables to the higher end or lower end, and it didn't seem to matter -- blacks and whites were still basically dead even. What they spend their money on may differ, but no racial group feels more or less satisfied than any other.

Finally, there is a gigantic sex difference, dwarfing anything else we've seen. While 57% of men are satisfied with their income, only 34% of women are. We can't attribute this to women wanting to shop more, or for more expensive things -- men have their eyes on super-expensive cars and other auto-related junk, amateur sports equipment, big flashy gadgets and electronics, and so on. And men don't make that much more than women, so it can't be due to differences in income. I think it must be a personality difference rooted in the brain's wiring. In questionnaires, women consistently score much higher on the personality trait Neuroticism than men. And this shows up in the real world, as they suffer more from depression than men. The feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, and impulsiveness that characterize Neuroticism should show up when we ask people if they're satisfied with their income level.

These other demographic findings are pretty neat, but the most robust and important finding is that income dissatisfaction does not increase as you move up the status scale. We may have this misperception because those higher-status people who are not satisfied are the ones most likely to speak up about it, and the ones who the media are most likely to cover because of the schadenfreude value it provides the readers with. No one wants to write or read a news feature on a bunch of people who say, "I'm rich and educated -- and it is all it's cracked up to be!"

GSS variables used: rincblls, race, sex, age, class, sei, wordsum, educ, realinc

Youthful exuberance: Age and the housing bubble

The internet does not produce any non-self-referential data; it simply makes the data easier to find and faster to obtain. Still, if this drops below some threshold, some people might get into investigation who might not otherwise would have bothered -- and that's as good as producing new data, since unexamined data do not really exist. Probably the best result of this is the ability of people with computers to figure out if a popular story is true or not.

One story that was everywhere in the media not too long ago -- although it has probably since been crowded out by all the news about the collapse of the global economy -- was that young people today refuse to grow up. In particular, they were supposed to be opting more than ever before to live at home and freeload off their parents well into their 30s. This story broke into the mainstream when Time Magazine ran a cover story about twixters, the goofy name for these aging slackers. Around the same time, MTV devoted an episode of True Life (a popular hour-long documentary show with different topics each week) to young people who were moving back with their parents.

These stories were circulating during 2005, at the height of the real estate euphoria, so the inference is that young people were being left out of the housing bubble. The greatest beneficiaries must have been older people starting a family, or perhaps middle-aged speculators looking to "flip that house." But rather than take the tales at face value, let's see how well or how badly the bubble treated young people, using housing data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which begin in 1982 and go through 2007.

First, here is the distribution of homeowners by age, using coarser and finer-grained age groups:





It would seem from the first chart that homeowners were becoming grayer, but the youngest category is pretty wide -- "under 35." Looking at the finer-grained chart, we see that those under 30 seemed to be doing pretty well, especially since their low in the early 1990s. This looks especially true for the under-25 group, but it's hard to see in the chart. To get a better view, here is the homeownership rate for the under-25 age group over time:


Indeed, they were treated quite well by housing bubble that began in the late 1990s. Just eye-balling it, there is a gain of about 10 percentage points -- or about a 67% increase. But maybe they were nothing special, and the other age groups had similar increases. Let's have a look at how their rates changed from the early-'90s low to the peak in the mid-2000s:


The middle-aged age groups and above tend to have homeownership rates of at least 70%, often 80% or higher, so there is only so much room for them to gain before they hit 100%. That's why their increases aren't so great. The increases among the elderly reflect a steady increase since 1982, unlike the ups and downs that every other age group went through, so they're a different story.

But for the younger age groups, all of them had lots of room to gain, and yet it was still the very youngest whose rates shot up the most in relative terms. Clearly we were all fed a bunch of bull about 20-somethings refusing to make it on their own, mooching off their parents forever, and so on. A priori, that story should have sounded implausible since the 20-somethings of 2005 had come of age during two frenetic economic booms separated by a quite tepid recession. It sounds instead like the world was their oyster.

(I was a mid-20-something living and working in Barcelona at the time-- something I couldn't dream of doing now, with the Spanish economy in ruins. And even though housing became cheap after their real estate bubble burst, it wouldn't be any fun this time around since the euphoria has dissipated.)

How can we get a good intuitive feel for how spectacular the housing bubble was for young people? Let's compare their percent increase in homeownership rates to other not-so-credit-worthy groups. Many commentators have pointed to the increase of homeownership among Blacks and Hispanics, but their rates only increased by just over 10% and 20%, respectively. They started fairly low too -- not like the middle-aged -- so their increase was similar to the 25 - 29 and 30 - 34 age groups. Nothing close to the gains of the under-25 group. The same is true for single mothers, whose rates increased by under 20%.

As far as I can tell, young people were the greatest beneficiaries of the drive to debauch lending standards, especially the move to do away with down payments. After all, how much money could you have saved up by that age to put down? Forget the fact that what little you did earn you probably piddled away on your car, electronics, beer, shoes, handbags, and so on.

These data underscore the importance of paying attention to age as a demographic variable, something that we rarely do, except to whine about how youth-obsessed our culture is (or is becoming). That's not true either, but in any case, we already have lots of analysis based on race or ethnicity, sex, class, and even sexual orientation. Age is typically a far stronger cause of differences than any of those, yet we neglect it too often. This may reflect how homogeneous our social circles are by age, so that differences across age groups don't automatically spring to mind. Still, we should make a conscious effort to pay better attention to age when trying to figure out how people and their societies work.

The changing social climate of young people from 1870 to present

[This will end up being quite long, so I will post it in three stages for easier digestion. Expect two updates during the week. First update on generations added.]

OK, so the title is a bit ambitious, but I've finally found a way to measure this. Anyone who's read my personal blog knows that one of my obsessions is documenting what's going on among young people. They typically leave very little in terms of a written record, and as adults most people erase the memories of their adolescence -- to the benefit of their mental health -- and replace them with whatever accords with their grown-up worldview. For example, they may imagine adolescents as relatively innocent creatures, whereas their memories -- if unearthed -- would remind them of what an anarchic jungle secondary school was, in contrast to the much more tranquil social lives of adults.

So, the need for a clearer picture of young people's lives is great, yet clearly unmet. As luck would have it, The Harvard Crimson (the undergraduate newspaper) has placed all of its content online, stretching back to the paper's origin in 1873, and it is fully searchable. This allows me to search for some signal of the zeitgeist year by year and plot the strength of this signal over time. If you read my three-part series at GNXP on the changing intellectual climate, as judged by what appears in academic journals, the approach is the same. (Here are those articles: Death of Marxism, etc., A follow-up, and Popularity of science in studying humans.)

In short, I count the number of articles in a given year that have some keyword -- "Marxism," for example -- and then standardize this by dividing by a very common neutral word. This protects against seeing an imaginary trend that is simply due to the newspaper pumping out many more articles over time (or fewer in hard times). Ideally, I would standardize by using "the" since it appears in every article and therefore gives us the total number of articles, answering the question "What percent of all articles in that year contained this keyword?" Unfortunately, the Crimson search engine won't allow me to use "the," but it did let me search for "one," which is also a highly frequent word and will be a decent substitute. Before getting into the meat of the post, here is the number of articles found by searching for "one" across time:


We were correct to standardize somehow, given the huge increase since the early 1990s (probably reflecting the greater ease of desktop publishing with cheap computers and software).

A real improvement over the previous series that used JSTOR is that the Crimson archives run right up to the present, whereas JSTOR typically has a 5-year lag between the article's being published and being archived in JSTOR. The only limitation here is that we only see what's going on among upper-middle class young people, rather than all of them, but I'm mostly looking at events or topics that permeate our society, rather than academic fads as before. (Although I will probably look into that as well using the Crimson database.) So these youngsters ought to be fairly representative.

Moving on to the substance, I've put together graphs on three broad topics that are of great importance to young people. Adults also tend to worry about where the next generation stands on these topics. They are identity politics, religion, and generational awareness.

Identity politics

Everyone knows that the 1960s brought a sea change in college student culture, but I don't think anyone has presented a clear picture of how the concern with racism, sexism, etc. began or how it has changed over time to the present. In particular, most people (in my experience) over-estimate how prevalent identity politics were in the '60s, while forgetting how widespread the corresponding hysteria was in the early 1990s.

I began at the earliest date that the word appears or 1960, whichever came first, and end in 2008. The y-axis shows the count of articles with the keyword divided by the count of articles with "one." I chose the following identity politics keywords: "racism" or "racist," "sexism" or "sexist," "homophobia" or "homophobic," "date rape," and "hate speech." I also made a composite which sums all of them up. Here are the results:


"Racism" increases sharply through the '60s, peaks in 1970, and declines moderately through the '70s and '80s. However, starting in the late '80s, there's another surge which peaks in 1992. After the early '90s panic, though, the preoccupation with racism has declined substantially, so much so that it is now back down to its pre-late-'60s level. You'll recall how little widespread disruption there was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, and the Duke lacrosse hoax, despite every professional activist -- and even Kanye West on a televised awards show -- struggling to whip up society into another revolution. But 2006 had none of the racial hysteria to fuel it that 1992 did, so it was impossible to spark another round of race riots in L.A.

As for "sexism," it only begins in 1970. Many people who weren't alive back then don't remember how little of a role women's liberation played in The Sixties. But I used to be a radical activist in my naive college days, and Z Magazine operator Michael Albert emphasized that second-wave feminism was largely a delayed response to the perceived sexism of the anti-war, civil rights, and anti-capitalist movements that formed the basis of the counter-culture's concerns. Although there is not much change during the '70s and '80s, it got a pretty high jump initially, so it's not as though there were few adherents -- there just wasn't a massive increase. But once again, starting in 1988 there's a resurgence that peaks in 1992. This is when third-wave feminism was born, and it coincided with the resurgence of racial politics.

However, just as with race, panic about sex plummeted shortly afterward and is currently even lower than its initial level. Again, recall how few massive protests there were -- if any -- about the Duke lacrosse hoax, whose bogus premise was a bunch of jocks raping a stripper. Or for that matter, how pathetic the response was to the Larry Summers brou-ha-ha of early 2005. It surely generated some controversy among academics, but even that didn't last very long, and no one outside of academia gave a shit. In particular, the students didn't care -- influence from their leftist professors notwithstanding. If the zeitgeist lacks an obsession with sex roles, their feminist professors can preach all they want, but it will only fall on deaf ears.

Paying attention to homophobia only begins in 1977 -- 8 full years after the Stonewall Riots. And remember, that was in 1969, a ripe time for liberationist and revolutionary movements. This underscores the importance of using quantitative data in reconstructing history, since most people nowadays would imagine that back in the turbulent '60s, they were surely fighting against homophobia the way that their counterparts do now. Far from it. Back in the '60s, and even for most of the '70s and early '80s, campus radicals and liberals couldn't have cared less. Again, back then it was all about civil rights, stopping the imperialist war machine, and maybe smashing capitalism -- not about gay marriage or getting more women into science careers.

As we saw with "racism" and "sexism," "homophobia" saw a sharp rise in the late '80s and peaked in 1989 or '90, before dropping precipitously afterward. Currently it is more or less where it was before the late '80s surge. Liberals and young people may support gay marriage, but the larger meta-narrative of homophobia, as the activists would say, does not interest them.

Now we come to two more specific topics. "Date rape" basically tracks third-wave feminism, although there is an isolated occurrence in 1979 (which I exclude from the graph to keep the trend clear). Quite simply, there is rape and there is not-rape. "Date rape" was a term that tried to criminalize sex that wasn't rape, but where the girl regretted it or was unsure of what was happening. Probably the guy was stinking drunk too. Importantly, claims about "date rape" drugs later turned out to be bogus, as doctors in the UK pointed out -- most of the women claiming to have been slipped a "date rape drug" had no such drug in their system, although they typically did have lots of alcohol or other hard drugs present. It was essentially a witch-hunt or moral panic. By now, we know what to expect -- a sharp rise during the late '80s that peaks in 1992 and falls off a cliff shorter thereafter. Nowadays no one takes the idea seriously.

"Hate speech" shows roughly the same pattern, although it doesn't get started quite as early. It appears suddenly in 1990, peaks in 1991, and plummets right away. Aside from an anomalous jump in 2002 - '03 (which may reflect some event specific to Harvard), it has remained very low for nearly 15 years. Compared to college students during the heyday of Generation X back in 1991 - '92, young people today are more likely to view the concept of "hate speech" as a thinly veiled attempt to censor unpopular viewpoints.

It's interesting to note the differences in scale among the five topics. The "racism" scale is 3 times as great as those for "sexism," "homophobia," and "date rape," confirming what many others have observed -- that in the struggle for a bigger piece of the identity politics pie, race has trumped sex or sexuality. The scale for "hate speech" is about 3 times smaller than the previously mentioned three topics, perhaps because it is so specific, while "racism" pops up in many more contexts.

The composite identity politics index shows roughly the same pattern that we've noted before. There's a jump during the '60s which peaks in 1970 -- this only reflects a concern with racism. There is little or slightly negative growth during the '70s and '80s, but this was only the calm before the storm. In the late '80s, another wave of panics sweep through, and there is a sustained peak from 1989 through 1992. I have often pointed out in my personal blog and less often at GNXP that the peak of the social hysteria is 1991 - 1992, and this confirms that claim.

As with other epidemics, eventually it burns out, and obsessing over identity politics is now at or below its pre-late-'60s level. This overall pattern does not change even if I remove the two topics of "date rape" and "hate speech" that might seem to bias things toward producing an early '90s peak. Hard as it may be to believe for anyone younger than the Baby Boomers, identity politics was simply a very small piece of the radical chic calling back in the '60s -- it was about civil rights, anti-war, and capital.

Generational awareness

We often speak of young people as an entire generation, but that only works when they have strong generational awareness or solidarity. Otherwise, they are merely a cohort. To give a personal example, I am too young to be part of Generation X, yet I'm a bit older than the Millennials. Almost no one my age (roughly mid-late 20s) is stuck in the culture of their adolescence and college years and never will be, in the way that many Baby Boomers are culturally stuck in 1968 and many Gen X-ers are stuck in 1992. It is possible to be a traitor to your generation if you're a Boomer or X-er, but since my cohort doesn't view itself as a Generation, the idea of defecting fails to make sense.

The same goes for the cohort born between roughly 1958 and 1964 -- their age-mates will not burn them at the stake for saying that they never liked disco music or punk rock, unlike a Boomer who said he didn't like the Beatles' later albums or a Gen X-er who said he always thought alternative rock was lame.

In any case, how do we quantify this sentiment? I simply searched the Crimson for "generation," which will turn up any time a member of a Generation writes about their age-mates as though they were a cohesive group, as well as when older people recognize the young people of today as being different and a cohesive group. I assume that its secondary use as a synonym for creation is roughly constant over time, so that changes reflect its primary use. The counts for the very early years are low, and the number of articles with "one" is also low, so I'm not so sure that the standardized measurement is telling us something real for that time period. Thus, along with the standardized graph, I've included one that shows just the counts. Here are the results:


The trendline is exponential, although other simple trends show roughly the same picture. It seems that during Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thinking in generational terms was not very common, although it does turn up toward the end of the Progressive Era. I'll get to my conjecture about this after surveying the other periods.

During the Roaring Twenties and through the Great Depression and WWII, the level is much greater than the historical trend and lasts very long. This may strike us as unexpected because we associate inter-generational conflict mostly with the late 1960s -- but if you thought young people were going crazy then, you should have seen them during the 1920s! Women started driving, smoking, swearing, and cutting their hair short like men -- take that, you dinosaurs! Jazz and later swing were just as much of a middle finger to older people as rock and roll was later on -- perhaps more so, given how much jazz broke with other forms of popular and classical music that formed the cultural background. Rock and roll, compared to its background, wasn't so different. One central way by which young people mark themselves off from older people is by inventing their own slang, and they indeed made a bunch of it in the 1920s, much of which is still with us today.

After WWII and through the first half of the 1960s -- the Golden Age of American Capitalism -- the level dips below the historical trend. The name "Silent Generation" was coined in 1951 to refer to young people at the time, and silent they were. If we must use "generation" instead of cohort, I prefer using distinct names for what I've been calling Generations -- Boomers, X-ers, etc. -- and numbered Silent Generations for everyone else (i.e., Silent Generation 1, 2, 3, ...). Of course, after them come the Baby Boomers, although surprisingly the late '60s level is not so far above the historical trend. Still, in absolute terms, it's as high as it was during the 1920s, even if it doesn't last as long.

There is a dip below trend for most of the 1980s, when Silent Generation 2 was in college. Then there's a spike in the early 1990s, reflecting Generation X finding its megaphone, to everyone's annoyance. It's hard to make out the end -- it looks mostly at the historical trend, perhaps with a recent jump. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, we'll be hit by another wave of social hysteria, and that will crystallize the young people then (say, age 16 to 24) into a new generation. We already have a name for them -- the Millennials -- but their generational self-awareness doesn't seem very deep to me right now. Voting for Obama has been the extent of them making us hear the voice of a new generation. But just wait.

I'm not too sure what causes the increasing historical trend -- maybe it just shows that the word is becoming more and more common to describe something we already talked about before, and hence the trend isn't interesting. Or it could mean that with an increasing pace of cultural change, we are able to pay better attention to generational changes, and we can therefore talk about them a lot more than before.

What's really interesting are the oscillations above and below the trend, which correspond pretty well to what we consider the heydays of Generations and Silent Generations, respectively. Trying to piece it all together, I think that generational awareness is low when times are prosperous and young people are small as a fraction of the population. This combination of good economic times and little competition means they can more easily establish themselves during early adulthood on their own. They don't feel gipped or embittered, so they aren't anti-establishment (which in practice means anti-elders). In contrast, when economic times are bad and there are a lot of young people competing to establish themselves, anxiety about the future sets in, many feel cheated -- they went to college and didn't end up making it rich -- and they have to band together to support each other.

This is really just a rough guess, and I don't have good data to present on the percent of the population that's 16 to 24, or what their average wages were, over this entire time period. And there are exceptions, of course. But looking at the whole thing, that's what I see.

Next update: religion, which will cover five topics and include a composite index.

Brief: science knowledge across the lifespan

For the first of the brief posts (which don't count toward the 20 articles you've paid for), let's take a quick look at how knowledge of basic concepts in math and science changes -- or doesn't -- with age. It seems a priori unlikely that knowledge would continue to increase over time, since most people don't read more and more science or math during their lives. For most, there's what they were taught in school, and that's it. So, it could be like vocabulary size, which stays pretty constant through adulthood (or increases very slightly), or it could be like matching names with faces, where you forget people's names after not having seen them for so long.

The GSS has asked respondents 13 such basic science and math questions, mostly in True / False format, as follows:

- The center of the Earth is very hot.

- Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.

- It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

- Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?

- Electrons are smaller than atoms.

- Lasers work by focusing sound waves.

- The continents on which we live have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.

- All radioactivity is man-made.

- Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.

- The universe began with a huge explosion.

- How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year?

- A doctor tells a couple that their genetic makeup means that they've got one in four chances of having a child with an inherited illness. a. Does this mean that if their first child has the illness, the next three will not have the illness?

- b. Does this mean that each of the couple's children will have the same risk of suffering from the illness?

I treated a correct answer as worth 1 point and an incorrect answer as worth 0. So, the average score that an age group gets on some question is simply the fraction who got it right. I weighted all 13 questions equally and summed up the scores for each question. Thus, if everyone missed every question, the total score is 0, while if everyone got every question, the total is 13. This way, the data have a clear and simple meaning: if you picked someone at random from some age group, how many questions out of all 13 would you expect them to get right?

The age groups are in 3-year intervals, starting with 18 - 20 and ending with 63 - 65 (to keep sample sizes around 40 or more). Here are the total scores on this basic science quiz by age group:


Aside from the anomaly of the 42 - 44 year-olds -- or maybe it's a sign of a mid-life crisis -- the data are pretty flat from young adulthood through retirement. There's a clear jump from the late high school / early college years to the late college / post-college years, although it decays somewhat during the 20s -- perhaps people are glad to not have to use this stuff anymore, so they don't keep up on it. During the 30s and mid-40s, though, there is a pretty evident steady increase. After that, it declines somewhat or is flat.

Like I said, though, there isn't much variance across the lifespan, so it seems that these factoids are like vocabulary words -- parts of your crystallized intelligence that you acquire when you're maturing, and that more or less stay put in your mind for the rest of your life. Given how little most people apply these factoids to their daily lives, there doesn't seem to be a strong "use it or lose it" component to remembering them.

As a final reminder, since you're paying to read this site, I'm much more open to reader suggestions about what to look at, for both the in-depth and these briefer posts. I have plenty of new ideas myself, but I'm sure there are many more that are floating around in readers' heads. I'll try to get to all of them, although how soon the results appear will obviously depend on how easy it is to attack the question.

GSS variables used: age, boyorgrl, evolved, hotcore, earthsun, electron, lasers, condrift, radioact, viruses, bigbang, solarrev, odds1, odds2.