Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons

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Tyler Cowen points to this news article by Lauren Sandler:

Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe [and coauthor Lisa Neidert] has discovered. Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red.

All the analysis in the linked paper is at the state and county level. That’s fine but this is not going to tell you what is a “predictor of a person’s politics.” Cowen labels his post “Sentences to ponder,” and what I want to ponder is that people are so quick to jump from aggregate to individual patterns.

And, yes, I know that aggregate patterns are related to individual patterns but they’re not the same. In particular, from the evidence we’ve seen (and which we presented in our book), social issues are important for voters at the high end of the income scale, not the low end.

David Brooks catches this—in his op-ed from 2004 that Cowen links to, Brooks explicitly labels the conservative “natalists” as being high income (“when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences. . . . It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. . . .”). Setting aside the eliteness of that last statement (what do you call a family with three kids and a $75,000 income? Are they not middle class? And, if they are, what does that make of Brooks’s claim? [As commenters Daniel and Bill point out, I was confused on this; Brooks means that the total cost is $200K per child, not that the parents require $200K in annual income. — AG]), Brooks is getting it right that it is higher income voters who are central to the culture war.

In summary, I’m not trying to slam or “debunk” the Lesthaeghe and Neidert article. I just think it should be understood as an aggregate, not individual, pattern, and interpreted in light of what we already know.

15 thoughts on “Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons”

  2. I agree with Andrew’s general point, but think he’s misinterpreting Brooks’ point. I think he’s claiming that it costs a middle-class family about $200,000 to raise a child, which I presume means their spending over roughly two decades. The $200,000 is not their annual income level.

  3. Reporters and editors love to frame social science findings as second-person: “why the weather affects whether you’ll kill your boss.” That’s one way they end up turning aggregate findings into individual implications.

  4. Pretty sure the $200,000 is is total over 18 years (let’s call it 20, so that’s 10k per year), so a $75k income family with 3 children is supposed to be paying out something like $30k per year on child related expenses. Seems pretty middle class to me, all those daycare bills add up pretty quickly, not to mention food, rent/mortgage on a larger house, bigger and/or more cars, health insurance, car insurance, life insurance…

  5. Did I miss something in the article, because they don’t seem to ever say anything other than that these are correlated at the aggregate? Lesthaeghe understands ecological fallacies as well as anyone–I think this is all on the reporter/blogger this time.

  6. “The ole ecological fallacy.”

    Electoral Votes are largely handed out at the state level. The correlation between how states vote in Presidential elections and their white total fertility and white “years married” rates are quite high.

    • Steve:

      I’m interested in statewide and countywide voting patterns. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have written Red State Blue State. Even if presidents were elected by popular vote, it would be interesting and important to understand vote by state. I have no problem with that. I just don’t think it’s right to characterize this as a “predictor of a person’s politics.”

  8. Something related: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/religions-and-babies/
    this gapminder presentation is wonderful, but the title is worong: It is not about religiosn ad babies,
    it is about cultural differences and babies. He uses religion on a nation-state level. But at least in the protestant tradition, religion is about personal conviction and not about membership. His finds do not say ANYTHING at all about the effects of religion in this sense a sa personal conviction, only in the sense of “state religion”.

  9. Pingback: Assorted links

  10. According to this reaasoning, corporations are not persons, either. Is this a subtle attack on the Citizens United decision?

  11. It takes a lot more money to be middle class in most Democratic voting states, specifically to own the sort of sizeable home that most seem to think is a prerequisite for kids and multiple kids. It’s possible that it is housing prices (and policies) causing voters in blue states to not buy larger homes, have kids, and change voting interests until a higher income than in the red states.

    There’s a significant inverse correlation between what is income is necessary to expect Republican voting and housing affordability.

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