Half Changed World

WBR: Intelligence and How to Get It

As promised, here's a review of Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.  it's the book that Nicholas Kristof's column a couple of weeks ago was based on.  The book jacket describes this book as "the authoritative anti-Bell Curve" and indeed, much of the book is  a full-out attack on the claim that intelligence is primarily determined by genetics and that any attempts to improve outcomes for members of disadvantaged groups are doomed.

To be honest, the "how to get it" part was the least interesting part of the book for me, because it covered ground that I already know about -- Perry Preschool, KIPP, Carol Dweck's work on the "mindset" that effort matters more than inherent ability.  That said, Nisbett does a good job of writing about these issues in a non-technical manner, and I'm hopeful that he will influence public opinion.

The "intelligence" part of the book was far more interesting, because Nisbett is implicitly arguing with both the strong hereditarians who believe that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetic and that environment (including parenting) doesn't matter much, and with the liberals who aren't sure exactly what is meant by "intelligence," and are pretty skeptical that intelligence tests are picking up underlying ability rather than leaning.  The first two chapters (and a more technical appendix) are aimed squarely at these issues, and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to talk about intelligence.

Nisbett argues that the high estimates for the genetic component of intelligence are overwhelmingly based on twin studies, and especially adoptive studies, and these don't haver nearly as much variation in environments as there exists between families overall.  He also notes that overall IQ levels have risen steadily over time, far too quickly to be accounted for by natural selection (if you look at the raw scores, rather than the normed ones which are forced to have a constant mean of 100).  Addressing the question of racial differences in IQ specifically, he points out that the black-white gap has also decreased significantly in the past decades, and that African-Americans with a higher percentage of European genes do not have higher IQs than African-Americans with fewer European genes.

I'm going to end this review where Nisbett begins the book, on the question of what is intelligence.  Even after reading the book, I find it hard to define.  Nisbett is clear that he believes that schooling does increase intelligence, and that scores on even the most abstract and supposedly culture-free components of the IQ test (such as the Raven progressive matrices*) improve markedly with practice.  So he doesn't agree with the opening quote from Cyril Burt that intelligence is "inborn, all-around intellectual ability.. inherited, not due to teaching or training... uninfluenced by industry or zeal."  But he also thinks it's a real characteristic, distinct from specific knowledge of a subject.  In some ways, he almost seems to define intelligence as that which is measured by IQ tests, which is a strong predictor of academic and career sucess although not the only factor in either (with effort, emotional skills, self-discipline, and motivation being the strongest non-intelligence factors in these).

* For what it's worth, I would have chosen a different answer than the "correct" one on the sample problem given in the book, and still think that my answer is equally plausible.

graphing the tax plans

Via Bitch PhD and Yglesias, this terrific graph showing the Obama and McCain tax plans and how much they'll affect different income brackets' taxes, with the bands scaled to reflect the number of people affected:

This is from a site called chartjunk, which attempts to use Edward Tufte's principles in designing charts.  Definitely lots to learn from.

The Freakonomics blog at the NY Times picked up on this too.

While we're on the topic of taxes and distribution, I'll point out that the big tax cut bill coming out of the Senate, which includes both the Alternative Minimum Tax patch and a bunch of business tax extensions, does include one provision that is really important for low-income families: allowing families to start to receive the child tax credit starting at an income of $8,500, down from the $12,050 under current law.  This would help 13 million low-income children.  It's not at all guaranteed that the House bill will also include this provision, so it's worth dropping a line or calling your representative.

I'm going to use the blogger's prerogative to add this to the post, rather than risking having it get buried in the comments with all the back and forth about child support.

Maria commented on the stat that's shown in the third chart on the Freakonomics post -- that the top .1 percent of the country pays 20 percent of the income tax.  I haven't seen that elsewhere, but it seems plausible.  There are great statistics on US income and wealth inequality here.

It's worth noting that for all conservatives in the US mutter about European socialism, the tax system in almost all European countries is far less progressive than the US system, because they collect a large portion of their government funding through a Value Added Tax (VAT) which is if anything, somewhat regressive.

I

Composition of the US Labor Force by Marriage and Parenting Status

Here's what I've been working on this week:

This is pretty different from the usual way these numbers are presented, which is based on families rather than workers.  (Remember, if half of the families with children have an at-home spouse and the other half is dual income, only 1/3 of the workers will have an at-home spouse.)

For what it's worth, the furthest back I was able to come up with roughly comparable numbers for is 1975, when 41.5 percent of the workforce were parents, and 35 percent of the working parents had an at-home spouse.

I'd love some feedback on these graphs -- what interests you?  Surprises you?  Is the second one too many slices to be easily interpreted?

Update:  I'm responding in the comments. But I also want to register my fury that Microsoft in Excel 2007 has made it impossible to apply patterns to different slices on a pie chart so that you can tell them apart when you print them in black and white.

Update 2: Ok, here's one that shows part-time vs. full-time.

Homeownership rates

When I posted about whether young people are "falling behind" their parents, almost all of the commenters agreed that a big part of the reason that even relatively affluent young adults *feel* poor is that homeownership seems so out of reach (even with the declining market).  This made a lot of intuitive sense to me.

But my dad then sent me a ton of Census data on homeownership rates by age, going back to 1982.* (Yes, I come by my geekery honestly.)  And his point is that households under age 35 were just about as likely to own homes in 2008 (41.7 percent) as in 1982 (41.2 percent).   Homeownership rates for this group hit a low of 37.3 percent in 1993-1994, and then rose to 43.1 percent in 2004, before falling off slightly.

So how is it possible that homeownership can feel so out of reach to almost everyone I know, even as the homeownership rate didn't decline at all?  Well, part of the answer is that I live in an expensive housing market, so the "everyone" I know is a biased sample.  (The readers of this blog are more diverse, but I think are still disproportionately living in large urban areas, compared to the country as a whole.)   Also, a whole lot of condos were built in the 1990s, so if by "homeownership" you mean "owning a single family detached home," the homeownership rate probably did decline somewhat.

But it's also true that a lot of people -- at all age groups -- bought homes only by extending themselves to their limits.  There was this credit bubble that you might have heard about... (Supposedly in 2005, half of all loans made in DC were interest-only.)  And there was this dreadful fear that if you didn't jump in right away, even if you couldn't really afford it, you'd be priced out forever.  So, the people who didn't buy houses felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford a home, and the people who did felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford anything else.

*The Census table is only online as a text file -- if you want my Dad's Excel spreadsheet, I'm happy to send it on.

My father is right

After reading yesterday's post, my dad emailed me to say that he thought the question of whether young adults are better off than their parents depends mostly on what level of education each generation has attained.  Specifically, he argued that a young adult with a college degree is likely to be better off than her parents if she's a first generation college student, but not if her parents also went to college.

Let's look at the possibilities. 

• If your parents went to college, and you went to college, they are probably earning more than you are.  (Obviously, there are exceptions when the parent suffers from a disability, or chose to be a starving artist, or got laid off, or when the kid joined Google or Microsoft at just the right time, but on average, 55 year old college grads earn a lot more than 25 year old college grads.  To be precise, in 2006, the average 25-34 year old with a bachelor's degree in 2006 earned $40,276 and the average 55-64 year old with bachelor's degree earned $50,397. 
• I wasn't convinced that young college graduates were necessarily earning more than their non-graduate parents but I looked up the numbers, and my father is right.  The average 55-64 year old with a high school degree and no college education earned  $29,283 in 2006.  While there are some plumbers and union mechanics who earn good money with just a high school degree, there's not enough of them to affect the median.
• Young high school graduates are also earning less than their HS-grad parents -- the average 25-35 year old with a high school degree and no college earned just $25,0354.
• And, to fill out the options, the HS grad child of college-graduate parents is clearly downwardly mobile.

[Sources PINC-03-part 37 and PINC-03-part 91.  All figures cited are medians.]

My dad's point was that because the fraction of the population going to college has increased so much, a significant portion of college graduates are from families where their parents didn't go to college. And they're doing better than their parents.  At least in terms of income -- they also have more college debt. And, as lots of people commented yesterday, their parents probably own a home that has appreciated significantly since they bought it, while in a lot of the country, homeownership is still out of reach for most young people, even those with good incomes.

Also, check out Figure 4 in this report.

Mothers labor force participation

Here's something that I pulled together at work, and then wound up cutting from the document I did it for.  So I thought I'd share it here. 

This chart (from the new Indicators of Welfare Dependence report, issued by my old friends at HHS) shows the trends in labor force participation of married vs. divorced/separated/widowed vs. never-married mothers over the past 30 years.

I think it's pretty remarkable how sharply the line for the never married mothers goes up in the 1990s.  So, what's going on here?

Before turning to the question of why never married mothers labor force participation (LFP) rose so much during the 1990s, it’s first necessary to consider why it didn’t rise before the 1990s.  Another way to think of this question is to ask why did the labor force participation of married mothers rise during this period, and why didn’t the same factors increase the labor force participation rates of never married mothers (at least until the 1990s).

• One reason that labor force participation rates increased for married women is that women now have greater potential wages, which make paid labor more attractive.  Women are both more educated and more experienced than they used to be, and blatant labor market discrimination is far less common, opening many lucrative career options to women.
• However, these economic explanations only go so far; a key part of the story is changing societal norms that have made continued employment by married mothers, regardless of economic need, far more common.  As Blank and Shierholz comment, the effect of marriage itself on women’s labor force participation “virtually disappeared over time.”

What about divorced mothers?

• Same arguments as for married mothers, plus:
• Lack of alternative resources makes for lower reservation wages.
• Among more skilled women, single parenting has a positive effect on labor supply – true in both 1979 and 2003 (Blank and Shierholz)

So why didn’t the LFP for never married mothers rise in the 1980s?

• On average, younger, less educated than divorced mothers, so potential wages are much lower – may not equal the cost of child care or other lost benefits.
• In addition, the “child penalty” on LFP rate is higher for younger mothers, and less educated mothers, even when children are the same age (Boushey)
• Welfare provided a meager alternative to low-wage work – not a great living standard, but possible to eek by.  Kathy Edin’s work showed that low-wage work often didn’t provide any more disposable income.
• Welfare policies provided large incentive to keep all earnings off the books.
• In 1979, but not 2003, less skilled single moms were less likely than comparable childless women to work (Blank and Shierholz) – may be capturing the effects of welfare policy

What happened in the 1990s?

• Strong economy led to employment expansions for most low-income workers – male and female, parents and non-parents.
  
• EITC expansion greatly increased the returns to work in the formal sector for low-income parents – studies have shown that the effect was concentrated on single mothers.
• Time limits and work requirements largely removed the alternative of choosing full-time parenting over low-wage work for welfare recipients, even for parents of young children. Just between 1996 and 1999, the employment rate for single mothers under 200 percent of poverty with a child under the age of 6 increased from 44.4 percent to 58.5 percent.  (TANF 7th annual report, page IV-33).
• Work supports reduced the cost of going to work – child care, SCHIP, expanded earnings disregards.
• Rate of increase in LFP did increase for divorced women, but not as sharply as never-married women.
• Some of the increase in employment among never married mothers is likely due to composition effects – with declining teen birth rates, increases of overall non-marital birth rates, never married mothers are more likely to be older, more educated.

And in the 2000s?

• Weaker economy reduced both employment and LFP for all types of workers
• But married women’s LFP peaked in 1997, when economy was still booming – suggests that recession isn’t the whole story .  May be due to substitution with husbands’ earnings (although women’s LFP has become far less affected by husband’s earnings over time.)  (Blau and Kahn)
• Divorced women’s LFP peaked in 2001; never-married women’s LFP in 2002; single mothers under 200 percent of poverty in 2000.

Data geek heaven

Via Kameron at Brutal Woman, I found this presentation on how much of what we think we know about "the third world" is wrong.  Specifically, it points out how much Asia and, to a lesser degree, South America have converged with Europe and Northern America with respect to factors like infant mortality and life expectancy, leaving Africa behind.  But the use of graphics is the attention getter.

So, I was quite pleased to discover that the data tool, gapminder, that Rosling uses is now available for anyone to play with.  You can pick from a bunch of pre-loaded data sets, and the site promises that there will eventually be the ability to add your own data.  Data geek heaven.

On a somewhat related note, does anyone know if there's a way to condition the color of a bar in an Excel bar graph on the value of a boolean value of another data series?  I wound up doing it by hand for the presentation I was working on today, but there ought to be a way to it automatically?

Stats on parenting and class

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child's Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It's full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau's description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" -- children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.

The endless to-do list

I've been thinking about that NYTimes article on mother's labor force participation.  The article suggests that the slight recent drop-off in women's labor force participation in recent years is because we've pushed unpaid work -- housework and child care -- about to its lower limit, and there are only so many hours in the day and something has to give. 

Bitch, PhD thinks that makes sense.  She wrote:

if, broadly speaking, we've wrung about all we can out of the 24 hours in a day, then it makes sense both that some women would step back from the grueling regime in favor of a more balanced personal life, regardless of the possible risks they run in doing so: when you've reached the limit of your energy, you can't keep going and that's all there is to it. It also makes sense that women who are still trying to hang onto the stressful balancing act of career, children, and coupledom would feel that they're singlehandedly carrying the world on their shoulders. And given the pressures on all of us, of course we're all defensive and insistent and argumentative about our choices.

But one of her commenters, Steve Horwitz, points to this Economist article (based on this paper by Aguilar and Hurst) which uses the same underlying data as the Times article and comes to the conclusion that total leisure time for all groups -- including working moms -- has increased significantly over the past 40 years.  Is this possible?  And if it's true, why do we all feel so tired?

I think there's a bunch of different things going on.

If I'm reading the papers accurately, the biggest issue is whether you consider time spent with children doing generally recreational activities -- reading to them, taking them to parties, watching school plays, even going to the park -- as leisure.  Aguilar and Hurst do, while I think Bianchi (whose data the NYTimes uses) counts them as child care.  Conceptually, I think these activities somewhere between true leisure and work.  They're not in the same category as changing diapers or attending parent-teacher conferences, which you do because they're important, but no one really considers fun.  But they're also at least semi-obligatory --  you feel guilty if you don't do them enough, and you often have to do them even if you'd really rather be doing something else.  So they add to the modern parent's endless to-do list.

While the time-use studies clearly show that the amount of time spent on housework has dropped significantly, they don't account for the fact that people's expectations  haven't fallen as much.  So even if we only vaccuum once a month, we feel like we ought to do it more often, and it stays on our to-do list, even if we know that we're never going to get to it.

Aguilar and Hurst also point out that there's been an increase in inequality in leisure time, with more of the gain in leisure concentrated among less educated individuals.  If you believe Annette Lareau, the parents with more education are also spending more of their "free" time in intensive parenting activities.  And if you're reading this blog, or Dr B's, the chances are high that you're in that group.

As the Economist article acknowledges, the blurring of the lines between work and free time are also a factor in our perception of overwork.  If you have to carry a blackberry to your kid's soccer game, and check your voice mail over the weekend, it's hard to leave the office behind.  And I don't think it's coincidence that Dr. B and Sandy Piderit are academics.  It's not just that professors work long hours, but that their hours of work are unbounded -- there's almost always something else that they could/should be working on.

Overall, I think it's that sense of things left undone, rather than the total number of hours worked, that makes people feel overwhelmed.  When I started work after getting my masters, I remember how excited I was at the concept of the weekend.  Look, it's Friday, and I get to go home!  And I don't have to think about work, or feel guilty about not doing it, until Monday morning!  What a concept.

But at this point in my life, my personal to-do list is a lot longer than my work one.  Some days are busier than others at work, but I generally leave the office having accomplished most of what I need to do.  At home, I almost always feel like I'm running behind.   Therefore, I need to make a conscious choice at times to let go of the endless to-list.

Or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

Shabbat Shalom.

Do only rich families have at-home parents?

RebelDad asked today if anyone could find the Census data that journalists are using to say that there were 147,000 SAHDs in 2004, up from 98,000 in 2003.  Of course, I took that as a challenge, and dug it up.    It's this table, cell I7.

However, the part of this table that caught my attention was rows 27-38, which have income data for different types of married couple families with children under 15.  This is the first hard data I've seen on the subject.  I have seen lots of conjectures, including Stephanie Coontz's statement (in Marriage) that the only two segments of the population in which male breadwinner families predominate are the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution and the top 5 percent, and Nathan Newman's provocative suggestion that SAHMs are "luxury goods."

So what do the data say? First, that married two-parent families are overall fairly well off -- over 40% have incomes over $75,000 a year, and only 7.3% are poor.  Second, at the level of detail the Census provides, such families with SAHMs are generally worse off have lower cash incomes than average -- only about 31% have incomes over $75,000, and 12.2% are poor.

The income categories most likely to have a SAHM are those with annual family incomes between $10,000 and $25,000.  The women in these households are likely to have low potential earnings, and between child care costs and the phaseout of some tax breaks, it probably doesn't pay very much for them to work.  I would also guess that many of them are from cultures that highly value at-home mothering.  At the other end of the spectrum, married couple families with incomes over $100,000 are slightly more likely than those with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 to have a SAHM.

Turning to the families with SAHDs, I was surprised to see that they were generally worse off had lower cash incomes than families with SAHMs.  Less than 22% have family incomes above $75,000, and 15.6% were poor.  This presumably reflects the overall lower earnings of women compared to men. But I would have guessed that the influence of selection would have pushed the average family incomes up.

Revised 10-20-2005 to reflect Parke's suggestion.

"The mothers are working"

On Monday, Philip Klinkner at PolySigh posted a graph of labor force participation rates by race and gender for the past 50 years.

I was generally aware of the overall trends, but was surprised at how low the labor force participation rates were for black women in the 1950s.  Yes, they were a lot higher than for white women, but I've often heard comments to the effect of "black women have always worked; they didn't have the privilege of being stay-at-home mothers even in the 1950s.

That's certainly the impression that I got from reading The Street.  We returned the book to the library yesterday, so I can't post a direct quote, but Lutie Johnson (and presumably Ann Petry) lays the blame for most of the ills of black people on the fact that whites wouldn't give black men jobs, but would hire the women as domestic servants.  So the men felt emasculated and sought to prove themselves by fighting and sleeping around.  And the children were left unsupervised in dangerous neighborhoods, and got sucked in by the attractive menace of the Street.

Petry also suggests that at least some of the huge increase in single-mother households over the past 50 years is illusory.  Almost all of the women in The Street are technically still married, but living on their own or with men other than their husbands.  They're only married because they can't afford to jump through all the hoops required to get a legal divorce at the time.

The Scale of Disaster

Jen (who often comments here) asked me if I knew how the Boxing Day tsunami compares to other historical natural disasters in terms of the number of deaths.  Here's the most comprehensive single list I was able to find, going as far back as an earthquake in 1201 AD.  Limiting it to the past 40 years or so, it looks like it falls third, behind only the 1970 cyclone that hit Bangladesh and the 1976 earthquake that hit China.  Wikipedia also has an entry on this, broken out by types of event.

For a different perspective, Nicholas Kristof points out in the New York Times that more people die every month of AIDS (240,000) and malaria (165,000) than died in the tsunami, and almost as many die of diarrhea (140,000).  But it's hard to stay focused on unglamorous, persistent problems, and so kids die for lack of a few cents worth of oral rehydration salts, or bleach to purify their water.

I'd encourage everyone who is giving so generously to the victims of the tsunami to also consider giving unrestricted funds to an organization like CARE or Doctors without Borders to fight chronic disease and poverty. 

Moreover, a recent report from the UN Development Programme points out that most of the victims of "natural disasters" are also victims of poverty.  Poverty means that people live in places prone to flooding, earthquakes and mudslides, live in flimsier buildings, and so forth.  I'm not sure there's any building code on earth that could have made much difference against the tsunami, but there's a reason that similar size earthquakes kill tens of thousands of people in Iran, but only a few in California.

No typical families

I finally got a chance to look at the new Census report on America's Families and Living Arrangements.  The data on SAHMs and SAHDs is all the same material that I discussed last month when I discovered the detailed tables on their website, so instead I'm going to talk about the big drop in the fraction of all households that contain children.

According to the Census, in 2003, families with children made up just 32 percent of households, down from 45 percent in 1970.  This is a  big shift, driven by a bunch of factors all working in the same direction:

• More people don't have children at all.  In 2002, almost 18 percent of women ages 40-44 had never had kids, up from about 10 percent in 1976.  (About 0.3 percent of women have their first child in their 40s.)
• More people delay childbearing (so they're childless for longer)
• People are having fewer kids, even those from cultures that have traditionally valued large families. (A family with 1 child will have a child under 18 for exactly 18 years, while a family with 3 children, 3 years apart, will have one for 24 years.) 
• People live longer after they're done having kids.
• Affluence and mobility both result in more single people -- both young adults and the elderly -- living on their own rather than with their families.  In 2003, over a quarter of all households were people living on their own.  Less than 10 percent had five or more people, down from 20.9 percent in 1970.

I think these trends make it harder to convince businesses that they have to adopt family-friendly policies.  But, as I've said before, it strikes me as utterly insane that in a potential working life of 50 or more years, it's not feasible to take 2 or 3 off to focus on childrearing.

Some good news

Since I often post about bad news, I thought I'd share this encouraging piece of news that came across my desk today.  The CDC reported that births to very young teen mothers (ages 10-14) are down to 0.7 live births per 1,000 girls, half the rate they were in 1990, and the lowest rate since 1946.  This is good news on all levels -- girls this age aren't physically ready to give birth (it's dangerous both to the mother and the baby) and they're not emotionally ready to be parents. 

The interesting thing is that no one really knows why the birth rate has dropped in the last decade -- either for this group of very young teens, or for teens in general (the birth rate for girls 15-19 is 41.7 per 1,000, down from 61.8 in 2000).  The story is a complicated one, involving both better birth control (especially long-term hormonal approaches like depo-provera and norplant) and reduced sexual activity.

"Juggler families"

This week, I was part of a small group that got together at the National Partnership for Women and Families to talk about their work to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act and to extend paid sick and family leave to more workers.  It was a good conversation, and it reminded me that I want to look into California's paid family leave program (which is funded through an employee tax, not by employers) in more detail. 

Someone asked the question, what fraction of families don't have a stay-at-home parent.  I thought I had addressed this question in my discussion of the trends in women's labor force participation (see Who's "opting out"?)  but when I checked, I discovered I hadn't.

The latest figure i could find was for 2001, when 68 percent of children had both parents or the only resident parent in the labor force, up from 59 percent in 1985.  Interestingly, in 1985 this was true for 51 percent of children under 6, and 63 percent of children 6-17.  By 2001, the gap had narrowed significantly, to 66 percent of children under 6 and 70 percent of older children.  (These figures come from Table ES.3.1.A in Trends in the Well-Being of America's Children & Youth: 2003, a handy reference book put out by the fine folks for whom I work.)

The Work-Family program at the New America Foundation likes to refer to these families as "juggler families," which is a nice catchy phrase.  Their talk of how such families have "replaced the traditional family of the breadwinner and the homemaker" is a little misleading, however.  It conveys the impression that all of the working parents in those juggler families are fully committed to the labor force.  But the statistics include a significant number of parents who consider themselves primarily caregivers, but also have some paid work.  I've never seen a comparable figure broken out by hours of work -- if any of my readers has, please let me know.

The National Partnership does a good job of pointing out that paid leave doesn't only benefit families without an at-home parent; in fact, families with only one earner are more vulnerable if illness causes that earner to miss work and lose pay.  Unlike increased funding for child care, many social conservatives support paid family leave; however, the business lobby bitterly opposes it.

SAHMs and SAHDs

As described yesterday, I searched all over the internet to try to substantiate the claim that the number of stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) has increased by 15 percent in less than 10 years.

And finally, I found it: Table SHP-1: Parents and Children in Stay-At-Home Parent Family Groups: 1994 to Present. In fact, this table reports that the number of stay-at-home mothers increased by over 19 percent between 1994 and 2003, from 4.5 million to 5.4 million.

I hope that some of you are saying "but..." right now. Doesn't 5.4 million sound awfully low? For perspective, there were over 93 million women between the ages of 16 and 65. How can this be right? The catch is that Census is using a very narrow definition of what constitutes a stay-at-home parent: you have to be a married parent of a child under 15, out of the labor force for an entire year, say that the reason you're not working is to care for "home and family" and your spouse has to be in the labor force for the entire year. RebelDad did an excellent job least year of explaining the drawbacks of this definition, so I won't repeat them.

Even though this definition isn't perfect, this is the first longitudinal data I've seen on the number of stay-at-home dads (SAHDs), applying the same definition to a consistent data series over time. They found 98,000 SAHDs (using this narrow definition) in 2003, down from a high of 106,00 in 2002, but up from just 49,000 in 1996. However, because the number of SAHDs is relatively, there's a lot of "noise" in the figures -- I asked the Census bureau, and they said that the drop from 2002 to 2003 isn't statistically significant. One way that statisticians deal with this kind of noise is to pool the findings from several years. So I compared the average number of SAHDs for 1994-1996 to the average number for 2001-2003, which suggests a whopping 50.8 percent increase. Just comparing 1994 to 2003
produces a 28.9 percent increase, also quite impressive.

One way to get a sense of the limitations of the definition is to compare this series to a similar one that just looks at married couples, and whether one, both or neither is in the labor force. This comparison indicates that in 70 percent of the married couples where only the husband was in the labor force, the wife met the definition of "stay-at-home mother." But in the married couples where only the wife was in the labor force, only about 10 percent of the husbands met the definition of "stay-at-home father."

One reason for the gap is the requirement that only spouses of year-round workers can count as "at-home parents." I'm not certain, but I think that taking maternity leave is considered as being "not in the labor force." If that's the case, my husband wouldn't have counted as being an at home dad last year, because I was on maternity leave for 12 weeks. Adding back in the parents who meet all of the other requirements to be an at home parent would increase the reported number of SAHDs by 60 percent, to 157,000, but the reported number of SAHMs only by 12 percent, to 6 million. I also think men are less likely to say that the reason they're not working is to "care for family and spouse."

Who's "opting out?"

Last week's 60 Minutes story on (Women) Staying at Home, included the statement that "Census bureau statistics show a 15 percent increase in the number of stay-at-home moms in less than 10 years." I hadn't seen any hard numbers supporting the claim that there's been a big increase in the number of women staying home, so I set off in search of this statistic.

First stop was the Bureau of Labor Statistic's useful databook on Women in the Labor Force. I soon learned that the labor force participation rate (meaning the fraction of the population employed, or looking for work) for women was in 2002 was 59.6 percent, a slight (0.7 percent) decline from the 1990 peak of 60.0 percent, but higher than any year between 1970 (when it was 43.3 percent) 1996.

But, of course, women with children are only a small fraction of all adult women, so there'd have to be a pretty big drop in the number of working mothers for it to show up in the overall labor force participation rate. So I kept looking.

The same databook reports that the labor force participation rate for all women with children under age 18 was 72.2 percent in 2002, down from a peak of 72.9 percent in 2000.* Looking only at women with children under age 3, the rate is 60.5 percent, down from a peak of 62.2 percent in 1998. We're still looking at changes in the 1-3 percent range, nothing earthshattering. So I kept looking.

Next, I found an interesting article from the Monthly Labor Review, a journal put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the headline: "Are women leaving the labor force?" It includes this quote from Barron's, claiming that "In just the past two years, a quiet counterrevolution has begun..." The most interesting thing about this article, however, is that it's from July 1994, shortly before women's labor force participation hit new all-time highs. (For the record, the author, Howard Hayghe, correctly concluded "it is too early to proclaim that the trend of increasing labor force participation rates of women has been halted.") So, is the claim of the retreat from the workforce just hype? I kept looking.

Moving over to the Census bureau's bi-annual report on the Fertility of American Women, which turns out to be the source for this Womens eNews story from last year. This report says that of women who had a child in the last year, 54.6 percent were in the labor force in 2002, down from a peak of 58.7 percent in 1998. That's a 7 percent decline -- albeit from an extremely high point. Looking at the breakout by education, it looks like the biggest percentage decrease is for women without a high school degree, and the smallest decrease is for women with a high school degree, but no college.

So what's going on? I think there are two different stories, at different ends of the labor market. At one end, is the story about the stars and planets aligning in the late 1990s to get more low-income mothers into the labor force than ever before**: welfare reform removed an alternative to working, increased federal and state support for child care made working more possible, the Earned Income Tax Credit made working more profitable, and the strong economy made jobs available. The economy isn't so strong these days, and it shouldn't be a surprise that fewer poor mothers are working. (The big unanswered question is what are they living on, because it's not welfare, but that's a topic for another day.)

The second story is about well-off well-educated women who have the choice whether or not to work because they have other sources of income, most often husbands. For the last 30 years, this group has been more likely to work, not less, than other women, because they have access to the most interesting, renumerative, and flexible jobs. And it does look like there's a small increase in the number who have chosen not to work in the past few years. Whether this is a blip in the trends (as the apparent decline in the early 1990s was), possibly caused by the weak economy, or is the start of a real change (post 9/11 reprioritizing?), I have no idea. And no one else does, either, no matter what they tell you.

Coming tomorrow: The plot thickens: another source of data on stay-at-home moms is found. And stay-at-home dads, too!

Footnotes:

* Yes, mothers have a higher labor force participation rate than all adult women; it's because "all adult women" includes senior citizens.

** I am aware that not all never-married mothers are low-income, but this was the closest graph I could find to what I wanted to show.

Working Hard, Falling Short

The Annie E. Casey Foundation issued a new report this week, called Working Hard, Falling Short. It's about low-income working families, defined as those earning less than twice the poverty line, or about $36,800 for a family of four. About 1/4 of all working families with children fall into this category, accounting for about 1/3 of the children in working families. Those are pretty grim figures.

Or are they?

Last month's Washington Post article on the decline of the middle class reported that about 41 percent of all American households (including those without children) make less than $35,000 a year, down from 54 percent in 1967. (All these figures are in inflation adjusted dollars.)

So, is it terrible that so many families are low-income, or encouraging that so few are?

One thing to note is that a significant portion of the gains of the last 30-40 years are due to the increase in women's labor force participation. A lot of families worked their way out of low-income status by having multiple wage earners contributing to the family income. But that results in child care costs, which come out of the discretionary income. And it doesn't leave families with as much flexibility to respond to family crises. People feel like they're working harder just to keep up -- and there's not a whole lot of room in the day for more work.

Are low-wage jobs "worse" than they were 30 years ago? They're more likely to be in the service sector, less likely to be in manufacturing. They're less likely to be unionized. They're less likely to be 9-5 jobs, more likely to be evenings or weekends, keeping the 24-hour economy running. Or they may be variable shift, with the employer deciding how to staff based on the previous week's sales. I don't know whether such benefits as employer-provided health insurance and paid leave have gone up or down over that time period -- anyone have a data source?

One hint about the problem comes from the title: "Working Hard, Falling Short." Falling short compared to what? Precisely because average incomes have increased so much, the same amount of money feels like less. And, as Tyagi and Warren argue, it's not just a matter of envy, but that low-income families have to compete with better off ones for houses in safe neighborhoods, for access to quality schools, and so on.

School financing

Following on the heels of yesterday's review of The Two-Income Trap is this article from today's New York Times, about the disastrous consequences of Texas' Robin Hood system to equalize school finances.

The basic problem (which the Robin Hood system was designed to fix) is that most public school funding in the United States comes from local property taxes. Rich areas have much more of a valuable property base, and so are able to put more money into their schools. As a recent study from the Education Trust showed, nationwide, there's a gap in school funding of more than $1,000 per student between the highest- and lowest-poverty school districts.

The Robin Hood system was implemented after a group of school districts sued the state, claiming the old system of school funding was unconstitutional, and won. It attempts to overcome this inequity by taking money from the wealthiest school districts -- those with property value above a threshold -- and distributes it to the poorest. The New York Times article, based on an analysis by Harvard economists Caroline Hoxby and Ilyana Kuziemko, explains what went wrong. Hoxby and Kuziemko argue that the problem is that part of what determines the value of property is the quality of the schools. As the quality of the schools went down (for a given level of taxation), the property values also dropped, so the state's share of taxes went down. In order to provide the level of funding they had promised to the poor districts, the state had to lower the threshold and therefore affect more districts. And the spiral continued. They conclude that the Robin Hood system only reduced inequality between school districts by about $500 per student, but destroyed thousands of dollars per student in property value.

What are the implications of this study?

First, it both supports Warren and Tyagi's argument that access to quality schools is a significant portion of what drives up property values, and emphasizes how unlikely it is that their proposal to delink residence from access to schools could ever be implemented. The disruption, as home values in previously "good school districts" plummeted, would be monumental. I can't imagine the circumstances under which such legislation would pass.

Second, it's a strong rebuttal to those who argue that how much money a school district has doesn't matter. Homebuyers in Texas certainly valued access to schools in rich districts less when their funding dropped, even though nothing else about the schools had changed. Thus, it could support an argument for either a minimum floor on school spending per student or for some version of equalization or both. Hoxby and Kuziemko are quite clear that they don't want their paper used as an argument against equalization in general.

Third, as Hoxby and Kuziemko argue, it suggests that lawyers shouldn't be allowed to design tax systems. They claim that the Robin Hood system was designed solely in order to avoid a legal ban on a statewide property tax, and that it does pretty much everything wrong from the standpoint of creating an efficient tax system.

What none of these studies do is tell you what to do if you're a parent and a good liberal who believes in public schools and can't really afford private school anyway and enjoys living in a diverse urban (or semi-urban) area but isn't quite sure that the schools where you live are as good as you want them to be and doesn't want to sacrifice your kid to an abstract principle. (Here's a link to a friend of mine's much funnier and slightly obscene rant on the same subject. Don't click if cussing offends you.)

Tomorrow night we're off to a pizza party being held for parents of preschoolers who are zoned for our local elementary school (which is literally 3 blocks from our house). Part of the goal is to discuss how we can help the school, but another part is just to hold each other's hands and convince ourselves that we're making the right choice.

Sleep

Almost every parent I know thinks that diaper changing is vastly overrated as the worst part of parenting -- it's the lack of sleep, and the interrupted sleep, that kills you. Shortly after my older son was born I took a grim satisfaction in reading a newspaper article about how a number of accused suspects had falsely confessed to major crimes under the pressure of being kept awake for long periods of time.

A British magazine, Mother and Baby, recently released survey results that have gotten a lot of play on the internet. The statistic that's gotten the most attention is the claim that 52 percent of fathers either sleep through their babies cries or pretend to, while mothers only get an average of 4 1/2 hours of sleep a day during the first 4 months of their children's lives. That 4 1/2 hour figure is pretty horrifying; fortunately, it's almost certainly bunk. I couldn't find on their web site any explanation of how the survey was conducted, which almost always means that they had the survey in the magazine and readers sent it back. Well, that means you have a highly selected sample -- those parents who are worked up enough about sleep to bother sending back a stupid survey to a magazine.

However, the Sleep Foundation has also recently released its survey results, based on a more scientific sample. This is a long, fairly technical report, but it has some interesting findings:

* 71 percent of all infants (under 12 months) wake up at least once per night, and 21 percent wake up three or more times per night. Both the number of wakenings and the length of time that they're up decreases as kids get older, but 36 percent of preschoolers are still waking up at least once per night.

* This survey agrees that mothers are by far more likely to respond to a child who needs attention in the night, being the primary respondents for 89% of infants, 85% of toddlers, and 71% of preschoolers.

* They found that the average primary caregiver for a child under 2 months slept 6.2 hours a night, and for all children under 10, 6.8 hours a night. Granted, 6.2 hours broken into 3 2-hour chunks is an order of magnitude less restful than a solid 6 hours, but it's better than 4 1/2. Most parents think they need about 8 hours a night.

*Almost 3 in 10 parents reported having some symptoms of insomnia at least a few nights a week, with nearly half saying they have these symptoms more often since becoming a parent, and about 20 percent saying less often. This hit home, because I've been having trouble sleeping this week. I fall asleep instantly, but when I get woken in the early morning -- typically by the boys, but Tuesday it was by the cat puking next to our bed -- I can't get back to sleep. It's the worst feeling, lying there exhausted, unable to get back to sleep, knowing that my alarm is going to go off in just an hour or so.

* 10 percent of parents of an infant say their child's sleep habits have caused a moderate or significant amount of stress in their relationship with their spouse/partner -- much better than the 60 percent who Mother and Baby claims say that it has created "immense stress."

* There are some interesting statistics comparing infants/toddlers who are put to bed awake versus those put to bed asleep (eg rocked or carried until they fall asleep), suggesting that those who are put to bed awake sleep better. However, I could make the argument that the causation goes in either direction. I'm an agnostic in the sleep wars (cosleeping v. sleep hygiene v. crying it out, etc), believing in doing what works for you. My older son didn't sleep through the night until he was about 14 months, my younger slept through the night at 4 months; we didn't do anything differently.

Not enough hours in the day

I don't know anyone who thinks they have enough time to do everything they want to, especially not working parents. The US government just released the first analyses from its new time use study, which attempts to figure out exactly what we're all doing with the 24 hours a day we get.

As the New York Times points out, it didn't exactly require a multi-million dollar study to tell us that on average, women do more housework and more child care than men. I'm also not exactly shocked to learn that employed mothers get less sleep on average than non-employed mothers.

They haven't released the underlying data yet, but there's still some interesting data in the appendix tables that they did publish, especially Table 6, which breaks respondents out by gender, employment status, and whether there are children of different ages in the household. I immediately turned to employed women, with children under age 6:

Caring and helping for household members (as a primary activity): 2.42 hours a day, versus 3.14 hours a day for non-employed women with young children in the household. That gap is actually quite small, in my opinion, but it's consistent with previous research suggesting that employed mothers cut out sleep, housework and personal time, rather than giving up time with their children. (Table 8 says that women in households with children under 6 spend an average of 6.94 hours a day caring for household children as a "secondary activity," while doing something else, but this isn't split by employment status. First thing on my list of things I'd like to see analyzed when the public use data comes out.)

(By contrast, the numbers for primary care are 1.28 for employed men with young children in the household and 1.23 for non-employed. My guess is that means that non-employed men with children at home are still more likely to be home because they're disabled or otherwise unemployable than because they're choosing to take on child care responsibilities.)

Working: 4.34 hours a day. I think these figures include weekends, so this works out to about 30 hours a week. Women, especially those with young children, are more likely to work part-time than men, but Table 4 also shows that women working full-time work an average of about 2/3 of an hour per day less than men working full-time.

Personal care activities (including sleeping, showering, makeup, etc): 9.23 hours a day, less than non-employed mothers of young children, but more than employed men. I guess women really do take longer to get dressed.

Eating and drinking: 1.06 hours a day, exactly the same as non-employed mothers of young children. The key thing to note here is that at any given time respondents were only allowed to indicate one activity (except for childcare), so all the times that you eat while driving, working, watching tv, etc. don't show up in the survey. Someone who works on the study told me earlier this year that when they were testing the instrument, they discovered that a significant number of people didn't report any eating in the course of the day because it was never their primary activity.

Household activities (e.g. housework, cooking, etc.): 2.00 hours a day, substantially more than any group of men, employed or non-employed, with or without children, but less than non-employed women. A clean house and homecooked meals are among the things that get sacrificed to the time crunch. Interestingly, mothers of young children, regardless of employment, did slightly less household activities than mothers of only school-age children. Shopping is a separate category, coming in at 0.9 hours a day

Leisure and sports: 3.25 hours a day, the lowest of any of the subgroups reported. This is actually higher than I would have guessed. However, this figure has to be read in conjunction with Table 8, which says that women with children under 6 spend an average of 2.43 hours of leisure a day in conjunction with child care. The overall pattern for this one is pretty clear, with men consistently reporting more leisure than women, non-employed more than employed, people without children more than people with children, and people with only older children more than people with young children.

How many babies?

I haven't been able to figure out whether there was some recent statistical release that led to the publication of three articles about fertility statistics in three different publications in the past couple of weeks. It's interesting to see the different takes on the same subject.

The New York Times' article appeared in the Week in Review two weeks ago, noting that population growth has slowed worldwide, leading the UN to lower its prediction for the plateau level of world population to 9 billion, down from its 1968 projection of 12 billion. Most of this decrease is driven by poorer countries, where the combined effects of urbanization, women's education and employment, and reduced child mortality have all acted to drive fertility down. While noting variation in fertility levels from country to country, the article's main thrust is about how widespread the overall downward trend is.

The Economist emphasized the divergence in the trends between Europe and the United States. They point out that while American fertility rates fell during the 60's and 70's, by the mid 80's, they had started to rebound. At present, the U.S. has fertility rates just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, while Western Europe's fertility rates are around 1.4 children per woman, and projected to keep dropping for another 10 years.

The Economist article discusses some possible consequences of this divergence in detail, which I won't rehash (although it's worth reading). I'm intrigued by the causes, and the relationship between fertility rates, women's labor force participation, and government policies to subsidize the costs of childbearing (e.g. paid parental leave). It strikes me as ironic that the U.S., which doesn't have a child allowance, nonetheless has a higher birthrate than many countries that do. In some cases, such as Singapore, the causality may run in the other direction -- governments adopted pro-child policies BECAUSE their birthrates were low -- but my impression is that the child allowances in Europe date to before the recent declines in fertility.

The third article was a slightly bizarre op-ed piece in the Washington Post, about how religous conservatives have a competitive advantage over liberals, because they have more children. The article struck me as mostly a way for the author, Philip Longman, to promote his book about how declining birthrates are, contrary to conventional wisdom, bad for the world. The article struck me as misleading because it ignored both the role of immigrants, who tend to support Democrats, and the electoral college. It also included the statement that "African Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, now have a lower average fertility rate than whites." I haven't been able to find this anywhere on the NCHS website and it's not consistent with anything else I've read.

****
Follow-up: I emailed Longman to ask him about the statistic and here's his reply:

"Thank you for your query. Since I wrote the piece, I have become aware that NCHS has revised its fertility statistics. The latest numbers show the Black, total fertility rate at 2,051.0, and the White at 2,040.0. This amounts to a difference of just over one-one-hundredth of a child per woman, so if I were writing the piece today, I would say that the Black fertility rate has fallen to point that it is virtually the same as the White rate.

"For more information, see: Revised Birth and Fertility Rates for the 1990s
and New Rates for Hispanic Populations, 2000 and 2001: United States, National Vital Statistics Report, Volume 51, Number 12, Table 3: Crude birth rates, general fertility rates, total fertility rates, and birth rates, by age and race of mother based on the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and percent difference: United States, 1991-2001.

"By the way, this same revision shows that Black fertility has fallen 17 percent since 1991, while White fertility has risen by 1 percent."

First day of school

Today was my older son's first day of preschool. It's the same school he attended last year, and he was eager to get going, happy to see his friends and teachers. It's amazing to me to think of how much he's grown in the past year, and what he'll be like a year from now.

One of the things that never gets talked about in the endless discussions of whether child care is good or bad for children -- which are typically framed as being about whether or not women should work outside the home-- is that non-employed parents use child care as well. We send our son to preschool because he likes it, because it's a good opportunity for him to learn social skills (sharing, taking turns), because it gives our other son a chance to have some one-on-one attention, and because it gives my husband a break.

Child care is expensive, of course, so it's mostly affluent non-employed parents who use it -- full- or part-time nannies if their children are infants, preschool if their children are older. Very low-income parents may also be able to send their children to Head Start, which was explicitly designed to try to make up the gap in the learning opportunities available to poor children before they start school.