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Abstinence pledges
It seems to boil down to Larry Iannaccone's model of religion:
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Here is much more, on the general question of why the teenage children of evangelicals get pregnant so often. The first question is whether they do, adjusting for all the proper demographics. Second, I wonder if there isn't also a combined lifecycle/genetic effect. Maybe if you're rowdy when you're young, you're religious when you're old, but the kids that pop out are on average rowdy too.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 31, 2008 at 07:30 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
Posted by: Kevin at Oct 31, 2008 4:50:04 PM
From the New Yorker article: "The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota)."
The difference that stands out to me in that statement is less "Republican-leaning states vs. Democratic-leaning states" and more "Warm states vs. cold states" (which I suppose is red vs. blue in a different sense).
You got a good point..So then is it may be because girls have more chance to put on skimpy clothing in those warm states?
Posted by: Brad at Oct 31, 2008 6:15:41 PM
Sorry, no time to reply. I was busy writing to my great-grand-baby daddy (he got four different girls pregnant, you know, but that was common back then) and listening to Cole Porter sing, "I wanna &8ck you in the @$$"
Posted by: K T Cat at Oct 31, 2008 7:07:09 PM
The New Yorker article is intellectual fraud based on an awful misreading of the statistics. The divorce rate figure used is meaningless and the teen pregnancy rate figure actually disproves the conclusion.
Divorce by state: Talbot uses the number of divorces per 1,000 residents rather than the percent of marriages in a state that end in divorce. If you look at the rate of marriages by state, it's obvious that the reason people aren't getting divorced as often in the states with lower divorce rates is that they aren't getting married in the first place.
Teen pregnancy: The teen pregnancy rate for Hispanic teenagers is four times the rate for white teenagers, while the black rate is three times the white rate. It should thus come as absolutely no surprise that the five states with the highest teen pregnancy rates have very large black and/or Hispanic populations, while the states with the lowest teen pregnancy rates are almost entirely white.
Hooray for bad journalism.
Posted by: Sean at Oct 31, 2008 7:09:28 PM
OK, let's try some math. According to the US Department of Labor (the title suggestes that they get involved in pregnancy issues), the illegitimacy rate for whites in 1940 was 2%. In 1963 it was 3.07%. For blacks it was around 16% in 1940.
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/moynchapter2.htm
Now we're all enlightened, progressive, secular people here, so we know for a biological fact that teenagers will have sex. Current data for the US says that the average age for the loss of virginity is about 17.
http://current.com/items/88792729_average_age_of_virginity_loss_by_country
So, since we know that 50% or so of all 17 year olds in 1940 were having sex and we know that the illegtimacy rates were in the low single digits, we can therefore conclude that most marriages occurred around age 14, assuming a normal distribution for the age of sexual activity and taking a guess at the standard deviation.
Furthermore, I ... whoa! Never mind! You should see this YouTube video I'm watching. The Andrews Sisters are strapped to a king sized bed and Bing Crosby, dressed in leather and looking like a bat is brandishing a huge kielbasa in one hand and a hand-cranked egg beater in another ...
Posted by: K T Cat at Oct 31, 2008 7:39:18 PM
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."
St. Augustine
Thanks Tyler!
Posted by: at Nov 1, 2008 12:25:11 PM
Green grow the rashes, O;
Green grow the rashes, O;
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,
Are spent among the lasses, O.
"Green Grow The Rashes, O," by Robert Burns
http://www.worldburnsclub.com/poems/translations/green_gro_the_rashes_o.htm
I love the sung version by Mary Black (can only find this one, with Altan):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qipJANuAnn0
Posted by: at Nov 1, 2008 8:04:25 PM
Ah, here it is, the most beautiful version I know of "Green Grow The Rashes, O," by Robert Burns:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DR73CDUtdE
"twere not for the lassies, o!"
"The sweetest hours that ere I spent, were spent among the lassies, o!"
"arms around my dearie o"
Posted by: at Nov 1, 2008 8:14:08 PM
People seem to be taking history too seriously after the first comment scared them. Teen culture, that is people 13-19 having independance, is relatively recent. 100 years ago, how many teens had mobile phones, email or cars? Population densities were much lower, mass transport was expensive, many teens had to work...
...there was no female or sexual liberation yet, there was no financial help for single mothers, catching STDs was more likely...
...contraceptives were less reliable, births were more dangerous, sex itself was a taboo...
...er, so there's quite a few differences between 'now' and 'then' that meant people would have less sex. Also, many of our data was collected by the church, which has a serious agenda when it comes to sex.
I think the only lessons to be learnt from the past are how not to approach sex.
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