In today's Wall Street Journal, "The Fertility Gap" between Democrats and Republicans is analyzed:

According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated, politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given the fact that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections.

For a less politically correct treatment, here's an earlier article with stark graphs (that's free):

The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions.

But that's just the facts. The philosophy question is more interesting.

If the adults have less than 200+ children by the time they die, their philosophy will have to spread faster than their progeny because at less than replacement rate the base of supporters will shrink. In mathematical terms, a stochastic series with an average geometric mean less than one will converge at 0.

In population terms, subpopulations with less fertility than replacement values will die out.

Religions with an admonishment to be fruitful and multiply will last longer than competing ones. Philosophies that call for zero or negative population growth will commit suicide in a whisp of finite time. It doesn't take many generations for a philosophy to die out. A philosophy that garners 3/4 of the previous generation's adherents will go from 150 million adherents to 1,500 aherents in 40 generations.

Optimism about the human condition is selected for. People who believe in Julian Simon's theory of plentiful commodities and bountiful technology (The Ultimate Resource 2) will be more fertile than the worriers about carbon pollution and the population problem du jour. The former ideas have positive probability of being eternal.

The Democratic / Republican divide may be trivial in comparison with global fertility figures for all of humanity. Try Anglosphere versus ???? for example.

= = =

Of course, a subset of humanity that incorporates an admonishment to be fruitful and multiply will last longer than competing ones and that will make them far better space colonists, no? But we have discussed this before, haven't we?

Sure hope they corrected for age. People tend to be liberal when they're in their twenties. It kind of goes with the college scene, and besides you're a beggar in adult society -- no experience, low job skills, no savings -- so naturally you sympathize with other beggars. People tend to grow conservative with age, morgages, children.

Soooo...if you're not careful, the 200 random liberal adults will tend to be much younger than the 200 random conservative adults, and, gosh, it wouldn't be too surprising if younger adults had fewer children.

Carl:

I believe the rates are adjusted for age. The best way to look at this is to compare red states and blue states -- the red states definitely have higher reproductive rtaes, even when they are, like Utah, prosperous.

There's another factor -- as a meme-set becomes established in a larger and larger percentage of the population of an area, it tends to propogate proportionally more vigorously and effectively, particularly if missionary activity is strongly encouraged by the meme-set. So genetic success and memetic success tend to be mutually reinforcing.

I always used to tease by anti-natalist acquaintences in California by referring to the Zero Population Growth organization as the "Movement for a More Mormon America". It annoyed them, particularly because it's true.

Re the question of the Anglosphere -- overall, the core Anglosphere nations have a higher average fertility than equivalently developed Continental European nations, or Japan, but not by enormous amounts. Due to the hgih religious-cultural diversity in the Anglosphere, there are pockets of prosperous, high-fertility subcultures, which will become a higher total percentage of the Anglosphere assuming trends continue. At that point the disparity will probably increase.

The big development today is that many developing natins are also starting to show developed-world population trends, China and India included, but even Mexico now.

Since it's *lifetime* fertility rates we're discussing, that's mostly done. Still might be some large bias, but it'll be harder to find. Also some subgroups in the the Red States are among the most fertile ethnic groups anywhere in the world. The Hutterites, for example, had an estimated average lifetime fertility over 6 children in 1980 though it was on the decline.

Well, I'm sure California politicians Fabian Nunez -D, Phil Angelides -D, and Antonio Villaraigosa -D aren't worried a bit about the "fertility gap" in white voters.

Bill: "We have discussed this before, haven't we?" Is that an allusion to Battlestar Galactica?

Carl: "People tend to be liberal when they're in their twenties." If they have kids in their late twenties and thirties (and forties) when they are old and rich enough to be Republican (but not yet super rich enough to be Democrat), that's what they will pass on to their kids instead of their youthful Democrat idea(l)s. The 2004 piece talks about migration too.

Karl: Do you think hispanic fertility will cause the Senate to have individual member districts rather than at-large state districts?

Probably not, Sam. Even if it is a good idea (I really haven't thought about it), you'd have to get a constitutional amendment passed to change voting schemes for US Senator. This was already done in the 17th Amendment which provided for the direct election of senators. So it is possible.

But I don't think there's such a compelling reason to create districts for senators. First, any regional group which is a deciding factor in elections will probably resist such an approach. Eg, the Hispanics in California will probably lose substantial voting power if the state were split into north and south senate districts. New York City would probably be split off from the rest of New York. There are several states where a few urban areas are highly influential. These would probably lose half their influence since they would most likely end up in one district or the other.

Second, creating districts for the US Senate does run counter to the purpose of the Senate. Ie, the senator is supposed to represent the entire state. Third, you provide more opportunities for gerrymandering which IMHO is a ridiculous problem in the House of Representatives.

I think a better approach would be to modify the House of Representatives to allow some degree of proportional representation. I'm not sure it would even require a constitutional amendment since some of this is supposedly decided at the state level. For example, in California, going from 1 representative per district for 53 districts, you could have 3 representatives per district (except for one with only 2 representatives and 2/3 the population) for a total of 18 districts.

Not in favor of Senate districts. It's a way for incumbents to consolidate power ahead of demographic shifts. Whoever is in charge of the redistricting can gerrymander to hold onto one seat by creating a majority district instead of losing both seats. It's temporary; at the next redistricting, the (new) party in power can redistrict the Senate seats too unless there is a provision that they must stay the same for a full 10 years.

Karl:

Multi-member districts are even more subject to gerrymandering than single-member districts. Usually they get set up so the dominant party is guaranteed two seats and the smaller party gets one seat. The bulk of the minority strength, if distributed unevenly, is shoehorned into districts where they take two and the other takes one. Places with such systems are even less competitive than the current congress.

A better idea would be a rigid mathematical formula for geographical divvision of the state, just starting at one corner and carving out districts across and down. Or having geographically even-area contiguous districts, but giving each legislator a vote in the chamber weighted by the population of his district.

Interesting. Some religious fanatics groups in my country as well as some refugees of certain religion and region have much more kids than the average people. It remains to be seen if they can pass on the habit to a significant percentage of their own children.

Also, with limited resources (this has happened in my country in the past, when good farmland had been divided smaller every generation) it is not necessarily wise to have as many kids as possible, if you can't afford to take care of all of them well enough. There might be an optimal point. Have 4 kids and take care of them all well. Or have 10 kids, 5 die of malnutrition and sickness, and the rest end up in dangerous and unhealthy jobs because of lack of education.

All countries go through demographic changes and industrialize. Inheritance rules, mortality statistics and so on all matter. But constant throughout the ages are philosophical differences. Democrats and Republicans are all having fewer children than 1900 due to improvements in education, health, decreased infant mortality and effective pensions. Still, there is a differential that will persist based on philosophy.

Just that having more kids doesn't necessarily make them succesful enough to be worth it. K and R strategy and all that.

Ugh. I didn't mean the comment about age-normalization to be taken quite so literally. What I meant to do was suggest one be exceedingly careful about interpreting this kind of work. Statistically speaking, the conclusions are on pretty shaky ground (although I will note I suspect they are, nevertheless, correct).

I'll try something less easily shrugged off: who doesn't think having children changes your general attitudes? Hopefully no one. So then, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: which comes first, the attitudes or the (lack of) children? Not easy to know, is it?

The generic problem with any statistical study like this is that it isn't longitudinal. The only way to be sure you've established cause and effect (versus mere correlation) is to measure people's political attitudes before they can possibly have children, and then watch to see whether they do (and watch political attitudes as you go along, too). This, and only this, makes it possible to make the case that the one causes the other.

An analogy: if I did a study of people who had had heart attacks in the last year, and of those who had not, and asked which had implanted pacemakers, I would undoubtably find that those who had heart attacks were more likely to have had implanted pacemakers. Eureka! I have found that pacemakers cause heart attacks! Or not. Actually, I've just found a correlation (one easily explained by the fact that pacemakers are more likely to be implanted with people with heart disease, who are also at risk for heart attacks).

The only way to discover cause and effect is to do a longitudinal study: I need to select people with and without pacemakers, and follow them over time to see who had heart attacks and who didn't. Then, of course, I'd find that, other things being equal, those with pacemakers had fewer heart attacks -- that pacemakers prevent, not cause, heart attacks.

All this study does is show a correlation between self-described liberals and lower fertility. It doesn't tell you dick about whether the former causes the latter, the latter causes the former, or they are both caused by some other factor.

Does it matter? Sure. Suppose fertility and liberalism are correlated, but not causually. Or suppose infertility causes liberalism. Will liberalism die out? Nope. It will merely rise and fall with fluctuations in fertility. You can only make the Darwinian argument that liberals are breeding themselves out of the species if you know liberalism causes infertility.

"If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids."

That's because God loves them more, and commands the stork to give them more children.

I don't know if you would consider it a decent proxy for a formal longitudinal study, Carl, but the West Side of L.A. has had a population that averages politically very liberal for at least four or five decades now. Despite the fact that California, as a whole, shows vigorous population growth over this period, and now has a larger percentage of the total U.S. Congressional delegation than ever, the West Side keeps losing a Congressional district or two every census/redistricting cycle even as the state, overall, picks up more. I'm satisfied that the causation arrow for this correlation points from political philosophy to reproductive results. Then there's the added factor that the West Side is also the most heavily gay part of town too.

Both causation arrows point to lower participation in the Democratic Party. If people with fewer kids become Democrats or people who are Democrats have fewer kids there are fewer kid Democrats. There may be enough new adds from other sources, but encouraging fewer kids seems counterproductive to political power.

Republicans are known for having more children. They are also known for their denunciation of science, dependance upon religion, and controlled by fear.

So, in 200 years, we can logically expect a preponderance of dumb religious sheep whose first response to anything they don't understand will always be first to legislate it out of existance, and when that fails, violence.

Unfortunately, other countries who do not follow this path will logically be magnitudes more intelligent, and with the products of that intelligence, will eat the US for dinner.

If only I could live to see that day, I'd be ROTFLMAO.

LOL, Johanna.

The one remaining Democrat will then trigger the Omega bomb like at the end of the Planet of the Apes. Oops, I suppose that was a spoiler.