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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Okay, I've found a graph from 2019 that compared against TFR: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1238575/total-fertility-rate-us-education/. There's also this graph that subdivides by race that shows different race-based curves, which is an objection someone brought up elsewhere.

The hook-shaped curve is evidence for what I'm talking about-- that selection pressures have returned to favor educational attainment (and therefore, by proxy, IQ). Especially since the true strength of the relationship is going to be obscured by older women with less education who already had all their children, and obscured by an inability to differentiate between then-young mothers who won't and will later get additional education.

Elsewhere someone brought up the objection that even if positive selection pressure in favor of education has begun to apply to whites and hispanics, it doesn't seem to apply to blacks, which would mean we should expect to see racial iq differences (if they exist) to continue to diverge. But I reject that reasoning on the basis due to the fact that base rates of education have always been lower for blacks for structural reasons (i.e., racism, poverty), that black TFR started from a higher modern basepoint and has dropped faster, and that therefore the existing obscuring effects of having an older, less-educated cohort would be stronger.

In the interest of honesty I also found this graph for birth rates in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/195970/number-of-births-by-educational-attainment-of-mother-in-the-united-states/ but I'm having a hard time comparing it against the original graph because it splits things up into different brackets.

Thanks for these. I don't see much to argue about with them, though I'm suspicious about that since the hook-shaped curve flatters my priors from other vaguely-recalled studies. The zeitgeist of "I shouldn't have kids while I'm still struggling with the rat race" favors the people who've won (their idea of) the rat race, but not as much as it favors the people who just decide not to run.

The Statista graph you linked doesn't show positive selection on educational attainment. The fact that the small minority of women with graduate degrees have slightly higher TFR than women with associate's or bachelor's degrees does not make up for the fact that they have lower fertility than the majority of women who have no college degree. It's still clearly the case that the majority of children are being born to women with below-average educational attainment.