Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

With academic social studies you can usually assume they've controlled for the basics like that, especially if the conclusions are unfortunate for the left which always means rigor gets ramped up significantly. They're working from large scale surveys and controlling for simple confounders is easy.

Sure enough:

> Arpino & Mogi explored mechanisms behind this reproductive pattern, finding that extreme right individuals were 4–5 percentage points more likely than centrists to intend having a child within three years. This effect persisted after controlling for religiosity, education, and income

You can just grep papers for "control" to check this sort of thing, as terminology is quite consistent.

There are big differences between left and right in fertility (=how many children you choose to have, in demographic discussions) and this isn't at all a controversial claim in social studies. The question is not does it exist or is it confounded but why does it occur - or if you really want, what underlying factors strongly correlated with leftism are the true cause. You can think of that as confounders if you like.

I also follow this space but can't agree with the claim that "No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions". There are pretty strong theories and ideas about the root causes, and those also lead to solutions. However they are anathema to the left so depending on what exact subspace you follow you may never see them (they'd be censored immediately).

For the same reason you won't get much of that kind of discussion here on Hacker News.

For my parent's generation they were typically the first member of the family line to have ever gone to university and it was considered a point of immense pride to have done so. There seems to have been no concern back then about intellectual standards or political bias in universities, it wasn't a topic for the average parent.

This got passed down. My brother and I were both encouraged to go to university, it was actually the assumed default and when my brother decided not to it was quite the mini scandal. He was sent to private meetings with the headmistress of the school to try and talk him out of the decision (not going was the right call, he did great without a degree and much better than anyone else). But any university would have done. Nobody had concerns about competence or bias.

A good question is whether that encouragement was because standards were higher. In some sense they must have been, at least for the quality of the student body, because they were so much more selective. But if you go back and read old scientific papers they were often not any better in terms of rigor or standards than papers are today and sometimes they were clearly worse. It wasn't noticed because there was no open access and no internet forums or social media where people could compare notes.

It seems obvious that at least some people are going to be way more selective about whether to help their children go to university nowadays. The costs are much higher, cheating is vastly more rampant so the value of a degree has been devalued a lot, and awareness of the very low intellectual standards is much more widespread.

Yes they do. Just grep the paper for the word "control" and you can quickly find the answers to these questions. This isn't a new finding and they've controlled for all the obvious factors.

They dont care about humanity. You can see that pretty clearly.

And conservatives were the punishing ones toward pregnant teens - the conservative answer to teenage pregnancy was to make her suffer as much as possible.

That is why it is especially appealing. The political groups that blamed pregnant teenagers and tried to ensure pregnancy destroyes their lives are complaining we dont have enough pregnant teenagers. And you can bet on them being cruel to pregnant teenagers again if that goes up again.