Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics
Roberto Rivera on the Truth About Loving Our Kids
I’ve got a confession to make: I’m a geek. No, I’m not a “carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, [such] as biting off the heads of live chickens.” I mean the contemporary sense of the word: a person whose curiosity and enthusiasms meet with the disapproval of others. My frowned-upon pursuit is statistics. I love baseball partly because the numbers mean something. And it’s not just baseball. You can’t really understand American culture unless you, as they say on Marketplace, do the numbers.
That’s why I’m a sucker for the Statistical Abstract of the United States and why I love browsing through page after page of Census Bureau data. I won’t say that figures never lie, but I will say that they are a lot less misleading than we are. I admit that you can’t reduce life to a mathematical model. However, if I had to choose between the numbers and position papers from interest groups—whether left or right—I’d trust the numbers to provide me with a picture that more closely conforms to reality. That’s because the data from the Census or the Abstract does one thing exceptionally well: It exposes the gap between our rhetoric and our actions.
A good example of this function is the data released this past spring by the Census Bureau on households and families. We Americans never tire of saying how much we love our children. Nearly every policy proposal is justified by an appeal to our kids’ well-being and future. Think of the woman on The Simpsons who, at every Springfield town meeting, yells, “But what about the children?” Now it barely qualifies as parody.
For instance, former Clinton Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner was famous—some would say infamous—for making every proposed regulation a test of how much we love our kids. Browner wasn’t alone in the Clinton administration in her “it’s for the children” brand of politics. Her mentor, former Vice President Gore, introduced new anti-smog measures by telling Americans that “we’re moving forward on our greatest challenge . . . and that is to provide a better and safer and healthier world for our children and their children to come.”
It isn’t only environmental policy. Remember the “soccer moms” of a few years ago? They’re still here, only they’re called “suburban voters” now. Whatever they’re called, they’re still considered the key to presidential elections. And the key to the key, as we’re constantly being told, lies in issues that affect the well-being of their kids: education, health care, gun control, day care, and so on. Whether we’re talking about the Kyoto Protocols or urging Oregon State University to use as its mascot a less aggressive cartoon beaver that won’t scare children, the message is always, “There’s nothing we won’t do for our children.”
Well, except get married, or stay married. During the 1990s, the number of people living alone, for the first time in history, exceeded the number of people living in two-parents-plus-children households.
The Rest of the Numbers
As several conservative commentators have pointed out, this statistic isn’t as significant as it might first appear. As John Leo of U.S. News & World Report noted, postponing marriage, combined with longer life expectancy, makes it likelier that people will live alone at some point in their lives. Using the total number of households as the basis for comparison ensures that even if the total number of traditional families rises in absolute terms, they would still seem to be falling behind. What’s more, there’s plenty of reason to suspect the motives of some of the media outlets trumpeting the news.
But conservative reassurances about the effects of media bias aren’t so, well, reassuring—especially when you look at the rest of these numbers. It’s hard not to agree with what Johns Hopkins’s Andrew Cherlin told the Washington Post: “The central place of marriage in our family system is eroding.” What the numbers show is the growth of what Jennifer Roback Morse, in her book, Love & Economics, calls “replacements” and “substitutes” for the two-parent family. The single fastest growing households are ones comprised of “unmarried partners.” These grew 72 percent, to 5.4 million households. What’s more, at least one-third of these households contain at least one minor child.
But it wasn’t only unmarried partner households that experienced growth. Single-parent households continued to rise. In fact, every imaginable kind of living arrangement saw its share of the total number of households rise during the nineties—except the two-parent kind. What we’re left with is that only 62 percent of American children live in a traditional two-parent family—a figure that is virtually unchanged from the early nineties.
Roberto Rivera is a Fellow at the Wilberforce Forum at Prison Fellowship. His work has appeared in Books & Culture, and he is also a regular contributor to the web magazine Boundless. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
25.3—May/Jun 2012
Calls for Freedom, Democracy & Secularism End Up with None of the Above by Hunter Baker
30.2—March/April 2017
Our Path to Holiness Runs Straight Through Calvary by Robin Phillips
28.6—Nov/Dec 2015
on the Deepest Longings of the Restless & the Lonely by William Graddy
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
