Democrats have more children than Republicans. WSJ is wrong

In a WSJ opinion article entitled The Fertility Gap, Arthur C. Brooks writes:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. 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 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.

With his claim that there are “more little Republicans than little Democrats,” Mr. Brooks demonstrates that he is either (1) too stupid to be allowed to use the GSS and write about it in the Wall Street Journal; or (2) intentionally misleading people.

Let’s look at the actual GSS data comparing Democrats to Republicans (using only 1996-2004 data to reflect the current parties and not how they were in the 1970s):

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		PARTYID
		1 Democrat	2 Ind	3 Republican	ROW TOTAL
CHILDS	0: NONE	26.6 1,258	31.3 1,646	26.0 986	28.2 3,890
	1: ONE	16.7 792	17.1 901	15.6 590	16.6 2,283
	2: TWO	24.6 1,167	25.4 1,336	27.9 1,057	25.8 3,560
	3: THREE	15.9 753	14.6 767	17.6 665	15.8 2,185
	4: FOUR	8.5 403	6.1 320	7.5 283	7.3 1,006
	5: FIVE	3.4 162	2.8 149	2.7 104	3.0 415
	6: SIX	2.0 96	1.2 61	1.1 43	1.5 200
	7: SEVEN	.9 42	.6 33	.9 33	.8 108
	8: EIGHT OR MORE	1.4 65	.9 49	.7 26	1.0 140
	COL TOTAL	100.0 4,738	100.0 5,262	100.0 3,787	100.0 13,787
Means		1.94	1.69	1.86	1.82
Std Devs		1.75	1.63	1.60	1.67
Unweighted N		4,738	5,262	3,787	13,787

As we see, the average Democrat has 1.94 children and the average Republican has only 1.86 children. The opposite of what Brooks tells us.

This is because poor people have more children than rich people, and everyone knows that the Republicans are the party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the poor. And the Democrats are also the party of blacks and Hispanics who have much higher birthrates than whites.

But everyone knows that conservatives vote Republican. How is it possible that conservatives have more children but Republicans have fewer children? Well the answer is that there is not a perfect correlation between political party and whether a voter identifies himself as “liberal” or “conservative.” Furthermore, a plurality of respondents identified themselves as “independent.”

A big component of “liberal” and “conservative” is how religious a person is. Religious people are more likely to identify themselves as “conservative.” When we examine birthrates based on a measure of religiosity, we see a huge birthrate difference between the religious and the secular (once again looking only at 1996-2004 data):

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		BIBLE
		1 WORD OF GOD	2 INSPIRED WORD	3 BOOK OF FABLES	4 OTHER	ROW TOTAL
CHILDS	0: NONE	20.2 591	29.5 1,342	41.5 616	37.0 44	28.5 2,593
	1: ONE	16.5 484	16.8 767	15.1 224	17.6 21	16.5 1,496
	2: TWO	26.8 786	26.1 1,190	21.6 320	26.1 31	25.6 2,327
	3: THREE	18.0 529	15.3 696	12.7 189	10.9 13	15.7 1,427
	4: FOUR	9.7 285	6.7 304	4.7 70	4.2 5	7.3 664
	5: FIVE	4.1 120	2.6 117	2.3 34	2.5 3	3.0 274
	6: SIX	1.9 56	1.4 65	1.3 19	.8 1	1.6 141
	7: SEVEN	1.1 33	.9 42	.2 3	.8 1	.9 79
	8: EIGHT OR MORE	1.6 48	.7 33	.5 8	.0 0	1.0 89
	COL TOTAL	100.0 2,932	100.0 4,556	100.0 1,483	100.0 119	100.0 9,090
Means		2.16	1.75	1.40	1.43	1.82
Std Devs		1.75	1.63	1.56	1.48	1.68
Unweighted N		2,932	4,556	1,483	119	9,090

I previously wrote about how more intelligent people have less children.

The trend in the United States is that poor, religious, and stupid people are having more children, while rich, secular, and smart people are having fewer children.

I don’t see the birthrate pattern as a good thing for the future of the United States.

UPDATE

Read my important followup post: Bush voters have more children than Gore voters.

Comments

[Ned]

Your analysis is much better than the WSJ's.

[Rob]

Brooks likes being quantitative, but he's scared to follow the numbers. He spoke at my school, and said that the locations with the highest birthrates voted republican, which he got from Sailer, but he did not cite the stronger correlation: higher white birthrate = more republican.

[IC]

Well, it is liberal whites who have fewer kids than conservative whites. Only white liberals vote. Minorities are most democrats with more kids. But minority democrats do not vote.

WSJ imply white liberals.

[Peter]

Blacks do not have "much higher birthrates than white." Slightly higher, yes, but not "much" higher.

[AG]

HS: Did you have a study indicating white liberals with higher IQ and lower birth rate compared to white conservatives?

Anyhow, high IQ with low birth rate fit Rushton theory again and again.

[SFG]

It's really pretty easy to solve this. There are really THREE groups: white liberals, white conservatives, and minorities. white conservatives have more kids than white liberals but fewer than minorities, which produces all sorts of statistical anomalies because you have a high and a low group mixed together and compared with a medium group.

Separate out race.

[Douglas Knight]

Half Sigma:
everyone knows that the Republicans are the party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the poor.

Yes, everyone knows it, but is it true? I believe the average incomes are comparable. The distributions are probably not best described by a single number that way. One thing I've heard is that Republican states are poor, but in each state, Republicans are rich. These two factors should cancel each other out.

[Michael Martine]

I've always maintained the so-called culture war is actually a population war. Thanks for actually doing some work with those numbers.

[donny todds]

Republicans believe in a government for themselves and can have as many kids as they'ed like, Libertarians believe in government for nobody so dont care how many kids they have, and Democrats believe in government for everybody and try to have less kids because they know they have to take care of everyone elses kids And if you remove the kid factor the same rule applies.