Religiosity, economic views, and children

There has been lots of blog chatter recently about the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals.

In order to better understand this, I ran two regression analyses. The first analysis predicts the respondent's political views as measured on a seven point scale from liberal to conservative. The second analysis predicts how many children the respondent has.

In both cases, the independent variables are (1) EQWLTH, a seven point scale asking the respondent whether he believes the government should reduce income differences between the rich and poor; and (2) BIBLE, which asks if the respondent thinks the Bible is the direct word of God, the inspired word of God, or just a book of fables.

EQWLTH is a measure of economic libertarianism.

BIBLE is a measure of religiosity.

Let's examine the results:

Variables
Role	Name	Label	Range	MD	Dataset
Dependent	POLVIEWS	THINK OF SELF AS LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	EQWLTH	SHOULD GOVT REDUCE INCOME DIFFERENCES	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	BIBLE(1-3)	FEELINGS ABOUT THE BIBLE	1-4	0,8,9	1
Weight	WT2004NR	WEIGHT	.35-5.92		1
Filter	YEAR(1998-2004)	GSS YEAR FOR THIS RESPONDENT	1972-2004		1

Regression Coefficients					Test That Each Coefficient = 0
	B	SE(B)	Beta	SE(Beta)	T-statistic	Probability
EQWLTH	.180	.010	.252	.015	17.191	.000
BIBLE(1-3)	-.404	.030	-.197	.015	-13.430	.000
Constant	4.219	.070			59.843	.000

Variables
Role	Name	Label	Range	MD	Dataset
Dependent	CHILDS	NUMBER OF CHILDREN	0-8	9	1
Independent	EQWLTH	SHOULD GOVT REDUCE INCOME DIFFERENCES	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	BIBLE(1-3)	FEELINGS ABOUT THE BIBLE	1-4	0,8,9	1
Weight	WT2004NR	WEIGHT	.35-5.92		1
Filter	YEAR(1998-2004)	GSS YEAR FOR THIS RESPONDENT	1972-2004		1

Regression Coefficients					Test That Each Coefficient = 0
	B	SE(B)	Beta	SE(Beta)	T-statistic	Probability
EQWLTH	.002	.013	.002	.015	.144	.885
BIBLE(1-3)	-.400	.036	-.166	.015	-11.109	.000
Constant	2.522	.084			30.166	.000

DISCUSSION

We see that whether or not a person considers himself liberal or conservative is an equal mix of religion (more religious corresponds with more conservative), and libertarian economic views (more libertarian corresponds with more conservative).

The T-statistic is higher for the EQWLTH question, possibly because the EQWLTH question is a seven point scale while the BIBLE question is only a three point scale. It would be fair to say that religion and economic views are given approximately equal weight when people consider their liberal-conservative orientation.

When we look at how many children the respondent has, the respondent's answer to the EQWLTH question has no correlation with the number of children. But the BIBLE question has about as strong a correlation with number of children as it did with political views.

This means that when people like Steve Sailer make a big deal about the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals, they are not accurately understanding the real correlation.

Being conservative is correlated with more children only because religiosity is correlated with more children. It has nothing to do with "conservative" economic views.

Thus it's misleading to talk about how conservatives have more children than liberals. The true story is that religious people have more children than secular people, and that economic conservatives have no more and no less children than economic liberals.

Comments

[Austrian]

Off-topic, but did you know there's a debate involving you going on: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/09/all-of-this-blogging-in-drag-is.html

David Lat and Libertarian Man of Mystery do no favors to women (and especially women bloggers) when they pose as women or caricature “female triviality” to suit their own ends...

[Spungen]

This makes more sense. When deciding whether to have children, non-religious people would factor their resources into the decision more than religious people would.

[Spungen]

Ha! Libertarian Girl's legacy lives on. Well, I for one would not lump you in with David Lat, especially not under the "frat boy asshole" label.

"You can read Libertarian Man of Mystery’s blog for more sickeningly offensive posts about women."

Hmmm ... The post Belle quoted was the only one I remember being kind of piggy, but maybe I haven't read thoroughly enough. I always thought that post was off-base, mainly because ... well, look at who LG attracted (angry older men), and the *kind* of attention she got.

[Frank N Stein]

So to summarize all these statistics given over all your posts:

The lower your IQ, the more children you will have.
The more religious you are, the more children you will have.
The lower your IQ, the more religious you will be.

IQ being strongly correlated with genes, and having more children increasing your genetic impact on the future, our country is therefore becoming dumber and more religious.

Got it. Now let's move on to something more interesting.

[Steve Sailer]

My primary interest is not in whether people say they are conservative or liberal but in which party they vote for in Presidential elections.

Second, my interest is primarily in the largest important swing voting bloc: non-Hispanic whites. Biblical literalism is common among blacks, but no matter how conservative they are on religion, they almost never vote GOP. Hispanics fall in between. We don't need a sophisticated model to explain black voting in Presidential elections, so including blacks merely adds noise to the data.

Third, as Inductivist showed recently, this gap in number of children between Republican and Democratic voters is a recent phenomenon. It is noticeable among younger people but not among empty nesters.

[Half Sigma]

Steve, the Republican Party has been picking up the high birthrate religious conservatives, but losing the low birthrate high IQ secular economically conservative voters to the Democrats.

Thus, the birthrate of the Republican Party is increasing.

[Austrian]

What economically conservative voter is going to the Democats? Certainly not one with an IQ higher than the ambient temperature. That's like saying the NAACP has betrayed your principles, so therefore you're going to join the KKK.

Granted, there are some who say that the best choice among horrible choices is to vote for a divided government (it tends to grow slower than when one party controls both the executive and legislature), and so these people may vote for Democrats to hold one branch, but that's hardly flocking to the donkey.

[Kathleen Marie]

What an amazingly stupid remark to make: "IQ being strongly correlated with genes, and having more children increasing your genetic impact on the future, our country is therefore becoming dumber and more religious".

It also seems to me that if you are very intelligent you would want to have more children in order to insure that the world become a better place overall. But from what I can garner from your statement, intelligence correlates much more strongly with selfishness and has nothing to do with a persons religious belief.

It was interesting that you said "religious" and not "Christian" people. I wonder how Hindus, Muslins, Jews feel about such an absurd remark? Shall we ask them?

Fortunately I am intelligent enough (although I am a libral, Christian woman) not to take this too seriously. In fact, I find it rather amusing.

"It is a poverty to decide to end a life so that you may live as you wish" Mother Teresa, conservative, religious, woman, no children.

[Spungen]

Kathleen, I don't know that HS's previous research and posts re IQ support the notion that high-IQ people passing on their genes will make the world a better place.

Good point, though, that Bible belief would only apply to Christians (and maybe Jews, rather than all religions.

[The Superfluous Man]

Kathleen,
It is not so much selfishness but a desire to invest more in one's child, difficult when there are so many.

He said religious because there is reason to believe it applies to all religionists; consider the high birthrates of devoutly Muslim countries (check http://www.bartleby.com/151/fields/24.html and http://www.queensu.ca/cora/polls/2002/September19-Religious_Belief_across_Countries.pdf and http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001527.html). Not having a child is not ending a life (abortion excluded for sake of argument).

"I wonder how Hindus, Muslins, Jews feel about such an absurd remark?"
This is not the blog of a liberal. The readers tend not to be liberal. Consequently, no one will care whether someone is offended (by the author's supposed findings or observations).

[Peter]

He said religious because there is reason to believe it applies to all religionists; consider the high birthrates of devoutly Muslim countries

Yet then there's Iran. About as devoutely Muslim as any country, yet its birthrate has plummted at an unprecedented rate.

[The Superfluous Man]

Iran, per a semblance of reason, took steps to reduce fertility (http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update4ss.htm).

"In May of 1993, the Iranian government passed a national family planning law that encouraged couples to have fewer children by restricting maternity leave benefits after three children....Strong government support has facilitated Iran's demographic transition. "

[TGGP]

The link between religion and fiscal conservativism is examined in this very interesting paper.