Why girls stay in emotionally abusive relationships (Warning: disillusionment ahead)

At the BlindGossip site, there's a series of four posts about an insecure young pop star and her boyfriend who, despite constantly demeaning and manipulating her, continues to enjoy her company. It's Demi Lovato, a singer I've heard of but never heard her music, and Wilmer Valderrama, the squat Hispanic dork from That '70s Show that used to be on 15 years ago.

Here is the most recent post in the series, where the website writer says that Demi reads the website, so guys, in the comments please tell her how great she is, and how she deserves 1000 times better than this ugly has-been slimeball. All four posts establish how emotionally demeaning he is toward her, and how she keeps caving in.

And just like the socially naive type that you might expect to live vicariously through celebrity drama websites, they all swoop in, showering her with effusive paragraph-long comments about how attractive, talented, popular, lovable, and worthy she is, and how she deserves 1000 times better than a dude named Wilmer.

And all are completely incredulous as to how she could continue to stay with a bum. If he were more attractive, wealthy, powerful, famous, violently dominant toward other males, etc. -- OK, a little constant demeaning might be the price she's willing to pay. But to stay with an across-the-board loser seems like an enigma to them, especially given how young, attractive, wealthy, famous, etc., she herself is.

I googled around and found similar puzzlement among males, females, young, old, liberal, conservative, etc. Everybody is completely clueless on this issue.

So I'll come right out and explain why -- girls who stay in these relationships crave the constant rescuing behavior, and the hyperbolic ego-reassurance, coming from those in their social circle whenever the girls engage in or hint at self-destructive behavior. They have a profound fear of abandonment by those who are supposed to be caring for them, so they constantly test them by degrading themselves, and making their social circle prove that they really do care and will swoop in to rescue and reassure them that they truly are lovable, worthy, deserving of so much better, and so on.

Now, these rescuers who are always being called upon, do not do so for other people they know -- because everyone else they know is not a hystrionic attention-seeker. The girl who purposefully lowers herself is trying to extract way more care and attention than her social circle would normally be prepared to give her. But because she's allowed herself to descend to such pathetic depths, they figure they can't just ignore her and continue to be her friend or relative.

In other words, such girls are emotional parasites on their social circle. If they're a celebrity, that extends to trying to extract ego reassurance from the entire society. It's shameful for her to degrade herself at all, but doubly shameful when she does so in order to parasitize the emotional reserves of those who are closest to her. Other people might need to draw on those reserves, and it's draining to the supplier every time they're called upon. Staying in an emotionally abusive relationship is one of the most selfish and manipulative behaviors a person could ever show. It's "fishing for compliments" through false humility, dialed up to 11.

Let's compare the ugly truth with some of the popular self-serving rationalizations, shall we?

1. The girl is terrified of being alone. Wrong: she can attach herself blindly to the next loser who walks down the hallway, who won't be emotionally abusive. Being in a relationship doesn't require him to be a demeaning manipulator -- does it get any more "no duh" than that?

2. The girl is inexperienced, and the seasoned jerk is taking advantage of easy prey. Guess again: these girls tend to be sexually and romantically precocious (and tend to get into drugs, which a naive angel would not).

3. The girl is insecure and desperate for attention, no matter how negative it is. Obviously, on one level. But she wants the attention from her social circle, not him. Craving attention doesn't require that it come in a demeaning and degrading form (no duh). It's not hard to find positive attention.

4. The girl has a desire beyond her control to "fix him," so she stays in order to nurture the sociopath into a kind soul. The impossibility of that task is obvious to anyone, no matter how delusional. Rather, giving this reason reflects the shameless grab for ego reassurance. She's looking for everyone to tell her that she's sacrificing her own well-being like some latter-day Mother Teresa, but girl, it just ain't worth it. It's naked self-righteousness, making herself out to be a martyr when she's just an emotional parasite.

Et cetera...

Why doesn't she move on to find a man who'll treat her right? Quite simply, she thinks that all men are unreliable scum. What would be the point in trying to receive heartfelt validation from a boyfriend? But she does expect her social circle to be comforting and reassuring, so she'll rely on them instead to give her feedback about how worthy and lovable she is. Yet she can't get a constant stream of that without regularly jeopardizing her emotional well-being.

Hence the never-ending cycle of drama in her life -- and it's not malingering or "crying wolf" either. She really is bent on a certain degree of self-destruction (but not so high that it would actually do her in -- that would halt the flow of reassurance, and that would suck).

She winds up only associating with the scummiest of men who have a red-blooded libido, not normal men who still have their balls intact. She has to give it up so that the guy will stay in the relationship; otherwise he'll bail before he gets to constantly demean her, and she won't be able to trigger the rescue behavior of her social circle. She has no intrinsic sex drive or joy for sex, though; it's only a means to the end of getting rescued from the ugly monster.

This also means that she will date men indiscriminately, meaning that any old scumbag will do. Demeaning treatment will get her the rescuing reassurance she craves from her social circle, and they don't care who the guy is. It's just, "He's demeaning you? Girl, you deserve 1000 times better than him, you're the bestest friend and the most beautiful person inside and out!" The interchangeable nature of her boyfriends reinforces her view that men are scum -- they're all the same, all substituteable slimeballs. But she chose them to play a faceless role (the jerk boyfriend who'll make her friends and family swoop in to rescue her), rather than for some distinct and individual mix of traits that only he has.

She will also wind up with lots of emotional tampon guy friends, and a gaggle of gay bffs, both of whom are too developmentally stunted to realize that she doesn't want a healthy rewarding relationship with a boyfriend. And the same goes for her girl friends -- only those who have that naive "swoop in" instinct, and not the more mature or cynical ones. (Fortunately for the parasite, most girls are not very mature or cynical.)

These are lessons that have to be learned the hard way by those who are or would be in this girl's social circle. And they're one of the most disillusioning experiences you could ever go through, so naturally a good deal of those who could learn, will not. Cognitive dissonance hurts.

For those who have a natural willingness to hear other people's cry for help, and do what they can to support them, it's disorienting to go through your first encounter with one of these girls. It opens your eyes to how easily taken advantage of an empathetic person can be these days. Good thing I'm only empathetic and not kneejerk sympathetic.

I could just sniff something out about a couple girls like this, in 8th grade and later in 9th or 10th grade. Then once you become aware of the possibility, you check everyone out from then on -- and sadly, at least during the '90s and the 21st century, most of these girls who give off signs of needing rescued are complicit in their own degradation. It's not the '80s anymore, when a girl may have been over-powered by a guy and raped, or otherwise have become a helpless victim.

So much of the social climate of the Millennial era has been dominated by this cult of fake victims. It turns out the guy didn't keep going after she'd said "No," or pried her legs apart when she'd tried to shut them and push him away. Nope, she just got into a drunken hook-up that she regretted the next day. (Remember that all those so-called cases involving "date rape drugs" turned out to be lies.) And Rodney King wasn't some well-intentioned bystander targeted by over-zealous cops. Nope, he was high on PCP and had been leading them on a long, high-speed chase. And AIDS wasn't the outcome of a homophobic rain cloud hovering over the Tenderloin, or hushed-up CIA labs -- nope, they were spreading that shit to each other, up the butt like perverts. Now the news comes out, too, that Matthew Shepard was likely killed by a couple of queer drug dealers, not redneck fag-bashers.

This whole tangled web of lies could only have been spun with the supporting branches of trust that had reached its peak in the late '80s, as folks tried to help one another out at the grassroots level, since the powers that be had proven to be too ignorant, too powerless, or too corrupt to do so for us. Petty criminals took advantage of that atmosphere of trust by presenting themselves as normal people, often in need of help ("Can you help me change this tire?").

But the final and most sickening betrayal was by all of these fake victims from the '90s onward. They weren't criminals, but they were more numerous and sucked more of your blood over the long term. It was pure intuition as a teenager that led me to keep those people at arm's length, but with the benefit of hindsight and hopefully some greater maturity, I can articulate it now.

If you do find yourself tied to such a person, though, like if they're family, what's the best response? I don't know, but I suspect telling them that you won't give them attention or respect until they get out of the relationship. Not in a mean-spirited way, just calmly and firmly, to let them know their manipulations won't work. For all I know, though, that might just drive them to even more self-destructive behavior, to call your bluff. Anyone with more experience being tied to such people, feel free to chime in. I try to avoid them at all costs.

Bowdlerizing Christmas songs

The other day at the supermarket, they were playing Christmas songs at one of those listening stations at the end of an aisle, where you can buy the CD that you're hearing. It was on "Winter Wonderland" when I passed by, and I thought I heard something weird -- "something something he's a circus clown..."

It took a few moments for it to sink in that those aren't the real lyrics. It's supposed to go:

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown.
He'll say "Are You Married?" We'll say "No man,
But you can do the job while you're in town!"

The song was originally written in 1934, just one year into the falling-crime period of the mid-century. Farther into the shift toward Dr. Spock and smothering mothers, in 1953 they re-wrote the bridge so that children wouldn't be scandalized by marriage, or perhaps to remove the slightest reference to religion (mid-century Christmas songs are almost all secular):

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he's a circus clown.
We'll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman,
Until the other kiddies knock 'im down!

That's the patronizing version I heard the other day in the supermarket, a sign of the neo-Dr. Spock times. What kind of rhyme is "snowman" with "snowman" anyway? Do they think children are too dumb to appreciate the subtle cheesiness of "snowman" and "No man"? We all got it when I was growing up. By the '80s, the kiddie version had been retired -- what gives today?

I searched LexisNexis to see when this version began making a comeback. The Bowdlerized lyrics (along with the original ones) appear in non-American Anglo countries in 1999 and continue regularly through the 21st century, as part of a larger printing of Christmas song lyrics. A 2009 article in the Kerrville Daily Times (Texas) makes a guessing game of "which song has these lyrics?" -- and it only includes the "circus clown" version in the hint for "Winter Wonderland." Then a 2011 article in the Enid News & Eagle (Oklahoma) tries to make fun of how unacceptable some old Christmas lyrics would sound to today's ears, and it too only refers to the censored version (i.e., would knocking down the snowman run afoul of the anti-bullying agenda?).

The trend had probably caught on somewhat earlier at the grassroots level before it was noticed and reproduced in the mass media (that's typical for person-to-person transmission). So the change began sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, as helicopter parenting became the norm.

Bowdlerizing an already inoffensive song is the height of paranoid over-parenting, not to mention a blow (however minor) against traditions -- and in the name of what? Cutesy infantilized "progress." The first attempt was made nearly 20 years after the original, and our recent revival comes 70 to 80 years after. Not like they released two versions around the same time, a la the censored "radio edit" of songs with curse words.

All of these minor blows to tradition add up to a nearly unrecognizable Christmas season these days compared to even 20 years ago, and none of it for the better. We're not supposed to care that wholesome song lyrics etched into our minds are being scrubbed away as though they were profane graffiti. After all, these days we get to enjoy peppermint mochas, peppermint bark, and peppermint cream cheese frosting -- three cheers for diversity and progress!

Bloodsport and societal instability: Mixed martial arts in the Millennial era

[Future posts will look at gladiator sports in Ancient Rome and no-holds-barred wrestling during the Gilded Age. But let's start with more familiar events.]

The rise over the past 20 years of mixed martial arts as a spectator sport would look odd to an observer from the 1950s. It's an unarmed gladiator spectacle, something that would have felt out of place when people were supposed to rein in their individualistic competitive instincts. Even boxing went through a lull during the mid-century, didn't pick up again until the '70s, and reached the status of a bloodsport spectacle only during the '80s (most memorably with Mike Tyson).

At first that looks like it tracks the violent crime rate, yet gladiator-style entertainment has only increased since the '90s -- not only with mixed martial arts, but also popular video game franchises like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

If the '40s through the '60s group together against the '80s through the 2000s, then it doesn't reflect the cocooning-and-crime cycle but rather the status-striving-and-inequality cycle as described in Peter Turchin's work.

What is it about a climate of rising status competition that brings out a taste for such entertainment in the public? It looks like a reflection of the prevailing moral code, which is to do whatever it takes to get ahead and to never be satisfied with what you've got. You can always climb one rung higher on the status ladder, if you don't mind stepping on one more skull to get there.

Status-striving has neither a moral basis nor a larger goal which motivates the action. Higher and higher status is glorified and pursued as an end in itself. (Rationalizations abound, as usual, but we're interested in what people think and feel in reality, not hypothetically.) That's what distinguishes gladiator entertainment from other forms that look like combat.

Football at least has team vs. team behavior (although even there it's getting more self-promoting and show-boating), and professional wrastlin' has both a (flimsy) narrative or dramatic arc along with age-old moral motives such as avenging a betrayal. A normal person watching along can easily understand why these two guys are trading blows, which is blunted by being staged.

Viewers tune into the UFC to watch two guys try to beat the shit out of each other, hopefully with blood spilled onto the mat and no stoppages by the party-pooping ref. The combatants are more skilled and tactical than the ghetto thugs on World Star Hip Hop, but it still looks like a physical version of debate club, where the purpose is to skewer the other side in a debate for its own sake -- not to achieve greater understanding of the topic, to defend their honor after having been slandered by the other side, etc. Just pointless individualistic competition and self-promotion.

Bullying can serve a larger pro-social function -- yet we're supposed to discourage bullying. Is it because there's a point? Like some tranny trying to scandalize his high school, and some guy kicking his ass so he'll stop polluting the social atmosphere -- evil. But one guy elbowing another guy's face for no reason other than to win status points and money -- good (or at least permissible).

Community defense -- Us vs. Them -- is pro-social. Why don't we see the UFC fans beating back the black punks responsible for the knockout game? Shit, they're only 13 years old -- wouldn't be hard for a posse of fit 20-something white dudes to go out on patrol, whether to just stare them down as a warning, or go with the "best defense is a good offense" strategy and give blacks a taste of their own knockout game medicine. Italians in the New York area used to do that off-and-on back in the '80s, but now they're more obsessed with Jersey Shore-style show-boating.

Perhaps a casual interest in practicing mixed martial arts serves to train you for the dog-eat-dog world that we live in these days. But we're not talking about what hobbies a handful of people practice, but the entertainment spectacles that so many are fascinated by, and that owners and promoters go to such lengths to hype up.

There's a conspicuous consumption angle to bloodsports as well, since they're typically held in larger-than-life venues like Caesars Palace in the '80s or Mandalay Bay today, commanding high ticket prices, and often with celebrities in attendance. Elites compete against each other to see whose casino or arena can stage the most spectacular fight night. That's also true for team spectator sports (the most ostentatious being the Super Bowl), and was not seen during mid-century or even 1960s football culture, when the national anthem was sung by military bands rather than pop music celebrities.

And there's a subtle aspect of widening inequality here too. The fighters are generally from lower or working-class backgrounds. In times of narrowing inequality, they'd get good long-term union jobs and be all set. When no one's looking out for their well-being, though, it's OK if they get bruised up locking horns with one another, whether in officially sanctioned fights or run-of-the-mill violence around their neighborhood. Again, if there were some point to it, then taking a bruising isn't something to automatically fret over. But when it's pointless, undirected anger and aggression, it corrupts that person's spirit and corrodes what little is left of the social fabric where they live.

Widening inequality is not just a result of the top soaring, but of the bottom sinking. And it's not only about money, but health and quality of life, as well as feeling part of a strong community. Once you look beyond money, it turns out that there is no "floor" on the status pyramid -- that it's hovering over a bottomless pit. If you thought it was bad seeing the poor get poorer, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Degradation and corrosion know no depths.

Related: A post on hazing as a form of elite in-fighting rather than solidarity building.

Adultery as a part of status competition and inequality

An earlier post looked at children of divorce and single motherhood. That was less feasible in the 19th and early 20th-century period of rising inequality because on an absolute level, they lived more precarious lives. But that didn't stop them from committing adultery.

I admit that the data here are hard to estimate directly. Indirectly, we have how common of an obsession it was in the literature of the time. Here is an unobjectionable list from About.com of the Top 10 Adultery Novels. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are the best known, and most clearly show adultery as a form of status striving on the part of the woman who isn't content with the modest life provided by her husband, and wants higher status, more conspicuous consumption and leisure, and so on. Effi Briest didn't make the list, but is also from the late 19th C.

The theme was a staple of Victorian, Gilded Age, and Edwardian / Ragtime literature, then started to peak and fade during the '20s and especially the '30s, becoming more or less unheard of during the mid-century. Divorce was also not a common theme during the mid-century, taking off only during the '70s. Victorian adultery and Millennial divorce are both forms of hypergamy, hence of status striving, so we shouldn't get too caught up in whether one version was more common in the 19th C. and another in the 21st. We should also not lose sight of the fact that hypergamy in either form fell during the Great Compression, reaching a minimum in the mid-century. *

How does rising adultery lead to rising inequality? It's just the counterpart of men competing more viciously in the economy. When men become discontent with a modest life, striving begins, and a few climb up, up, up, while the losers stay put. The losers will probably try to then push others down, so that they can at least enjoy a little relative status boost. They might want those below them not just below them, but way below them -- locked up in debtor's prison, serving time in the work house, or whatever.

For women in an age before they earned much income, their status was tied to who they could marry, or sleep around with in exchange for a finer material life. When women become discontent with modest living, they strive to marry higher and higher-status husbands, or at least become their mistresses. This raises the ceiling of the female status distribution. As for the women below them, they try to marginalize them even further down the hierarchy, ostracizing them to ensure that they can only get jobs as prostitutes, which is as bad for their status as being locked up is for a man's. Or at least tolerate the existence of red light districts -- "If there are women working there, it automatically raises my status in comparison." This causes the floor to fall on the distribution.

The net effect is to widen inequality among women, similar to the hollowing out of the middle class in the paid-labor economy. Among men there are more vagrants and more billionaires, among women there are more prostitutes and more wives-of-billionaires.

My hunch is that during the Progressive Era, reducing inequality was not only a matter of reining in the dog-eat-dog striving of men in the economy, but also the bitch-eat-bitch striving of women in the domestic world. We ought to remember that as we try to undo the way society has been heading. As we burn the bailed-out bankers at the stake, yea shall we also brand yon materialistic hussies with the scarlet letter. (Not out of self-righteousness, but to contain social instability.)

Then there's adultery / divorce on the part of the husband who isn't content with his wife and wants to trade up -- gotta boost your status by 1 point with an incrementally prettier babe at your side. The time trends appear to be the same for male as well as female adultery / divorce. It's not as though men become more and more likely to trade up during one time, and women during another.

I do wonder, though, about the magnitude of the changes for men and women. It's more in man's nature to cheat, so it probably doesn't rise and fall as dramatically across time periods. Women tend not to cheat as much, so they have much more room to rise during a period of increasing adultery.

What little we can tell from real-world estimates supports this. The General Social Survey asks a question if you've ever cheated on your spouse while married. The data only go back to 1991, so we can't see a fuller picture of how it does or does not track the trend for status competition and inequality. Still, men show no change from 1991 to 2012, at a little over 20% saying they ever have. Women began at around 10% and have steadily risen to around 15% now saying they ever have. (Data restricted to ever-married whites.)

Men's adultery stems from being horny, women's from wanting access to finer things in life. Even in the rare case where she's married to a wealthy man and cheats with a lower-status but better loving man, that's still a form of not being content with a modest lot in life -- of wanting to have her cake and eat it too.

* I reject the argument that popular culture tells us nothing about the society it came from, let alone that it gets things backward -- as though there were few prostitutes and mistresses in the Gilded Age, and soaring levels during the Fifties. People are generally tuned into what the major problems are of their day, and don't worry about problems from 200 years ago or 100 years into the future. If writers want to find an audience, they have to cater to contemporary concerns.

GSS variables: evstray, year, sex, race

Declining meritocracy in an age of greater status striving

There's a discussion at Steve Sailer's about the rise and fall of meritocratic tests in hiring, riffing on this article in The Atlantic. It was low around the turn of the 20th C., peaked in the mid-century, and fell out of favor sometime during the '70s. Most of the article is about how Big Data may help revive and re-vamp test-based hiring, but for now it's more of a nerd obsession than a widespread business practice.

By the way, what was the prevailing way of hiring around the peak of intra-elite competition and inequality, in the early 1900s? For workers, it was ruthlessness in a melee:

Near the turn of the 20th century, one manufacturer in Philadelphia made hiring decisions by having its foremen stand in front of the factory and toss apples into the surrounding scrum of job-seekers. Those quick enough to catch the apples and strong enough to keep them were put to work.

I'm sure they would have made great Black Friday shoppers. And for managers?

In those same times, a different (and less bloody) Darwinian process governed the selection of executives. Whole industries were being consolidated by rising giants like U.S. Steel, DuPont, and GM. Weak competitors were simply steamrolled, but the stronger ones were bought up, and their founders typically were offered high-level jobs within the behemoth. The approach worked pretty well. As Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School, has written, “Nothing in the science of prediction and selection beats observing actual performance in an equivalent role.”

Buy-outs by behemoths, where the former leaders are absorbed into lesser roles within the newer bigger trust -- sound familiar? If people's thirst for ever greater status and wealth is insatiable, this Borg-like assimilation is inevitable.

But resistance was not futile. During the 1920s, the elites agreed to rein in their pyramid-climbing, for the stability of the society, after the explosive climate of World War I and its aftermath. Not long after, inequality began steadily falling. What new norms were adopted by the middle of the century?

By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential. “P&G picks its executive crop right out of college,” BusinessWeek noted in 1950, in the unmistakable patter of an age besotted with technocratic possibility. IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests, professional-aptitude tests, vocational-interest questionnaires, Rorschach tests, a host of other personality assessments, and even medical exams (who, after all, would want to hire a man who might die before the company’s investment in him was fully realized?)—all were used regularly by large companies in their quest to make the right hire.

During the Great Compression of roughly 1920 to 1980, ruthlessly jockeying for status was taboo. That belonged to the Gilded Age with its robber barons, courtesans, and other professional strivers. Now you were supposed to be more content with what you had, and not step on someone else's skull just to so you could own a second car.

Perhaps the rise of meritocratic testing was a way the elites found of dampening the internecine status-striving that newly blew the country up in the wake of World War I. "Quit your complaining -- the test says you belong in this range, and that's where you go. Don't bother trying to act like a courtier."

Objective tests have a natural ceiling, where no extra amount of resume-padding, networking, and butt-kissing will alter your destiny. It contains elite status jockeying.

Here's a reminder of what the Great Compression business culture was like at the executive level, from Fortune magazine in 1955. You get a good feel for mid-century cocooning and isolation, but you also can't help but notice how self-effacing and reining-it-in the elites were compared to the robber barons or our neo-robber barons today.

During the late 1960s for elites, and a little later for everyone else, the restraints of the Great Compression came undone, probably as folks had forgotten or were unaware to begin with of the soaring inequality and social-political instability of the period running from the Civil War through the Gilded Age and culminating after WWI.

Peter Turchin, whose basic "structural-demographic" framework I'm borrowing here, has a series of posts on the topic of how and when elite competition and over-production of elites began. Straightforward measures like enrollments (per capita) at law schools, business schools, and medical schools, not to mention the higher ed bubble in general, all point to the 1970s as a transition era. By about 1980, the break with the mid-century restraint was complete.

What then became of hiring based on objective tests?

Remarkably, this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,” Peter Cappelli told me—the days of testing replaced by a handful of ad hoc interviews, with the questions dreamed up on the fly. Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term.

Over the past several decades, companies don't want to invest in testing out potential hires, when they're so footloose about where they work (see the rest of the article for numerical data, or consult your own experience). All that costly scientific testing wouldn't pay off until it discovered and hooked a good fit for the long term. Instead, new hires always have their eyes peeled for the next job, always on the move to find an angle on reaching one rung higher on the status ladder. Not content with a decent job at a good company.

With the return of unbounded status striving, hiring is more and more driven by "playing the game" factors, as though you were a latter-day courtier:

Perhaps the most widespread bias in hiring today cannot even be detected with the eye. In a recent survey of some 500 hiring managers, undertaken by the Corporate Executive Board, a research firm, 74 percent reported that their most recent hire had a personality “similar to mine.” Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests. “The best way I could describe it,” one attorney told her, “is like if you were going on a date. You kind of know when there’s a match.” Asked to choose the most-promising candidates from a sheaf of fake résumés Rivera had prepared, a manager at one particularly buttoned-down investment bank told her, “I’d have to pick Blake and Sarah. With his lacrosse and her squash, they’d really get along [with the people] on the trading floor.” Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

There's another reason, well discussed by conservatives, for the decline of objective testing: namely the fact that whites tend to do better than blacks:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased. Instead, companies came to favor the more informal qualitative hiring practices that are still largely in place today.

I'm starting to think the whole "disparate impact" thing is a rationalization to do away with merit-based hiring, in an era of greater status striving. The charge of "b-b-but, it's racist against blacks!" is just a shameless smokescreen that the strivers know will sell well with the target audience.

For example, my impression is that other countries without many Non-Asian Minorities share our disdain for objective testing, etc. It makes it even harder to do objective testing in America, but I'm convinced that it's a second-order thing. The main source is the discontent of elite strivers who want to be able to dazzle the HR rep with their fifty pounds of filler and connections.

And the military continues to use IQ testing. The usual argument is that their jobs are too important to let diversity worship fuck them all up. But you could say that about all kinds of industries, and in fact the military isn't exactly beating back the Indians, Nazis, or Commies these days. I think it makes better sense to see it as part of the military's wish to keep status-striving from getting too out of control -- that could get violent and destabilizing to the political order. Income inequality within the military must be far less than in the private sector, since the top-ranking generals still don't make as much as hedge fund managers.

Aside from the noxious atmosphere produced by the striving mode of thinking and behaving, it neuters the ability of people to do just do their damn jobs well and get paid decently for it. The current regime does not reward competency but rather resume-padding and networking.

Like, isn't it striking how much stuff they invented between 1920 and 1980, on a per-decade basis? The '80s weren't so bad, but then that was just the beginning of the trend toward where we are today, politically and economically. And the last 20-odd years? Jack. All we're better at these days is how to socialize costs and privatize benefits, and how to best dress it up in fashionable ideology -- see the housing bubble, bank bailouts, etc. Neo-con corporate cocksucking mates with liberal diversity worship -- imagine the beautiful offspring they'll create!

At any rate, there's another sign to watch for, to anticipate the unwinding of this spiral of intra-elite competition -- a renewed sincere interest in objective meritocratic testing.

Elite concern about broken homes: Changes over time

We've seen the historical patterns for both divorce rates and rates of children growing up in single parent households. How does elite concern for these social ills respond, or not, to their changes over time?

The following graphs all show how common a certain phrase is within Google's digitized library of books (Ngram), using the American English texts up through 2008, and beginning in either 1900 or 1950, whenever the phrase is about to take off. These are both fiction and non-fiction, so divorce could be part of the background in a novel, or a social scientific investigation, or a journalistic overview. Whatever the source, they all spring from an elite concern, although some are targeted toward a popular audience, and others toward their fellow elite members.

The main thing that they show is when the elite of the society actually gave a damn about a huge social problem, showing that they felt more like stewards of the less fortunate, and not shoulder-shruggers promoting a "dog eat dog" morality.

First, "divorce":

There's a secular rise in concern, reflecting the secular rise in the problem itself. However, there are clear cycles around that, and they reflect the crime rate (delayed by roughly 5 years). There's a peak in the late '30s (after the 1933 peak in the homicide rate), a low point in the early '60s (after the 1958 minimum in homicide), and another peak around '93 or '94 (after the 1992 peak in homicide), falling since (along with homicide).

As I've detailed for several years now, a rising-crime atmosphere makes people notice that things seem to be going wrong in the world, that the powers that be are too incompetent, impotent, or corrupt to fix things, and hence that we have to work together to help ourselves through this mess. A falling-crime atmosphere does the reverse: problems seem to be getting better and better, that must be because the powers that be have suddenly become omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, and hence we don't need to care much about helping one another through life's troubles anymore.

Divorce is just one example of that broader pattern.

How about during the time period of skyrocketing rates of children of divorce? Remember that the early '60s birth cohorts showed the first steep rise of being a child of divorce or of a never-married single parent by age 16, meaning the divorce probably struck during the early or mid 1970s. And unlike the divorce rate (which turned down after 1980), the rate of children in single parent households has only grown or steadied since then.

There are several relevant examples, but they rise only until the early-to-mid 1990s, and have fallen dramatically since, where they ought to have continued to rise or at least plateau. These cases all show an interaction between the rate of the problem itself and how likely the elites were to pay attention to it. That is, they paid attention as they should have during the rising-crime period, but have tuned out for no good reason during the falling-crime period. This echoes the result from "divorce," only it's now about children of divorce.

"Children of divorce":

"Dysfunctional families":

"Single mothers":

"Single parent household":

How, if at all, did elites show concern when there was less and less of a problem to be addressing? That appears to have been mostly during the Great Compression of circa 1920 to 1970. Rates of being raised in single parent households was the lowest for those born in the late Silent Generation and early half of the Baby Boomers. As you can see above, none of the phrases rose then. However, they had a different phrase for the phenomenon...

"Broken homes":

That shows an almost perfect match with the cycle in status one-upsmanship, inequality, over-production of elites, etc., that Peter Turchin has been describing and explaining. It was the heyday of liberal welfare policies, liberal social science (always with policy implications), and of elites generally seeing their role in society as stewards.

The metaphor "broken home" serves to shame selfish parents away from what is obviously a social evil, but something that the parents might be able to rationalize away without shame bearing down on them. It packs a punch unlike "dysfunctional family," "children of divorce," or "single parent household." For all we know, the phrase began at the grassroots level to shame divorcing parents in people's own communities, and the elites just took the phrase and ran with it in the national media and literature. Whoever started it, though, the point remains about how powerful the stigma was in doing its job.

Did elites tie it in with their broader plan to contain or de-fuse the societal instability that had reached a fever pitch in the late 1910s and early '20s? They sure did. I browsed through the NYT archives, and "broken homes" was typically used to describe a background cause for another phrase we haven't heard in forever -- "juvenile delinquency." A life of crime and vice will only widen the gap between rich and poor (and lead to greater instability too), so the elite stewards not only tried to contain the top from striving ever upwards, but also to keep the bottom from sinking themselves into the depths.

Nothing could be further from the mood of today or of the Gilded Age, when you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't break the law. Who cares if it ruins communities -- that's not against the law, is it? So the robber barons and elite strivers can indulge as much as they please in their wasteful contests of conspicuous consumption, while the poor are given a free pass to indulge in the "sporting" culture of booze, gambling, and brothels. The re-emergence of "chav" culture in England, and whatever it's called here in America, show how far we've returned to the norms of the Gilded Age.

I was struck by the tenor of those NYT articles from the 1950s, where a broken home was often described as a "tragedy" or "tragic," and moreover as "preventable" -- meaning if you parents get divorced after we warn you, you're guilty of causing a preventable tragedy. They placed no blame at all on the children, even ones who had turned to a life of urban crime. They were instead "victims of broken homes." And "juvenile delinquent" sounds pretty anodyne compared to the harsh condemnation of the parents' behavior above.

Nowadays, we sort of blame the parents, but only for not acting like proper helicopter parents and constantly monitoring their kids' behavior. We don't condemn them for raising their kids without both parents around, though -- they get a pass for that. We're much more severe in judging the kid -- send that little punk to the electric chair! Or if he didn't murder somebody but only got caught buying drugs, still, lock him up!

I'm getting into a separate post now about attitudes toward crime and punishment, rather than divorce, so I'll stop there and save that for another time.

Loss of connectedness among children of divorce -- Time to look beyond individualistic traits

In the comments of the post below, there's a discussion of behavior genetics. This research program tries to figure out how our current status has been influenced by genetic and a variety of environmental influences, and their interactions. As far as I know, the traits they study are all from the field of "individual differences" or "differential psychology" -- the things that make you, you and me, me. Personality, intelligence, attitudes, beliefs, habits, and so on.

Necessarily, they cannot study the things that make us, us and them, them. "We" do not share a genome, and "we" are not raised in the same house by the same parents; and ditto for "they" who do not share an entire genome or a common set of parents, which would contrast with our own. Now we're getting into sociology, anthropology, and so on.

There's nothing wrong with the behavior genetics approach, but it misses all of those group-defined traits that give us our cultural identity and our sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves. The things that give greater meaning to our lives, beyond noticing how smart, attractive, or extraverted we may be. So, we ought to supplement behavior genetics with group-ier social sciences to get the full picture of how we develop and turn out the way we do.

One of the major weaknesses of using behavior genetics to study the effects of divorce on children is that the main thing that marriage and family are about is group-level stuff. It's interesting to study how marital strife does and does not affect a child's individual characteristics -- mood, behavior problems, drug use, and so on -- but that's not where we should look for the effects of divorce.

Fundamentally, divorce represents a permanent rupture in the social connectedness among nuclear family members, not only between husband and wife but critically between the children and the absent parent ("non-custodial," "non-residential"). Your parents are not getting back together. And if you were raised by a single parent, without the other having been there for long, your parent is not ever going to bring the absent parent into the home to give you both parents.

Divorce typically results in a change of residence, since one parent (the custodial parent) will not be able to afford payments and maintenance of a house that had been a joint investment of two parents, while also raising the kids. Thus divorce also robs children of the "sense of place" of the home that they had attached themselves to so far during development. Houses, yards, sidewalks, blocks, and neighborhoods are not interchangeable, any more than parenting adults are to the kid. A stepmother is not the child's true mother, and the new place of residence will feel more alien -- more "not meant for us" -- than the marital home.

Moving one level up, the change in location will usually sever the children's social and cultural ties to the group of kids their age, whether at school or in the neighborhood broadly. They have to start all over again with new kids, and again -- kids are not interchangeable. Children of divorce have permanently lost their old friends who they'd grown close to, and now must do the best they can with a different set of kids -- and often not as able to get as close to them as they are able to get to each other, since they have grown up together, while the child of divorce is late to the party.

Finally, not only have they lost the connection to their home, but of their community environment in general. The neighbors' houses, the parks, the libraries, the malls, and the churches will all be different. So will the secret hiding places, the writings carved into the sidewalk, and all of those places where some meaningful experience took place. All those places, anchoring all those experiences, give you a sense of belonging to a particular, special world -- and you must now leave all of them behind for the rest of your formative years.

Whether children are resilient is not the question. Of course nature has programmed us to adapt to changing circumstances -- to roll with the punches. But again, resilience, adjustment, etc., are individual traits: however well the child of divorce adjusts to his new set of parents, new home, new social circle, and new community, he has lost much of his sense of belonging to a particular nested set of groups, and he won't ever get those back. (And to make things worse, resilience is only a tendency back toward normality, not a full recovery.)

We can ignore the predictable glib rejoinders about how any set of parents and peers will do, how a house is nothing more than a memory-free building on a featureless lot of dirt, and how all the streets and parks and malls in this country are all so similar that the kids will never be able to tell the difference. Of course they're not -- particular pieces of social and cultural life are not fungible stuff like dollars and cents.

Divorce is not the only way that children may be uprooted and transplanted willy-nilly into an alien place, but it sure is one of the more common and most reliable ways. And no matter how much the autistics may wish to insist on the fungibility of home, peer group, and community, none will say so for the parents. The children used to have both parents, now they only have one; if a new one moves in, everybody is always aware of their alien status within the family, and behave accordingly. The vastly higher rates of child abuse coming from step-parents rather than parents provides a dark example of what happens when we play down how particular the social-cultural arrangement should be once the ball gets rolling.

Little disruptions here and there are inevitable, and our minds are designed to handle that in the way that we can handle taking a hard fall or getting slugged in the gut. But ripping the children right out from their existing network of support and belonging is far too severe for them to bounce right back from. And treating the world as though it worked that simply is the height of arrogance and heartlessness on the part of the adults.

Children of divorce, an unseen historical trend: Is it related to status-striving?

Typically when you look up information on divorce rates over time, you'll see divorces per capita and divorces per marriage, within a given year. Graphing them produces the following:

No matter which rate you choose, there's been a secular increase since the mid-19th C. Apart from that, there's an apparent burst from the early '20s through the mid-'40s, a dramatic recovery through the late '50s, another surge during the '60s and '70s, and another dramatic decline since then.

This cycling allows for a half-full or half-empty debate about the state of things recently and into the future. "Sure, that surge during the '60s and '70s was bad, but it's gotten much better since. Maybe it'll surge again, but who can say?"

No such debate can take place, though, when it comes to a more important statistic -- how likely is a child to grow up without both biological parents? All those stats you read about divorces, marriages, risk of divorce for a given marriage cohort, etc., ignore the main worry that the public has about the topic of divorce -- namely, children of divorce.

The General Social Survey asks a question about who you were living with at age 16. I'll look only at whites to make the point stronger. In the graph below, I've recoded responses into living with both parents (red), living with mother with or without a stepfather (blue), living with father with or without a stepmother (green), and other responses (yellow). I've grouped people into 4-year birth cohorts starting with 1900, which you probably won't be able to read without clicking to make the image larger.

There's a tiny rise in children growing up in intact families, going from those born around 1900 to those born around 1950, but it's only going from 77% to 80%. But it's basically flat at a high level for that entire period. And remember, the question asks about their lives at age 16, so 16 year-olds were still highly likely to be living in intact families into the early '70s (the '56-'59 cohort is barely distinguishable from '40s births).

Then there's a sharp drop with those born in the early '60s, who would've been 16 in the late '70s, and keeps dropping after that, although it may have stalled out at the bottom with Millennials. (Ignore the last cohort, though, since the sample size is tiny.)

So, unlike the picture of divorce rates, which showed a dramatic reversal around 1980 and lasting through today, rates of children of divorce have only gotten worse since those born in the early '60s.

When people argue about whether the divorce problem is getting better or worse, they would seem to be talking past each other. The people who point to the first graph are talking primarily about the fragility vs. stability of the marriage bond, whereas the folks who respond with, I don't care what that graph says, it's getting way worse, probably have in mind the disruption to family cohesiveness.

I put myself in the latter -- marriage is important, but kids growing up in intact families is more. Marriage vs. divorce is about whether two egocentric adults, the husband and wife, can reconcile their differences and stay together. Once kids come into the picture, the egocentric adults are no longer simply husband and wife but father and mother. They have even more other people to take into consideration, and these new ones are defenseless and impressionable to boot. Time to stop thinking only of your own goals.

What's behind these changes? I'm tempted to point to the status-striving / inequality cycle. If some problem started to get bad by the mid-to-late 1970s, and has only gotten worse since, that's a likely culprit. (It's clearly not the cocooning / crime cycle.) We should then see rates of intact families rise during the Great Compression of roughly 1920 to 1970. Or, going from births around 1900 to around 1955. It's there, but very slight. The pattern is a little stronger by adding the red and blue bars together -- that's growing up with at least your mother (both parents, mother alone, or mother and stepfather).

You'd think rising inequality would make mothers and fathers stick together more for the benefit of their children, if they were worried about their offspring doing well in the future. And falling inequality should relax that, with one parent saying, "Meh, it's hard not to earn a decent standard of living these days -- they'll manage."

Therefore, it must have to do with the status-striving that produces inequality to begin with (a la Peter Turchin). One parent starts to feel like they could do better for themselves by splitting off from the other parent, regardless of who gets the kids. This constant monitoring of your prospects for trading up smells a lot more like status-striving. Or, it may not have to do with wanting to leave in order to re-marry or date someone with greater economic resources than your current spouse, but with the drive toward conspicuous consumption and leisure -- both far easier when you aren't held back by the old ball and chain, nor those darn kids who need your time, effort, and money. Whatever the causes, they all seem to stem from status-striving rather than inequality.

Historical research even farther back would be tough because divorce was a much more serious economic disruption before the welfare state. You might look at how common orphans and abandoned children were, though. Those could always reflect parents who just didn't have enough money to raise them -- but then that's always relative to how much the parents feel they need to spend on themselves. "I just wouldn't have enough to buy diapers every month and still shop for groceries at Whole Foods," or whatever the equivalent was in the Gilded Age. And then again, maybe the children were abandoned because one of their parents was too obsessesed with status-striving to rear their own offspring.

Our vague impression of Victorian England and the Gilded Age in America is full of children who don't live with both mommy and daddy --  all those orphaned and abandoned characters from Dickens, and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. But some numerical data would be nice to confirm that impression.

I'm becoming more convinced that conservatives who apologize or cheerlead for the Victorian era don't have a clue what kind of society they're defending, except for the cynical rats among the elite who want another Gilded Age where they're on top of a steep pyramid. Below are a few signs that the Gilded Age didn't care hardly as much as the Fifties did about keeping families together. The scenes are of New York in the 1880s, from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.

GSS variables: family16, cohort, race

Abandoned building chic during the heyday of latchkey children

Our neo-Pre-Raphaelite culture is fascinated by ruins that have become reclaimed by nature. See, among many others, this photo essay on The Ruins of Detroit. The prevailing atmosphere is one of desolation and isolation, finality and futility. The human race is gone, and it's never coming back. Nature itself is not lush, thriving, colorful, or expressive -- but a cold and impersonal crust blindly accreting and advancing to block out all traces of human existence.

Before this era of bleak chic, abandoned buildings were considered cool not because of their wasteland atmosphere, but because they opened up possibilities for sanctuary, a public place that could be reclaimed by real-life people rather than impersonal nature. Folks whose home life wasn't always secure and stable, i.e. the generation of latchkey children and children of divorce.

Odd as it may seem at first, abandoned buildings were thus a sign of the hopefulness, resilience, and can-do spirit of those who were given the label of "troubled teenagers," "disadvantaged youth," etc. They were places meant to be lived in, taken care of, and enjoyed -- not visited by gawking, clinical tourists who wouldn't touch or move or improve anything for fear of disturbing authentic decay.

With adolescents as the target audience, squatting chic appeared most commonly in music videos. Here's a notable exception for children in movie form, the musty attic above the school where Bastian connects with characters from another world in The NeverEnding Story:

The atmosphere in music videos wasn't always so Gothic, though. The life of squatters is shown as lighthearted and fun-loving, despite their surroundings. Here's the video for "Catch My Fall" by Billy Idol, where the tone is playful in contrast to his earlier video for "Dancing with Myself," which is more toward alienation:

The video for "Nothing at All" by Heart was filmed in the Bradbury Building, a location used in Blade Runner to establish the grungy Gothic mood of the coming dystopia:

In the Heart video, the lighting is still Gothic, but the surface is a little glossier, and the characters are upbeat and happy-go-lucky -- like, "Well, we've got this empty space all to ourselves, might as well make the best of it and have fun together."

Similar scenes from real life can be seen in the documentary Streetwise (see my review here), where one of the teenage runaways is squatting an apartment in an abandoned high-rise, along with his somewhat older hippie housemate. There's a fun shot of the 13 year-old dude roller-skating around the empty, dingy hallways that makes you chuckle at how resilient the kid is, more than feel sorry for the crappy living conditions that he's making do with (which you also feel, of course).

The goal here isn't to catalog every piece of popular culture where fun-loving folks reclaim such a place and make it their own sanctuary, although in the comments I might include other examples that come to mind later. And I figure you all will know of other examples already. The main point to take away is that in a time of social connectedness, even abandoned youth and abandoned buildings could be transformed into a halfway wholesome ecology, whereas in cocooning times, total isolation reigns.