The Christian share of adults in the United States has declined sharply since 2007, affecting nearly all major Christian traditions and denominations, and crossing age, race and region, according to an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center.
Seventy-one percent of American adults were Christian in 2014, the lowest estimate from any sizable survey to date, and a decline of 5 million adults and 8 percentage points since a similar Pew survey in 2007.
The Christian share of the population has been declining for decades, but the pace rivals or even exceeds that of the country’s most significant demographic trends, like the growing Hispanic population. It is not confined to the coasts, the cities, the young or the other liberal and more secular groups where one might expect it, either.
“The decline is taking place in every region of the country, including the Bible Belt,” said Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at the Pew Research Center and the lead editor of the report.
The decline has been propelled in part by generational change, as relatively non-Christian millennials reach adulthood and gradually replace the oldest and most Christian adults. But it is also because many former Christians, of all ages, have joined the rapidly growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or “nones”: a broad category including atheists, agnostics and those who adhere to “nothing in particular.”
You know all those “salute to the troops” stuff thrown up on football scoreboards? It turns out that the NFL charges for at least some of them. And we’re the chumps footing the bill.
No, this is not from the Duffel Blog or Onion. Christopher Baxter of NJ.com reports that the Pentagon, which is begging Congress for big bucks, actually paid NFL teams $5.4 million of your hard-earned money.
For example, the Jets were paid nearly $400,000 for several promotions, including, according to the contract, “A videoboard feature – Hometown Hero. For each of their 8 home game [sic], the Jets will recognize 1-2 NJARNG Soldiers as Home Town Heroes. Their picture will be displayed on the videoboard, their name will be announced over the loud speaker, and they will be allowed to watch the game, along with 3 friends or family members, from the Coaches Club.”
This, then, is the unpleasant implication: human beings change our behavior as we are being observed, and the males among us more so than the females.
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What would be curious, indeed, then, is if property crimes did not increase during large public protests during which the police turn out in force, and stand around providing a target at which protestors can express their ire. The more apparent it becomes that the police are concentrated in some areas, and unable to respond to property crimes they normally respond to, the more likely and widespread we should expect looting and theft to become. And while we would not expect only males to rob and steal, we should expect that more males than females will do so.
Finally, a rarely appreciated irony of the “riot patrol” response of most governments to large groups of public protest is that it actually increases the likelihood of looting. When we stop to think through what we know about human beings, social order and government, this is really not very hard to see. That, in my view, is the most interesting aspect of all of this: politicians and police have a strong tendency to make themselves worse off, and very few of them realize it. I will elaborate in a future post, but before getting to that one, I have some other questions to answer. Stay tuned.
It’s been well-documented that America’s banks and financial institutions are no longer the loose-and-easy lenders they were several years ago. But newly released data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reveals a less explored implication of that credit tightening: A new geographic divide in how easily Americans can borrow money.
Those who live in the upper Midwest, particularly Minnesota and the Dakotas, still have the healthy borrowing profiles they did before the Great Recession. Those in many other states have seen only modest declines in the ability to borrow. But those in the Deep South — especially in states hugging the Gulf Coast — have seen their access to credit drop off significantly, even though it was already weak to begin with.
The consequences of a credit freeze in the Deep South are daunting. The region is already economically distressed, with disproportionately high poverty levels, and restrictions on credit access limit the ability of those living there to start businesses, make investments, or manage unforeseen expenses. If enough people in an area cannot borrow, the community itself becomes less resilient, said Kausar Hamdani, a senior vice president at the New York Fed.
“It’s the ability to access resources,” Hamdani said. “Not just for emergencies, but to grow a dream, to start a business.”
Here’s something for the 80-some countries celebrating Mother’s Day today to cheer: compared to a few decades ago, many more mothers are around to be celebrated. In the last quarter century, the rate at which women die of pregnancy-related causes has dropped 45%, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report (pdf), to just 210 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2013.
While rates are still high in many part of the world, overall, their near-universal downward trajectory is encouraging.
One country, however, bucks this trend. Each year, around 1,200 American mothers die in childbirth—meaning about 28 mothers die for every 100,000 live births.
That’s an alarming increase from mere decades ago. In fact, between 1990 and 2013, the US’s maternal mortality rate surged 136%.
Even with that increase, the US’s current rate maternal mortality rate is still much smaller than that of many poorer countries—but by no means not all of them. Mothers in Uruguay, Lebanon, Libya, Kazakhstan, Chile, Albania, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Thailand die at lower rates. The average for developed countries, excluding the US, is just shy of 11 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
It’s not just the deaths. On top of the 1,200 American women who die every year of pregnancy-related causes, there are 60,000 “near misses,” or women who were really close to dying but survived. The combination of deaths and near-misses makes American women over 10 times more likely than their peers in, say, Austria or Poland to die of pregnancy-related causes—this despite the fact that the US’s per capita spending on maternal care is higher than any other country.
What’s behind this alarming spike in US maternal mortality?
Nearly two decades ago, Japan started running out of workers, dragging on economic growth. Making things worse is the fact that seven-tenths of Japanese women drop out of the workforce after having their first child. Getting them back to work could boost Japan’s GDP by as much as 15% (paywall), says Abe. And the way to do that was to make maternity leave longer.
Japan is hardly the only country that would benefit from keeping more mothers in the labor force. If American women worked at the same rates men did, US GDP could grow 9%, say economists; France’s would pop by more than 11%; and Italy’s would see a whopping 23% boost, according to OECD calculations. The average across the OECD would total 12%.
There’s only one problem with Abe’s plan: It’s targeting the wrong people. More maternity leave might sound like a great idea, but as long as mothers are the only parents taking leave, longer stints at home actually worsens job discrimination against them and makes them less likely to pursue a career.
Rather, as the experiences of Sweden, Iceland, and a handful of other countries show, the secret to keeping mothers in the workforce lies not in giving them more time off, but in getting more fathers to stay at home instead.
