Red Families and Blue Families

March 5, 2017 7:40 AM

A new study suggests "the crowded life is a slow life." The study concludes that increased population density may encourage people to adopt a slow life strategy. Such a strategy focuses more on planning for the long-term future and includes tactics like preferring long-term romantic relationships, having fewer children and investing more in education.

Previously, researchers have observed similar correlations between life strategies and voting patterns. People in blue states tend to defer marriage and have fewer children.

These related findings seem to suggest some possibilities for future research. Is it possible that patriarchy is a "fast life strategy" which increased population density mitigates against? There are also correlations between racism and opposition to wealth redistribution which might be related. Could a tendency to hoard resouces within one's own kin groups possibly be a "fast" life strategy, which is evolutionarily advantageous in circumstances with limited resources? These kinds of research inquiries might have direct relevance to political conflicts around the world.

posted by OnceUponATime (19 comments total)

Thank you for making this its own post! I only saw the delete note, and was bummed that I missed it.

Now off to read links, though this hypothesis doesn't bode well for the American political system in particular.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:11 AM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

(That should have said "voting patterns in the US" though I'd love to see if other people have similar data for other countries. Actually I'm hoping that there's more research on these questions than I realize and someone is going come along and add a bunch more links.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 8:30 AM on March 5, 2017

“People who live in dense places seem to plan for the future more, prefer long-term romantic relationships, get married later in life, have fewer children and invest a lot in each child. They generally adopt an approach to life that values quality over quantity.”

I don't like the value judgement that is imposed. Less children are more "quality"? Long-term relationships may be existing because moving to seperate housing is more expensive in large cities. Investing money in your children (but not time, because city people are being busy competing against so many others for resources/jobs)? Did I miss the link to the actual study?
posted by saucysault at 9:07 AM on March 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

I don't know if I 100% agree with the correlation. For example, the pre-school craze is more an artifact of affluence and you have to be reasonably well off to live around NYC. And it's another form of day-care, especially when two salaries are mandatory.

But an interesting observation nonetheless. Having to live in proximity to other people makes you more considerate of their situation. Who knew?
posted by Artful Codger at 9:08 AM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

As a behavioral ecologist who wallows in life history theories like it's no one's business... I'm a bit skeptical, because patriarchy and investing in early education and all of this are so very culturally mediated. If this is a life history tradeoff's behavioral plasticity strategy rather than something that can better be explained by social psychology approaches, I would expect to see changes in human behavior that... Well, honestly, I would expect to see changes that are more along the lines of how humans react to stimuli and which fall much less clearly into neat culturally expected lines! This feels so much to me like an idea that is delightfully simple and makes a lot of sense on first blush but which falls apart when I consider more evidence.

For example, what's our mechanism here? Do rural people who move to urban areas and vice versa display different trends than people who are born and raised in areas of the same density? (My hunch is no.) Are there critical periods of development that matter more to predicting a person's overall life history strategy, or is the context in which they're living in young adulthood/level of education a more important factor? Do PhD students, for example, employed at rural campuses have children more quickly than PhD students who are employed at urban campuses controlling for relationship status?

I'm also, of course, deeply skeptical about the correlation to our current situation as a child of conservative, urban, wealthy people who are nevertheless comfortable with authoritarian hierarchical styles. We can't assume that conservatives are only or even primarily poor and rural because it's just not true. How are we factoring suburbia into this?
posted by sciatrix at 10:04 AM on March 5, 2017 [17 favorites]

Some of the political editorializing that I took out of the FPP...

I think trans and gay identities are threatening to that patriarchal strategy (not maximizing reproduction by performing the duties assigned to you!) So is feminism. I think sharing resources outside your clan/tribe is threatening to that strategy too, and that's probably the root of a lot of racism and xenophobia.

What if "human nature" is actually to adapt to threats or poverty or isolation by becoming patriarchal and hoarding resources for one's own clan, and to adapt to abundance and peace by having fewer offspring and spreading resources around more?

Then it wouldn't be so much about "How do we convince people" or "maybe we can't convince them, maybe we just have to beat them" or "maybe we need to back more slowly away from patriarchy and clannishness to give people time to adjust." It would be about changing people's circumstances so they are more likely to adopt slow-life patterns... or otherwise just letting them be patriarchal within their own clans if they want, but making it clear that their clan-rules don't apply to us (and any of them who want to join "us" are welcome to.)

Also, I agree that the main link is kind of biased in favor of liberals/slow life. I think that "patriarchy" link is at least as biased the other way (it suggests that patriatchy leads to "higher quality" child rearing for instance...) I first read that article about ten years ago, and it raised my blood pressure then as it does now (mostly the parts where it postulates that patriarchy is not necessarily that bad for women), but I've been thinking about its thesis ever since. Also I think it has a really useful definition for "patriarchy."
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:05 AM on March 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Maybe my mind is poisoned by the use of "slow" as a valorizing term for upper class lifestyle affectations but the way this study is being reported here raises my hackles a little. It comes across as a just so story with a dollop of geographic condescension. Perhaps the study itself is less fraught. Perhaps I am way off base and reactive.
posted by Pembquist at 10:15 AM on March 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

Sciatrix, you raise some good questions, to which I can only say "more research is needed." But the questions about what happens when people move from rural areas to urban ones does remind me of this Cracked article.

Also I forgot to mention that the title of the post is taken from a book which I have not actually read. Though I did read an excerpt. (That is also quite sympathetic to the conservative viewpoint.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:18 AM on March 5, 2017

Re more research, give me some time to get home from this town hall and I'll track the study down and chew it over in a little more detail. I will say that doing this kind of research on nonhuman animals--trying to understand how individuals use their context to inform their social behavior--is very much my wheelhouse, and this work smells to me like something that makes an awful lot of leaps and assumptions. But I can be wrong and I often am, so I'll spend some time reading the study and the authors' arguments and evidence and give it a chance to try to convince me anyway.
posted by sciatrix at 11:22 AM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

Another demographic that the articles don't seem to talk much about is one I remember well from my hick town upbringing: people who are happy to commute 90 minutes or more each way to a high-paying job in the city if it means they can have a big country house and yard to raise their kids in, complete with picket fence, giant dog, and public school with no metal detector or crowded classrooms. They may be in the small town, but they're not really of it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:07 PM on March 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

Manila has the world's highest population density, yet everything I have ever read about the Philippines (I've only been to Cebu) would seem to contradict the conclusions presented in the first link.
posted by My Dad at 12:37 PM on March 5, 2017 [5 favorites]

This sounds like correlation and not causation - isn't this just wealth?
posted by benadryl at 1:09 PM on March 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

Evo psych 'studies' are the New York Times trend pieces of the social sciences.
posted by srboisvert at 2:37 PM on March 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think that people marry and have children when they are coming into full adulthood and full membership of their community. And in urban areas that's often about age 35. In the country it's 19 or 20, certainly by 25. And it's not really money so much as having arrived as an adult, knowing your life course and being reasonably certain what'll happen in the next 10 years or so, which are the crucial ones to children and marriage.

I grew up in the country and moved to the city as an adult. Where I was a teen, I worked about 25 hours a week on a farm, after high school. A lot of the firefighters and EMTs were teens or early 20s, a lot of social clubs, bands etc were all really young people but we were pretty adult. And most of my friends from there did marry young, settle down and happily raise kids. Some moved to the city or the suburbs and some stayed. A lot stayed. Overall they are much happier than my city friends I have noticed as we all age.

And it's not wealth or conservatism or anything, that's a mixed bag, if anything my rural friends are more liberal, less religious and most do have professional jobs now, very few farm full time or anything. It's just that we felt part of society quite young and like we had a right to have a voice and be fully participating adults being as we were quite important to the community that needed us to survive.

I feel like specifically patriarchial communities are the opposite of that. Those people never grow up. How many marriages of equal young couples happen there? Not a lot. But it's not confined to rural areas, my brother is a big corporate lawyer and his friends all have trophy wives who are much younger and don't work. Much less equality in those marraiges than the farm families I grew up around.
posted by fshgrl at 11:45 PM on March 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

>Will higher densities always lead to this slow strategy? “Not at all,” said Sng. “In fact, when high densities are paired with unpredictable death or disease, the theory predicts that people will become more present-focused and opportunistic.”

But "unpredictable death or disease" are not exactly the problems in Manila or other megacities. One major problem is precarious employment. I talked to people who traveled 3 or 4 hours one way each day to get to work as a guard or a cleaner. One person I corresponded with on Facebook lost his job when the contract was transferred to another agency.

I still don't buy the premise of this article, unless we're only talking about London or New York. But not everyone can live in those cities, either.
posted by My Dad at 9:46 AM on March 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

This Just So Story Explains EVERYTHING About Your Relatives. You Won't Believe What Happened Next.
posted by ead at 1:48 PM on March 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

I wonder if they would have found the same result if they had done the study in the 1950s-1970s, when there was a higher (relative) level of prosperity in suburbs and small towns compared to dense cities. All across the developed world over the past couple of decades, stable, long-term relationships and general prosperity have been moving from suburbs and small towns into cities, while heroin epidemics and crime and poverty have been moving in the other direction.

I'd like to see a repeat of the study set in 1959. If they got the same result, it would reduce the "Just So" vibe a bit.
posted by clawsoon at 2:54 PM on March 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm not even sure if you can use a macro approach (e.g., "Tokyo", "New York", "London", "Lagos", "Cairo") when comparing "slow life" versus whatever. There is no such thing as "Tokyo", since the population of Tokyo, in terms of demographics, is not homogenous. There are some parts of Tokyo that are rich, some parts that aren't so rich. Some parts where there are more families (the western suburbs), some parts where are not.

Manila would be the same. You can only look at this sort of thing on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
posted by My Dad at 4:36 PM on March 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

I would just like to point out that it can either be a "just so story" or be falsified by data from cities like Manila, but it can't be both.

"Just so stories" are not falsifiable.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:41 PM on March 6, 2017