Greg writes:
> I understand about Nevada, although your original email did not describe
> this, nor disclaim it.
My apologies. I thought the exception would be obvious.
> But please explain New Mexico to us, if not Wyoming,
> Indiana, Idaho, or Florida, which is still 40% above the national average.
...
> But I suspect that people still get married and divorced for any of several
> reasons, for which there is probably no simple root cause.
Money *is* the simple root cause of most things, and it gives every evidence
of being true for divorce rates as well.
If you compare the state-by-state divorce rates with that of economic
measures, in the case below, with the "economic vitalities" of the various
states, you will see a very strong correlation between the two:
divorce rates:
http://www.divorcereform.org/94staterates.html
economic vitality:
http://drc.cfed.org/index.php3?section=grades&page=grades
But, as I attempted to indicate earlier, there are other correlates as well.
If you were to plot divorce rates vs. the percentage of people in the state
that believe that "Genesis is the literal word of God", divorce rates vs. the
percentage of people in the state that voted for George W. Bush (the "red"
states have higher divorce rates than the "blue" states), divorce rates vs.
the average number of books in the household, etc., you will undoubtedly find
highly correlated graphs in all of these circumstances, in great part because
these are not independent variables but are rather high quality predictors of
one another.
The lowest divorce rates occur in:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Rank State Number Business Vitality Score
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
1 Massachusetts 14,530 2.4 AAA
2 Connecticut 9,095 2.8 AAA
3 New Jersey 23,899 3.0 BAB
4 Rhode Island 3,231 3.2 BCC
5 New York 59,195 3.3 CAB
Pennsylvania 40,040 BBA
The bottom five (excluding Nevada) are:
46 Indiana *** 6.4 BDC
47 Wyoming 3,071 6.5 CDC
48 Tennessee 34,167 6.6 CCD
49 Oklahoma 21,855 6.7 DCD
50 Arkansas 17,458 7.1 DDF
The correlation won't be perfect of course. There are states with worse
business scores that have lower divorce rates (New Mexico's score is FDC) as
well as states that have very good business scores (Colorado's score is AAA)
that have a worse-than-average divorce rate, but you shouldn't expect perfect
correlations; correlations rarely are. But if you were to plot these two
scores (business vitality vs. divorce rate) as a scattergram and run a linear
regression line through them, I can tell by simply looking at the data, that
the correlation is going to be quite good.
And if you were to plot divorce rates vs. the percentage of the population
that voted for GW Bush, I'm sure that you will almost certainly get the same
level of correlation. Divorce rates simply go up as a family is increasingly
stressed for money and can see little way out of its predictament. These same
people often have a tendency to seek simpler, more child-like explanations as
well, in both their politics and in their religion.
But before anyone forgets the original point-of-launch of this subthread,
Wayne wrote in regards to being a Christian family being equated with
"prudishness":
> You and me both! A lot of our tradtional "prudishness" has been
eliminated,
> to the great detriment of our families and our society.
In that regard, the demonstrable facts are quite the opposite of Wayne's
assumption, that as fundamentalism ("bibical-literalism") increases, the
Christian family is put increasingly at risk of disintegrating, undoubtedly
because of lowered earnings potential, but also because of the mandate of
female subservience to the head of household, etc.
Wirt Atmar
* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
|
