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Megan McArdle Profile picture
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3 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I see claims like this a lot, but Sweden has basically the same abortion rate as the United States, and within the US, our deepest blue states make up half of the top 10, and all of the top 3, for per capita abortions.

worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankin…

kff.org/womens-health-…
I don't say that being deep blue causes a high abortion rate, but the evidence that sex ed or free contraception makes abortion unnecessary is surprisingly weak. Cultural and institutional factors seem to matter more than sex ed programs per se.
I suspect there are threshold effects: if people are truly ignorant, or contraception completely unavailable, changing policy makes a huge difference. But once they know where babies come from and where to buy condoms, other effects dominate sex ed or contraception subsidies.
This has been another installment of "IF this contentious political problem had some easy, obvious solution, we wouldn't still be fighting about it."

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More from @asymmetricinfo

Megan McArdle Profile picture
3 Dec
So far, the response from readers to this column has been "This is ridiculous, every single woman I know will be up in arms!"

First of all, that's probably not true--and second of all, it's a big country, & your circle of young, educated professionals aren't the majority.
This is a symptom of a broader problem with how American elites approach diversity. We emphasize certain kinds of demographic diversity a lot--which, yay!--but forget that highly educated professionals are unrepresentative of basically any demographic group they belong to.
Their interests, tastes, needs, and outlook all diverge significantly from the average member of their demographic group. And like all of us, they often tend to be blind to the fact that the things that matter most to them are not necessarily what others most care about.
Read 8 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
1 Dec
Looking at abortion opinion, it's actually quite striking how little men and women differ on this question. The whole pro-life is about men telling women what to do with their bodies" schtick simply isn't grounded in reality. news.gallup.com/poll/245618/ab…
Women are somewhat more likely to say abortion should be legal under all circumstances, but that's a minority view among women as well as men. The percentage of men and who say it should be illegal in all circumstances is fluctuates right around 20%, male or female
Men are more likely to self-id as pro-life, and women as pro-choice, but when you drill down into specifics, it's clear this stems from differences in labeling quite similar views.

norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Rep…
Read 14 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
30 Nov
I just filed a column on how Twitter is a bottomless cesspool of negativity, so let me offer something positive and helpful: the endless braise.
If you're like me, you have a few basic braise recipes in constant circulation all winter. In my case: A tomatillo-based pork braise. A raisin-wine-worcester-and-celery oxtail braise loosely based on a reconstruction of an ancient roman dish. A tomato-wine-and-soy pot roast. Etc.
We always have liquid left over at the end. So instead of throwing it away, or just thickening and serving with pasta or tortillas, I freeze it, and use it to start the next batch.
Read 9 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
29 Nov
It's all part of a cycle. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, floors were covered in rich houses, but as carpets got cheaper, they filtered down to the middle class and then the working class, whereupon the rich decided the hardwood or tile floor was more tasteful.
Late in the 19th century, broadloom carpet--aka the stuff we think of as wall to wall carpeting--was invented. If you look at rich people apartments in 1930s movies, they're all covered in broadloom.
Broadloom is quiet, warm, and gives a smooth "Modern" look to those Art Deco places. However, it was vulnerable to the same cycle: as manufacturing improved and synthetics came along, broadloom got cheap. Then it got ubiquitous. Then rich people decided it was declasse.
Read 5 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
19 Nov
My column on the Rittenhouse verdict: the left threw away a golden opportunity to get conservatives on board with criminal justice reform. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Instead, people who are constantly tweeting about "ending mass incarceration" suddenly started sounding like the hardest core 1980s law-and-order conservatives. When talking about, let's remember, a *17 year old*.
This created the impression that what mattered was less what Rittenhouse had done, then his politics and his skin color. That was a disastrous message for criminal justice reform.
Read 6 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
15 Nov
I got in to Penn with a 2.7 GPA (though improving steadily throughout high school), & parents who couldn't afford to make donations. The weird smart kid who didn't do homework because they were too busy writing a novel was a definite character in the Ivies in my era. Not any more
In fairness, applications were much more labor intensive then, with no common app, and I applied to more schools than most people of my era. Unsurprisingly, given my GPA, I had a high reject rate: I got into two out of three of my reaches, but was rejected by both of my safeties.
Getting rid of the SAT is going to be one more strike against that kinds of kids. Every remaining criteria is some variation on "how hard do you try to please adults, and how well have you mastered the rarified set of social norms embraced by college admissions officers?"
Read 6 tweets

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