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🇺🇸🇺🇦 🇮🇱Nicholas H Wolfinger Profile picture
🇺🇸🇺🇦 🇮🇱Nicholas H Wolfinger
@NickWolfinger
Professor at the University of Utah; opinions are my own. Written some books about marriage & divorce. NAGA winner. Pot-bellied pig owner. No Substack.
Jun 5, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Thread. Are 20% of Zoomers LGBT, as those recent Pew data suggest? In a new post for @FamStudies, I look at the LGB part using data from the 2011-19 National Survey of Family Growth (the data don't have info on the T part).

/1

ifstudies.org/blog/bisexual-… Image The NSFG shows fewer LGB Zoomers than those recent Gallop data, but still strong growth, notably in bisexuality. The small increases in the % of gay/lesbian Zoomers are what we might expect in a more tolerant society.

/2
Oct 25, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I’m pleased that Mark Regnerus wrote a response to my paper w/ @profsamperry on premarital sex & marriage. 3 points:

- we measure # of sex partners rather than, say, timing of sex in relationships because of what can be measured with the least error.

/1 -we make no broad claims about whether sex now is “cheap.”

/2
Oct 24, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Thread. @profsamperry & I wrote a post for @FamStudies on our new paper on premarital sex & marriage, & put to rest that archaic aphorism about buying cows & free milk.

/1

ifstudies.org/blog/new-resea… Bivariate probit models & NSFG data confirm that premarital sex partners reduce the odds of marriage, BUT...

/2
Jun 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
This is an ongoing fiction.

Mitt Romney's child allowance is a fine idea, but the HuffPo article cited in this thread celebrates that he now has *two* GOP supporters. Romney-Bennet (D-CO), a bipartisan refundable tax credit, went nowhere in 2019.

/1

romney.senate.gov/romney-bennet-… Rubio's Washington Examiner piece has the gall to include this sentence, even after he voted for an Obamacare repeal in 2017 that would have increased the number of uninsured Americans by 32 million, per the CBO.

/2

cbo.gov/publication/52…. Image
Jun 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Back in grad school, I was taught that materialist analysis of the sort Deneen, @SohrabAhmari, & @ccpecknold conduct here is straight-up Marxist. These new red-brown NatCons are exceeding all expectations for what it means to be nationalist & socialist.

nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opi… Related: delighted to learn that @SohrabAhmari blocked me.
Jun 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
An interesting new (gated) study from @DanyaLagos offers cohort-based estimates of transgender identification based on representative data from 39 states. One question: could period effects be just as important as age effects?

1/2
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108… ImageImage The author punts on APC identification & the utility of Yang Yang's intrinsic estimator, but it's at least worth a shot.

2/2
May 27, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Thread. Reasonable people may disagree about the precise mechanisms linking family structure & offspring well-being, but the consequences of family structure have been affirmed by mainstream social science for 40 years.

/1 The senior social scientists of today--Andrew Cherlin, the late Sara McLanahan, Paul Amato--have all done rigorous data analysis linking two-parent families to child well-being. They've done their best to establish causality, as in this paper.

/2

jstor.org/stable/pdf/229…
May 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Thread. Interesting experience yesterday when I got an interview request on the SCOTUS leak from Sputnik, Russian state media. I'm normally happy to do any media, mainstream or tiny, liberal or conservative, but this was... a surprise.

1/3 The argument for doing it was a first amendment argument: the press should do its work irrespective of politics. And while Sputnik does plenty of propaganda for Putin, it also does some real journalism.

2/3
Jan 14, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Thread. A few thoughts on Amy Wax, the Penn prof who--most recently--made the news for saying that the U.S. show reduce Asian immigration, in part because most Asians vote Democratic.

/1

6abc.com/amy-wax-penn-p… First off, it's unlikely that Wax has been misquoted or misinterpreted, as she has a long history of professing such beliefs.

/2

abovethelaw.com/2019/07/amy-wa…
Nov 23, 2021 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
Thread. In collaboration with Jesse Smith, a grad student at Penn State, I just wrote a new paper on the effects of premarital sex on divorce rates using Add Health data.

/1

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… It's long been known that premarital sex raises divorce rates. We add to the literature in 3 ways:

- Does the effect vary by the # of premarital partners?

- Can the effect be explained by differences between partners?

- Are there gender differences?

/2
Nov 1, 2021 • 7 tweets • 7 min read
Thread. Writing for @ArcDigi, I recount the third investigation in the past five years that @UUtah has subjected me to. Once a university decides it has it out for you, they'll just keep coming.

/1

arcdigital.media/p/1ef1c518-1ec… The first investigation, in 2016, was a Title IX-type proceeding. I'd been accused of multiple offenses, most memorably having told a colleague that I'd proposed to my wife at a strip club. I described the investigation here.

/2

quillette.com/2017/08/24/sur…
Jun 23, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Thread. Today marks the 80th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa (translated: red beard), the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The scale of this human tragedy still boggles the mind.

1/6 Some numbers to get a sense of the scope:

- Wehrmacht troops & allies: 3 million (the largest invasion ever)

- Soviet dead, military & civilian, in WW2: 20-40 million, per Wiki

- USSR troops captured at Kiev in September-October: 660,000

2/6
Jun 22, 2021 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
This quality in-depth interview by @ArthurCDent & @C_Kavanagh is the impetus for a long-delayed thread on @jessesingal's great new book. I have two takeaways, on individualism & academic incentives.

/1 Jesse emphasizes the individualist turn in the book, as does this interview. But it's helpful to place it in its greater sociological context.

/2
May 25, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Thread. NYT ran a fine paean to the late Daniel Moynihan today that recalls the hullabaloo surrounding his 1965 report on nonmarital fertility among Black mothers. It ended up shaping decades of scholarship.

/1

nytimes.com/2021/05/15/boo… I wrote at length about Moynihan's legacy in my 2005 book Understanding the Divorce Cycle. The backlash was so strong that for years scholars ignored the possibility that nonintact parentage might be bad for kids.

/2
May 1, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
I'm happy to say this petition protesting the firing of @LinfieldUniv professor @pollackpelzner has gotten some attention in the New York Times.

/1

nytimes.com/2021/05/01/us/… Daniel was fired a month after he blew the whistle on misconduct at @LinfieldUniv in a long Twitter thread.

/2

Mar 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Thread. In a new article, @LarissaShamseer, @DrIvyBourgeault, et al. correctly observe that COVID will take a disproportionate toll on female scientists, but follow up with recommendations bound to have unanticipated consequences.

/1

jclinepi.com/article/S0895-… They recommend deemphasizing peer review as a career metric. This isn't a new idea-here is a thought-provoking read on the subject-but a transition to pre-prints is bound to introduce a lot of perverse incentives that haven't been evaluated.

/2

Oct 22, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Thread. This week on my bi-weekly & low-impact podcast, Amy & I talked to UC Berkeley Law scholar Martin Shapiro about the supreme court. Listen to Professor & the Idiot on your podcast app, or right here:



Some highlights appear below.

/1 The late justice Antonin Scalia was Martin's longtime professional acquaintance. Scalia spoke of his support for originalism--interpreting the Constitution as the Framers did--WHEN APPLICABLE. People tend to forget this part, said Martin.

/2
Aug 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Perhaps Devon was unaware that I was the first ever male speaker for the University of Utah's annual Women's Week in 2012, where I delivered part of the Edie Kochenour Memorial Lecture?

The basis of my talk was my research on how we might eliminate the gender gap in higher education.

amazon.com/Do-Babies-Matt…
Aug 15, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
.@samk_harris tells of an academic star chamber: tenured professor @CharlesNegy retweets a white supremacist & gets subjected to a nine hour inquisition about his unrelated performance in the classroom presumably intended pour encourager les autres.

/1

quillette.com/2020/08/13/the… Perhaps Negy, an ethnic & sexual minority himself, wasn't aware of who he was retweeting. Maybe he was, in which case I wouldn't object to the informal censure academe traditionally imposed in such cases, but academic freedom means protecting even the loathsome.

/2
Aug 13, 2020 • 20 tweets • 7 min read
Thread. For whatever reason UC Berkeley never released a death notice, let alone an obituary, for my coauthor & former Dean of the Graduate Division Mary Ann Mason, so I'll do it here, focusing on her intellectual contributions. She died two weeks ago at the age of 76.

/1 Mary Ann came to academe late in life, via an unusually circuitous route. She got a PhD in history from Rochester, but didn't pursue an academic career in order to stay with her 1st husband. Instead, she got a JD & practiced law.

/2
Jul 28, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
New episode of Professor & the Idiot: my co-pod Amy & I interview political scientist George Hawley, author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Where did the alt-right come from? Is it still a thing in 2020? Listen via your pod app, or right here:

Per this paper from George, support for the alt-right declined markedly after Charlottesville in 2017.

researchgate.net/publication/34…