“Children and the elderly: Divergent paths for America’s dependents.” Demography, 21(4), 435-457.

- Between 1971 and the early 1980s, the proportion of the population made up of children declined substantially, while the proportion of the population made up of the elderly increased substantially

- A Malthusian argument would suggest that children should now have more resources and the elderly less

- However, Preston argues that exactly the opposite has occurred, and that demographic change has been intimately involved in these developments

Changes in the family

- For many years now, children have relied more on their family for their wellbeing than have the elderly (the elderly rely more on public transfers)

- Increased incentives to divorce (changing labor force participation) and increased willingness to act on those incentives (rise of individualism) have harmed the wellbeing of children

- Elderly have not been as affected by these changes because of their prior disengagement from the conjugal family

Changes in politics

- The elderly make up a huge voting block, whereas children are not allowed to vote

- Moreover, many working age adults vote on behalf of their future elderly selves, and not on behalf of children

- As a result, public expenditures for the elderly have increased dramatically, whereas those for children have declined

- The incidence of poverty among children under 14 in 1970 was 37% less than among the elderly; in 1982 it was 56% greater than among the elderly

 Changes in industry

- The quality of our education system has deteriorated

- Education majors do not tend to be the best students, and teachers who remain in education are even worse than the average education student

- Preston argues that decreasing school enrollment has led to a drop in teachers’ salaries, which has caused even more negative selection among teachers

- In contrast, medical school is very competitive and investments in medicine are on the rise

- Preston concludes by noting that unlike expenditures on the elderly, expenditures on children are an investment in our common future

- Rather than urging families to take more responsibility for their children, public expenditures should play a bigger role

 “Population and the Invisible Hand” Demography, 22(4) 473-487.

- For much of the history of the field of demography, scholars have argued that population growth would lead to economic ruin

- Recently, however, scholars begain to argued that pop growth and economic development could go hand in hand

- Demeny disagrees, and argues that choices at the individual level are not necessarily congruent with collective interest

- “Invisible hand” should not be taken to mean complete absence of government intervention

Policies and institutions should be developed to bring individual interests and collective interest in line with regards to population growth

  - Advocates developing a sort of “demographic constitution”

4 “natural processes” that have aligned fertility decline and individual self-interest in Western societies

1. Decreased labor of children makes raising children an expensive and lengthy investment

2. Increased opportunity costs of raising children due to FLFP

3. Public old-age transfers reduce need for support from children

4. Elderly voting block ensures continued income transfers to older adults

“What’s happening to the American family?” Demography, 27(4), 483-498.

1990 PAA Address

Points out that theories about fertility decline are intrinsically also theories about the family as an institution

- In describing recent trends in the family, Bumpass uses data from the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH)

Marital disruption

- Marital disruption is emblematic of increased emphasis on individual needs over the needs of the collective

- The annual rate of increase in the level of lifetime divorce has been virtually constant for more than 100 years, generating a curve from 7% in 1860 to over 50% in 1990

- About half of children today will spend some time in a single-parent family, most as a consequence of divorce

- The proportion who agreed that parents should not stay together for the sake of children increased from 51% to 81% between 1962 and 1982

- Feedback from recent demographic trends in divorce may be undermining the institution of marriage itself

Cohabitation and marriage

- The proportion of marriages preceded by cohabitation increased from 8% in late 1960s to 49% in 1985-86

- Some implications of cohabitation for family life. . .

- It has changed the meaning of “single”; the reduced number of years spent married should not be viewed as a period of unattached living

- The event of marriage is a less specific marker of other transitions

- These “premarital divorces” likely keep the actual divorce rate from going even higher because those who would have married and gotten divorced now cohabit and break-up instead

- This doesn’t contradict the fact that people who cohabit prior to marriage tend to have higher divorce rates than those who don’t, because certain types of people select into cohabitation, particularly those who do not have as strong traditional family values

Childbearing and parenting

- Nonmarital childbearing is becoming part of the life experience of a significant proportion of women

- Decline in marital stability may explain the public’s increasing approval of nonmarital childbearing

Marital relationships

- Increasing women’s labor force participation may be altering the nature of marital relationships

- Little evidence in the aggregate between female employment and measures of marital quality

- Men whose wife works more tend to do more housework than men whose wife works less, but the amount of housework done by men still lags behind that of women

- Women who regard the division of hh labor as unfair are more likely to report trouble in their marriage, whereas men who regard the division of hh labor as unfair are not more likely to report trouble

Intergenerational relationships

- Most parents and children live near one another and continue to interact on a regular basis throughout life

- Future studies should examine how intergenerational relationships between estranged fathers and their children play out

Bumpass concluded by commenting that understanding the long-term character of institutional change in the family should direct social policy toward the amelioration of negative consequences, rather than toward attempts to reverse the tide

“The young adult years: Diversity, structural change, and fertility.” Demography, 28(4), 493-512.

- 1991 PAA Address 

In order to understand basic demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, it is useful to understand the other roles and experiences of individuals’ lives

- The young adult years (ages 18-30) are demographically dense in the sense that more demographic action occurs during these years than during any other stage in the life course

- The majority of births occur to women in their 20s

- Young adults are more likely than older or younger people to move

- High rates of marriage and divorce in young adulthood

- Young adulthood tends to be the time when individuals leave school and start their first full-time jobs

- Furthermore, the young adult years have become more diverse in the sense that there’s substantial heterogeneity in the sequence of activities

- One reason why the study of roles and events can be difficult is that it’s not always clear whether a transition has occurred

- For instance, cohabitation blurs transition from singlehood to marriage

- Sometimes it’s not clear whether or not an individual is cohabiting

 “Explaining fertility transitions.” Demography, 34(4), 443-454.

- 1996 PAA Address

 - In this paper, Mason sketches the six most commonly cited theories of fertility transition and their major criticisms, describes 4 fundamental problems in the way demographers have previously thought about fertility transitions, and sketches a more interactive approach to understanding fertility decline

Major theories

 1. Notestein’s (1953) Demographic Transition Theory

  - Attributes fertility decline to changes in social life that accompany, and are presumed to be caused by, industrialization and urbanization

- These changes are preceded by mortality decline, which sets the stage for subsequent fertility decline by increasing the size of families

- Furthermore, urbanization and industrialization make it expensive to have lots of children

- One major problem with this theory is that correlations between levels of urbanization/industrialization at the national level have been found to be weak (Princeton Fertility Project)

2. Lesthaeghe’s (1983, 1995) theory of shift in values of individualism

- A shift in values towards individualism and self-fulfillment accompanies the rising secularization and affluence of developed countries

- People find value in other activities than having and raising kids

- One criticism of this theory is that fertility has dropped in many East Asian countries (such as Bangladesh) without any apparent shift toward these values

3. Caldwell’s (1982) theory of intergenerational wealth flows

- Economic and cultural forces contributes to the rise of the nuclear family

- The rise of the nuclear family makes children, rather than parents, the recipients of intergenerational wealth flows, and reduces the economic incentives to have lots of kids

- One problem with theory is that it doesn’t account for fertility decline in East Asia, where little change in the value of the extended family has occurred

4. Becker’s (1960) neoclassical economic theory

- Three proximate determinates govern couples’ fertility choices:

1. the relative cost of children versus other goods,

2. the couple’s income, and

3. their preferences for children versus other forms of consumption

 A major criticism of this theory is that it does not explain the environmental and institutional conditions that serve to change costs, income, or preferences over the course of the fertility transition

5. Easterlin’s (1975, 1978) microeconomic theory

 - Elaborates on Becker’s theory and explains fertility in terms of three proximate determinants:

1. the supply of children in the absence of fertility limitation,

2. the demand for children, and

3. the costs of fertility regulation

- Like Becker, Easterlin’s theory does not elaborate on the institutional and environmental drivers for changing demand for children and costs of fertility regulation

6. Cleland and Wilson’s (1987) theory of ideational change

- Fertility transitions arise due to the diffusion of new information and new social norms about birth control

- This theory does little to explain fertility patterns in regions like Africa where number of surviving children, rather than number of births, is the main factor driving fertility

4 problems with our previous thinking about fertility transitions

1. Assuming that all transitions must have the same cause

- This is unreasonable given the existence of potentially important influences on fertility in only some times or places (for instance, state-organization family planning programs didn’t exist in the 1800s), the increasing evidence that diffusion of ideas can influence fertility behavior even in the absence of major structural changes, and in light of large demographic and social variation across pretransitional populations

2. Ignoring mortality decline as a precondition for fertility decline

 - Researchers have pointed to evidence that fertility decline has occurred at various levels of mortality to disprove this theory

 - However, Mason points to two factors that may reduce the correlation between mortality decline and fertility decline

- First, even if mortality does decline, families may deal with the prospective survival of many children (and the potential decline in standard of living) in ways other than limiting fertility, such as by sending the children to work as servants, by having them migrate overseas, or even by choosing to delay marriage (Davis’ 1963 multiphasic response theory)

- Second, parents’ perceptions of child mortality may differ from the reality

3. Assuming that parity-related measures of birth control did not exist in pre-transition populations

4. Focusing on too narrow of a time scale

 - For instance, one of the major findings of the Princeton Fertility Project was that fertility decline was only weakly correlated with economic modernization in Europe (Coale, 1973)

 - Coale argued that this finding undermined demographic transition theory

- Mason doesn’t believe that this conclusion is justified because we cannot expect the effects of modernization on fertility to happen immediately

Mason’s interactive theory

- Before articulating her theory, Mason outlines some agreed-upon facts about the fertility decline

1. Fertility transitions occur under a variety of institutional, cultural, and environmental conditions

2. Within a given geographical/cultural region, the first population to undergo a fertility decline is likely to have undergone some structural changes, but this is not necessarily true of subsequent populations

3. The sped which influence diffusion of fertility decline depends upon a number of factors, including language, social networks, etc.

4. When the number of children exceeds family’s capacity to support them, the family will engage in some sort of offspring control, but this can involve both post-natal and pre-natal controls

- Mason suggests that any theory of fertility decline must be both ideational in that they recognize that changing perceptions ultimately drive fertility change, and interactive in that they must recognize that various changes in the population work together to influence fertility decline

- One important interaction occurs between the types of postnatal controls that populations use and external changes that alter the costs of these controls relative to prenatal controls

- For instance, laws regulating child labor and education may have increased the costs of these postnatal strategies to maintaining large family size, and made birth control a more attractive option

"Demography and the environment"

1998 -- PAA Address

- In 1993, Ruttan identified 3 waves of concern about the environment since WWII

1940s-1950s: Can natural resources sustain economic growth and food production in the face of population increase?

1960s-1970s: Can the environment absorb the byproducts of modern technology, such as air and water pollution, asbestos, pesticides, etc.?

1980s-1990s: What are the global environment effects of population growth, such as acid rain, global warming, and ozone depletion?

History of demographer’s interest in the environment

- Following WWII, developing countries experienced huge and fast mortality declines, mostly due to introduction of health technology

- Demographers worried whether declines due to such exogenous factors would prevent subsequent declines in fertility

- Many demographers believed fertility control programs were necessary to speed up fertility declines

- Environmental issues have been a more central focus of demography since the National Academy of Sciences report in 1986

- Before then, demographers didn’t focus much attention on the environment for 2 reasons

1. Some saw the negative environmental effects of population growth as self-evident

2. Others believed that any direct effects of demographic change could be muted by growth-induced technological change (Boserup), institutional change, and even fertility reduction

- Since the late 1980s, demographic research on the environment has focused on greenhouse gases and air pollution, land use and deforestation, and environmental hazards and migration

- Demographic factors that are likely to affect consumption patterns include:

population aging,

hh formation, and

social inequality

- Environmental factors may also affect mortality and morbidity

- Murray and Lopez (1996) estimate that air pollution accounts for 1% of annual deaths worldwide

- Future research should utilize more longitudinal data and focus on the role of policy and institutions as mediating factors

“Maternal employment and time with children: Dramatic change or surprising continuity.” Demography, 37(4), 401-414.

-2000 PAA Address

Despite the rapid rise in mothers’ labor force participation since 1960, mothers’ time with children has tended to be quite stable over time

4 reasons for this trend

1. We tend to overestimate the amount of time mothers spent with their children in the past

- Research by Bryant and Zick suggests that the reduction in time spent with children attributable to increased labor force participation since the 1920s would be overestimated without considering changes in family size, observing who was actually looking after children in large families in the 1920s, and investigating the types of “unpaid work” mothers were doing instead of childcare

2. Working mothers still spend almost as much time with their children as stay at home moms

- Time spent with children has been much more stable than one would expect

3. Notions of “what children need” have changed over time

- Today, it is presumed that children need more financial resources to get ahead in life; if anything, working mothers are better suited to provide this valuable resource than moms who don’t work

4. Women’s market work as facilitated an increase in men’s involvement in childrearing, at least within marriage

- In two parent families, children’s time with mothers and fathers increased sufficiently to counteract any decrease in time in the home associated with maternal employment

 “Demography and the social contract.” Demography, 39(4), 587-616.

- 2002 PAA Address

- Classical political theories dating back to Hobbes and Locke suggest that membership in a society stems from the consent to be governed

- Despite this principle, noncitizens in this country are repeatedly denied rights that are afforded to everybody else

- Aliens actually used to be able to vote in many states; the promise of franchise was used to attract immigrants to newly admitted states to improve their representation

- However, as barriers of property, race, sex, literacy, age, and other impediments to universal suffrage were eliminated through constitutional amendments, the suffrage rights of noncitizens were eroded

- Some policies that have restricted immigrant rights in the past have been proposition 187 in California (limit access of legal and illegal immigrants and their children to schools, hospitals, welfare benefits, etc.), the 1996 welfare reform act, and the Illegal  Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (limited access to public services, including in-state tuition for college)

- However, some cities and states have gone against these mandates and given immigrants the right to vote in local school board elections, allowed them access to in-state tuition, etc.

- As long as membership confers different rights to different groups, future progress toward reducing social and economic inequality will be stymied

- Immigrants have much higher poverty rates than the native population (variation across ethnic groups, with immigrants from Latin America much more likely to be poor than those from Europe, Asia, or Africa)

- The diversification of the population warrants a realignment of demographic ideals with demographic realities

Must refocus political attention from immigration  to immigrants

“Is low fertility a twenty-first century demographic crisis?” Demography, 40(4), 589-603.

- 2003 PAA Address

Article reviews the spread of low fertility, argues that low fertility, but not very low fertility, is likely inevitable, and concludes that low fertility is not a crisis

- Sustained levels of very low fertility are not likely because motivations remain for couples to have low-parity births

- Secular trends have reduced the socioeconomic motivations for high-parity births, but they have not eliminated the motivation to have children altogether(Bulatao 1981)

- Proportion of women who intend to have zero children has not increased very much; in most countries, the proportion of women who intend to have 2 children is dominant

- Furthermore, institutional adjustments can make small families feasible, even if they are not economically advantageous

- Affordable, quality child care can be offered to reduce the incompatibility of work and childrearing

- Gender and technological changes can reduce women’s hh work

- Review of Bongaarts’ (2001, 2002) conceptual model of the factors affecting the period TFR

- A woman’s observed fertility results from her intended fertility multiplied by a set of factors that are not or cannot be subsumed under her fertility intentions

- These factors are unwanted fertility, gender preferences, replacement effects, tempo effects, infecundability, and competition

- A parameter of greater than 1.0 for these factors indicate that they increase fertility relative to intentions, and a parameter of less than 1.0 indicates that they decrease fertility relative to intentions

- Using this model, Morgan shows that variation in low fertility is not produced by a disinterest in having children; rather as women age they are faced with a set of competing demands that are most easily accommodated by a delay in fertility

- Postponement brings the risk that women won’t realize intended fertility due to infecundability at older ages and social norms against having kids at an old age

Morgan does not characterize low fertility as a crisis because

1) it is a problem arising from a solution to the problem of unsustainable population growth,

2) it can be addressed through policy and institutional adjustments, and

3) it is a problem that by and large befalls countries that have the resources to respond

“Diverging destinies: How children are faring under the second demographic transition.” Demography, 41(4), 607-627.

Trends associated with the second demographic transition are following two trajectories and leading to greater disparities in children’s resources

1. Children who were born to the most educated women are gaining resources, in terms of parents’ time and money

- Their mothers are older, more likely to be working well-paying jobs, and more likely to be in a stable union with their children’s father

2.  In contrast, children who were born to the least educated women are losing resources

- Their mothers are more likely to be unmarried or to have divorced

McLanahan points to 4 potential causes of these trends:

1. First, the second wave of feminism, which began in the mid-1960s, promoted women’s independence and labor force participation

2. Second, new birth control technology, most notably the pill, gave women the capacity to pursue higher education and a career by giving them greater control over their fertility

3. Third, changes in the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s reduced the labor market prospects of poorly educated men, which made them less “marriageable” in the eyes of women

4. Fourth, higher benefits and more income testing in the welfare system reduced the incentives of low-income women to work and get married

Why should we care?

- Inequality leads to social isolation

- Children in single parent families have higher poverty than children in two-parent families

- The quality of parenting is lower in single parent families

- To counteract these trends, McLanahan suggests that we develop policies that increase the returns to work and make it possible for low income men and women to achieve the living standard they associate with marriage (EITC, subsidized preschool and childcare, etc.)

“Immigration and the American century.” Demography, 42(4), 595-620.

- 2005 PAA Address

- Short-term studies of immigrant adjustment to the US obscure the ways in which immigration has shaped the national history of our country

- As Handlin (1973) notes, “once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America.  Then I discovered that immigrants were American history.”

Overview of immigration in the US

- Immigrants have been more visible and more of a conversation topic when they participate in the labor force and when they live in cities

- This was true during both eras of mass immigration (turn of 20^th century and since 1970)

- Most conservative way to count immigrants in this country is by counting foreign-born in the census

-Doesn’t include all illegals, doesn’t include 2^nd generation, etc.

- Even by this conservative estimate, 14% of population in early twentieth century and 11% in 2000 were immigrants

Influence of immigration on. . .

- Population diversity

- Edmonston and Passell (1994) estimated that the US population would only be 1/3 of its current size if it included only the descendents of those who arrived before 1800

- During the 20^th century, the white population became more “Americanized” as the foreign-born component almost completely disappeared, and Latinos and Asians became a major component of the ethnic panorama

- One important research question will be whether these “new” immigrants will follow the same path as that experienced by Southern and Eastern Europeans earlier in the 20^th century

- The children of most European immigrants experienced upward mobility in terms of occupation and education

- However, deinvestment in inner city schools suggest that children of modern immigrants may be at a greater disadvantage

Growth of cities

- The growth of cities during the industrial era was mostly due to inflow of immigrants

- Furthermore, in recent decade immigrants have prevented cities from declining (many native-borns have left cities but immigrants have kept numbers up)

Economy

- Despite widespread popular beliefs that immigrants harm the job prospects of native-borns, empirical evidence suggests this is not the case

- In addition, immigrants are often seen as a fiscal burden because they and their children use more than their share of public resources

- However, must remember that most of the teachers and staff at children’s schools are native-born, so it might not be fair to think about immigrants as a burden to natives

Politics and culture

- The votes of naturalized immigrants and the children of immigrants helped decide two major presidential elections in 1928 and 1960

- Immigrants have played a large role in American writing, directing, producing, and acting in films
- Perhaps immigrants disproportionately pursue jobs in the arts because traditional career paths aren’t as open to them

 “Reproducing inequalities: Luck, wallets, and the enduring effects of childhood health.”

2005 PAA address

2 arguments of article

1. Research on social stratifications and the intergenerational transmission of inequalities would be strengthened by studying the role of early childhood health 

2. Empirical evidence verifies that early childhood health matters for achievement of or accession to adult social class positions

Reviews evidence for a gradient in health by SES

- Individuals with less than a high school education have the mortality rate at age 52 that individuals with a college degree have at age 62

- Although a 10 year differential between these groups is a common finding in the empirical literature, there is evidence for a convergence/crossover of mortality rates at older ages

- Overall, health disparities by SES tend to begin in early childhood and expand with age

The observed SES and mortality gradients may be explained by health selection

- In other words, it is possible that healthier individuals early on in their lives are more likely to access advantageous social positions than those who experience worse health

-Nevertheless, this doesn’t make the pattern any less real or interesting; merely puts the burden on researchers to understand why such selection effects are occurring

Palloni argues that child health matters for the acquisition of traits that are rewarded in the labor market, such as cognitive performance, educational attainment, and personality

- Uses data from the UK National Child Development Survey 1958 cohort to show that children’s low birth weight (which is associated with parents’ social class and parents’ health) is predictive of their health and cognitive achievement at age 7

- Cognitive achievement at age 7 matters for educational attainment at age 16 which matters for SES at age 41-42

- Early childhood health accounts for approximately 9% of the association between parents’ SES and child SES, which is about the same magnitude as educational attainment

- Finally, Palloni makes the point that the relationship between childhood health and adult achievement would likely be much greater in developing countries, where more children are unhealthy, than in developed countries

 “Putting people into place.” Demography, 44(4), 687-703.

- 2006 PAA address

Putting people into place means examining individual behavior and outcomes in relation to a potentially challenging local context

History of research on neighborhood effects

- Began in 1960s

- World Fertility Survey (WFS) was used in 17 countries in the 70s and 80s to collect info on the features of local communities that might be related to fertility

- Generally weak findings

- At roughly the same time work on local context became popular in the US, following Otis Dudley Duncan’s finding that median rent in a census tract area and household rent were both highly predictive of total number of kids

- Recently there has been an explosion of interest in neighborhood effects

- However, some shortcomings of this research include:

- Assumption that neighborhoods influence individuals and not vice versa; little sense of human agency in the theory or research being conducted

- Hierarchical modeling is consistent with this conceptualization; individuals are nested within places

- Most research is narrowly focused on the effects of poverty

- Most research only includes a single cross-section of neighborhoods; no examination of change over time

Enwisle argues that human agency has 4 different forms that are relevant to understanding the association between health and context:

1) people choose where to live,

2) people’s moves have consequences for neighborhoods,

3) people may purposefully intervene in neighborhoods, and

4) people may selectively engage in certain aspects of their local context

- A more complex understanding of the relationship between health and place will require better data, longitudinal data, and diverse methods with which to study interconnections

“When to promote, and when to avoid, a population perspective.” Demography, 45(4), 763-784.

- 2008 PAA Address

- Demographers should push for greater use of a “population perspective” throughout the social sciences

- By population perspective, Duncan means descriptions (means, distributions, rates) and relationships found in the population at large

- This perspective is attained by using census data and sampling techniques that allow for generalizability to the entire population

- One good example is Fragile Families (which originally wasn’t going to include population representation)

- Many social scientists, in contrast, take a model-based perspective, which implies that a properly constructed model should apply to almost any sample drawn from the population

- Duncan argues that many of these studies could benefit from a population perspective, especially when researchers want to have something to say about subgroups that may be underrepresented in convenience samples (unmarried, racial minorities, poor, etc.)

- He even argues that population sampling techniques should be used in qualitative studies

Causal modeling can be very difficult to align with a population perspective

- Some problems with causal inference at the population level

- The effects of a treatment are unlikely be identical across individuals (population variation in treatment effects)

- It is almost impossible to control for all relevant variables (omitted-variable bias)

3 potential solutions

- Controlling for all relevant control variables (very unlikely)

- Creating confidence intervals around estimates

- Using natural experiments (focusing on a narrow subset of the population in which variation in key independent variables of interest is beyond the control of the individuals involved)

i.e. Twin studies

- Examining individuals who just make/do not make the cut-off for some program (ex: Head Start)

- One problem with the use of natural experiments is that research-based subgroups often do not overlap with the policy-relevant subgroups

How to use a population perspective for causal inference

- Duncan advocates combining natural experiments with subgroups with exogenous variability on key independent variables with population-based regression models to gain the advantages of both techniques

“An integrative approach to health.” Demography, 47(1), 1-22.

- 2009 PAA address

- Harris defines health as social, emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing

Argues that we should use an integrative approach to study health among the young as an important marker for health and wellbeing across the life course and to understand health disparities among the young as both causes and consequences of social stratification

By integrative approach she means bridging together the biomedical, social, and behavioral sciences

- Biomedical sciences have identified many proximate causes of disease, such as smoking related to CVD and lung cancer, but do not study the social, psychological, and behavioral factors that lead to smoking

- Social scientists study the factors that lead to proximate causes of disease, but have not studies the biological mechanisms through which social factors operate to affect health

- The point in the life course where individuals begin to make their own decisions about their health and health behavior is under-researched, but critical to understanding adult health and social stratification throughout the life course

Uses Add Health data to exemplify what can be achieved using an integrative approach to health

- Finds that poor health behaviors during transition to adulthood (smoking, poor diet, no exercise) are predictive of poor health outcomes (diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and sleep problems) in adulthood

- Also finds that poor health behaviors during transition to adulthood are associated with markers of SES, such as attending and/or finishing college, owning a home, and level of asset accumulation

- Although she argues that these findings demonstrate that the transition to adulthood marks a critical time for setting health and socioeconomic trajectories, she only looked at one cohort of individuals; it seems like she is drawing a far more general conclusion than is warranted by her data

“A multigenerational view of inequality.” Demography, 48(1), 1-23.

- 2010 PAA Address

Intergenerational influence is not limited to two-generations, although this is how it is conceived in the vast majority of studies

- Some researchers have studied the effects of grandparents on grandchildren, net of parents, and found no effects; however, Mare argues these studies may not be invariant across time and place

- The use of Markov models assumes that the distribution of a variable depends only on its distribution in the previous state

Multigenerational influence works through social institutions (transcend individual lives), demographic processes (fertility, marriage, migration), and transmission of socioeconomic resources

- Methodologically, it is difficult to distinguish whether an effect works through parent-child ties or if it works multigenerationally

- Some processes that ensure multigenerational influence are legacy systems at colleges, social isolation, passing wealth to grandkids, extended kin taking care of each other, heritability of certain traits

- Multigenerational influence is tied up with processes of cumulative advantage/disadvantage

- Mare advocates more studies of multigenerational effects to determine when Markovian assumptions do and do not hold