Utterly Moderate Podcast

Before we begin, don't forget to check out Lawrence Eppard's new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, and to read the newest piece in the Connors Journal on single parenthood in the U.S.

Now on to the podcast. . . 

Kimberly Wehle, a constitutional law expert at the University of Baltimore's School of Law, joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss her new book,  Pardon Power: How the Pardon Power System Works—and Why.

Wehle and host Lawrence Eppard discuss a variety of topics, including:

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Single parenthood has risen dramatically in the United States over time. Today, 34% of all children live in a single parent household, up from 9% in 1960.

There are regrettable negative consequences of these statistics, as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen notes:

“[C]hildren in mother-only homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes. Poverty is not conducive to thriving, but even for kids who are not poor, those who grow up with only one parent fare worse than others on everything from school to work to trouble with the law. And the consequences of fatherlessness are more dire for boys than girls. Boys raised without fathers and/or without good adult male influences in their lives are less likely to attend college, be employed as adults, or remain drug-free.”

And as the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz writes:

“Kids in single-parent homes have lower educational achievement, commit more crime, and suffer more emotional problems, even when controlling for parental income and education. Not only do young men and women from intact families (regardless of race and ethnicity) get more education and earn higher earnings than those raised with single mothers; they also do better than children who have a stepparent at home. Children growing up in an area where single-parent families are the norm have less of a chance of upward mobility than a child who lives where married-couple families dominate (regardless of whether that child lives with a single parent or with married parents). The evidence that the prevalence of single-parent households poses risks to individual children and communities goes on and on.”

There are large variations in single parenthood rates by race/ethnicity, with 63% of Black children, 50% of Indigenous children, 42% of Latino children, 24% of non-Hispanic White children, and 16% of Asian American children living in single parent households.

University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has published important research on how family structure impacts American children, including her new book, The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind:

“The most recent research, much of which incorporates advanced statistical techniques, continues to show that children who are raised in single-mother households tend to have lower levels of completed education and lower levels of income as adults, even after statistically accounting for observable demographic characteristics (for example, where the family lives or the mother’s level of education)” (p. 52).

In Table 1, Kearney shows how children of single parents differ in their life chances compared with children of married parents. For children of college-educated mothers, for instance, 57.0% have a college degree by age 25 if their mother was married, but only 28.6% of those raised with a college educated single mother.  

In Figure 1 you can see, as Mona Charen alluded to, the strong correlation between the dominant family structure in a neighborhood and the upward mobility rate of children raised there.

Even for children who themselves are raised in married parent households, they are statistically more likely to struggle in adulthood if they are raised in a community where there is widespread single parenthood. If you want to dive deeper into this subject, this paper from the Connors Institute has got you covered.

Table 2 shows the large variations in poverty rates between American families with different structures. Taken together, all of these data strongly suggest that parents really matter.

We discuss rising single parenthood and its consequences for children on the most recent episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast.

Joining us in this discussion is Kay Hymowitz, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes not only on family issues and childhood, but also poverty and cultural change in America.

Hymowitz is the author of the books The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back (2017), Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (2011), Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age (2006), and Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (2004), among others.

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On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, the authors of the brand new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, talk about the book and its implications for America. 

So what is their argument?

A significant amount of research suggests that most people seek out news and information sources that mirror their worldviews, avoid ones that don’t, and interpret information using cognitive filters that force an alignment with what they already believe. As social psychologist David Dunning writes, “Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated. . . And any information that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain whole and unharmed.” 

As they document in their brand new book and their free online documentary of the same name, the evidence suggests that this problem afflicts both conservative and liberal Americans.

Conservative Americans tend to place their trust in very few sources of news and information, and those sources tend to be low-quality, like the openly partisan Fox News. Conservatives also tend to cocoon themselves within a partisan media ecosystem of like-minded low-quality outlets, an “internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenge[s] it.” 

Liberal Americans are more likely than conservatives to trust legitimate journalistic outlets, but those sources often unknowingly spread misleading claims that they truly believe are backed by “the science.” Why do they believe this? Sometimes it’s because the outlet doesn’t fully grasp the preponderance of the evidence on the issue at hand. But too often it is because irresponsible experts, who news outlets should be able to trust, said “the science” backed their claims when it didn’t.

Consider the following statements that many on the left assume are backed by “the science”:

None of these claims are backed by strong evidence. At best, the research is mixed, not clearly pointing in one direction or the other. At worst, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. But many on the left believe these statements are backed by “the science” because prominent academics have made big, irresponsible claims that go far beyond what the preponderance of the evidence supports. 

In Poisoning, the authors give equal attention to epistemic failings on both sides. They believe the evidence shows that Americans across the political spectrum fall for questionable assertions from sources that they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative, sources which often present the information in a manner that appeals to the sacred beliefs of consumers’ in-groups. 

They make no assertions about which side’s epistemic failings are “worse” due to their honest inability to quantify such a thing—and they are not sure it matters as much as some may think. Both red and blue America face epistemic crises that act like serious illnesses that sicken American society—even if you could measure which one makes us feel “worse” as a nation, the reality is that either one would make our country seriously ill, and experiencing them simultaneously is a nightmare.

In Poisoning the authors discuss not only the misleading information that is hurting American, but a variety of possible ideas for how to get ourselves out of this mess.

You can buy the book, watch the free documentary, and read the other work they have published on this topic.

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We want to express our deepest sympathies and condolences to the family of Corey Comperatore. He was killed during the attempted assassination of former President Trump. 

According to NBC Philadelphia, Comperatore raised two daughters with his high school sweetheart and spent his final moments shielding his family that he loved so much from the gunfire.

May he rest in peace. His family is in our prayers.

We also want to wish a quick recovery to those who were injured in the assassination attempt, including former president Donald Trump and rally attendees David Dutch and James Copenhaver.

And lastly our condolences to all others impacted by this political violence.

Violence has absolutely no place in a civilized society.

Given how much our democracy and country have been through, we thought on this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we would lighten things up a bit and talk about something that perhaps we all might have some positive feelings about: one of our founding fathers. 

It is July after all, America’s month of celebrating our independence.

In the spirit of July and America and trying to find some positivity right now, on this episode we bring you a replay of our conversation with George Washington University historian Denver Brunsman. He previously joined the show to share his insights on the life and career of George Washington, as well as his general reflections on the study of history and its place in the modern university. 

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On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, host Lawrence Eppard and Connors Institute co-director Jacob Mackey discuss techniques and shortcuts that you can use to spot real expertise in a world where people with expert credentials are sometimes frauds and where people without expert credentials are often very knowledgeable. They also discuss crucial techniques for examining your personal biases and the limits of your own knowledge.

This conversation is based on two really good readings, and we hope you will not only listen to this episode but go to these websites and read these short but very illuminating pieces:

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Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now!

We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so.

In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind. 

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly, political scientist at Kentucky State University, to talk about misleading claims that have made their way into educational curricula in the U.S. Friend of the show Jacob Mackey joins the conversation as a special guest cohost.

Our guest, Dr. Reilly, is the author of several books, two of which are particularly informative in this discussion:

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Before we talk about this week’s podcast episode, don’t forget to check out the Connors Institute’s new documentary, The Poisoning of the American Mind, an illuminating film about how conservatives and liberals in America regularly fall for misinformation and disinformation.

On this week’s episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Varoujan Gorjian, to discuss a number of science-related topics, including:

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis.

On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no political conservatives at all. 

This significant one-sidedness means that the people doing the research as well as the people checking to make sure that research is high quality before it is published all have similar ideological blind spots, and this is allowing too much misleading information to make it into the public discourse, where it is often perceived by average citizens as being backed by solid evidence when that just isn’t so.  

On this episode host Lawrence Eppard is joined by anthropologist Michael Jindra from Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs to talk about this problem and hopefully offer some ways to save the social sciences from themselves.

Check out just some of the great insights Jindra has to offer in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “When Ideology Drives Social Science.”

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It is extremely hard for the average citizen to understand what the “state of the science” is on many issues. We can all type our queries about a particular topic into Google but, when we get the flood of results, most of us are not trained to be able to (a) understand the complicated statistical methodologies employed in many research studies, (b) compare studies and evaluate their strength relative to each other, or (c) assess what the preponderance of the evidence is across tens or even hundreds of studies.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Sallie Baxendale to help us think about how we might make such judgements. She also goes into detail about ways in which the scientific process can go wrong, as it has been in some areas of gender-affirming care in recent years, as Joshua Cohen discusses in Forbes:

“In the U.S., a politically partisan divide is shaping up between states that allow for and guarantee access to youth gender-affirming care and states that ban such treatment altogether. Twenty-two states have passed bans on the use of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgery in minors.

In Europe political divisions on this topic aren’t nearly as conspicuous as they are in the U.S. Rather, the debate is much more fact-based. An increasing number of countries have conducted systematic reviews of evidence to determine the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And the findings from these reviews—that the certainty of benefits is ‘very low’—have informed changes in policy regarding treatment of gender incongruence in minors. . .

All things considered, according to European health authorities and medical experts, there isn’t yet a medical consensus for the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in gender dysphoric minors.

And so authorities are ‘tapping the brakes,’ shifting from care which prioritizes access to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, to a less medicalized and more conservative approach that addresses possible psychiatric comorbidities. . .

In the U.S., on the other hand, talk of introducing guardrails like the ones being incorporated in Europe is sometimes met with being branded ‘transphobic’ or a ‘science denier.’”

You can read about Dr. Baxendale’s own troubling experiences with this field of research in her recent UnHerd article.

Dr. Sallie Baxendale is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College of London’s Institute of Neurology. She has over three decades of clinical experience working with people with epilepsy in London and Oxford, is the current chair of the International League Against Epilepsy Diagnostic Methods Commission, and serves on the Board of Governors for the International Neuropsychological Society.

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Episode Audio:

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Jacob Mackey to discuss two big gender-related stories in the news.

The first story is positive, and we have covered it in the Connors Newsletter—a big new research study shows that we have made great progress combatting sex discrimination in the labor market. This is great news!

Then there is a difficult and troubling story. According to leaked internal files from WPATH, a leading global organization which advocates for transgender health care, WPATH has not been completely forthcoming about their internal concerns about the evidence behind gender affirming care for minors as well as the ethical issues surrounding informed consent for such care.

The first part of this conversation is really positive, while the second half is a difficult subject that we hope we treat fairly and with an appropriate level of concern. Thanks for taking a listen.

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