The best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue? The http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2602 and raising a family.
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=375
No matter http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3410 wins the 2008 presidential election, pundits will afterwards hypothesize feverishly about why the country is so divided into vast inland expanses of Red (Republican) regions versus thin coastal strips of Blue (Democratic) metropolises. Yet looking at 2000 and 2004, few will stumble upon the engine driving this partisan pattern, even though the statistical correlations are among the highest in the history of the social sciences.
The Republicans lost the popular vote in 2000 while advocating a “humble” foreign policy and won in 2004 while defending a foreign policy that Napoleon might have found bombastic. But all that happened from 2000 to 2004 was that virtually every part of the country moved a few points toward the Republicans. The relative stability of this Red-Blue geographic split suggests that more http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1375, however, would have found the question of what drives the Red-Blue divide so baffling. Unlike today’s intellectuals, they both thought intensely about the web linking wealth, property, marriage, and children. They would not have been surprised that a state’s voting proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of affordable family formation.
First time readers of Pride and Prejudice frequently remark that Austen’s romance novels are, by American standards, not terribly romantic. She possessed a hard-headed understanding of how in traditional English society, wedlock was a luxury that some would never be able to afford, an assumption that often shocks us in our more sentimental 21st century.
Economic historian Gregory Clark’s recent book, A Farewell to Alms, quantified the Malthusian reality under the social structure acerbically depicted in Austen’s books. The English in the 1200-1800 era imposed upon themselves the sexual self-restraint that pioneering economist Thomas Malthus famously (but belatedly) suggested they follow in 1798. By practicing population control, the English largely avoided the cycles of rapid growth followed by cataclysmic famines that plagued China, where women married universally and young. The English postponed marriage and children until a man and woman could afford the accouterments suitable for a respectable married couple of their class.
http://amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/article.html