“Competitive the way people are competitive in the modern world — economically.”
You have to internalize a lot of info about r/K to get this. One of the things about intelligence is that there are different types. If you look at it compared to r/K there is a growing perception that Specialist Intelligence (vs General Intelligence) is an r means of exploiting a niche top avoid competition, during periods when resources are not so scarce as to support the necessity of using violence to survive.
“Prestige also counts. “
Again, status is more important in r-environments, when you have a wide variety of fitness levels existing due to a lack of culling. It is why a lot r-species have unusually flashy males. They use the flash to signal status, or superior fitness in some regard, to mates. In K, just being alive, and able to provision a mate is a sign of fitness, so there is less flash.
“ferociously competitive people in the country, you wouldn’t want to overlook talent agents, entertainment lawyers, or bond and options traders, and where do they cluster?”
Again, specialist intelligence. If resources actually became scarce enough that those who didn’t have food would die, and food was very scarce, all those guys would be dead, with a bunch of US Marines and Navy SEALs splitting up their stuff. There is competitive in an r-environment, and competitive in a K-environment. They produce different psychologies, because the environments are fundamentally different. We have not seen true K in a while. It doesn’t mean we didn’t and it isn’t when we were imbued with Conservatism.
“Look at the states where divorce rates are highest and those where they’re lowest.”
This was a leftist blogger’s contribution, and as was shown in several places, the mixed variables hid that it was Democrats who divorced more in the Conservative states, and never married in the blue states. The best examination of mating, pairing, and rearing investment drive I have seen is below, though Gallup, and GSS data show the same thing, albeit in different ways. Libs have more partners, shorter relationships, and want to rear kids less. Bear in mind, these are the intelligent Liberals, not the welfarites.
http://neuropolitics.org/defaultdec07.asp
“a lot of liberals are upper middle class people who pursue upper middle class breeding and rearing strategies: late marriage, few children, heavy emotional and financial investment in those children. You can say a lot against them, but they aren’t breeding like rabbits or abandoning their families more than other people.”
Remove birth control and abortion, and I will bet you would have a ton of young single moms in that cohort, based on the data above. That is how it evolved to operate. The fact that contraception and abortion have allowed it to operate differently doesn’t change where it came from.
“The country is much more one than two, with the same tendencies at work in both the red and blue halves.”
Again, if you want to hold that perception, you can, but the researchers who have taken everything apart in detail, from John Jost, to Neuropolitics, to Altmeyer and Adorno, to the GSS say we have two strategies in our population. I point out, if you look at the established traits of ideologies in the literature, you will see a correlation to r/K. History says leftists will crash the country, and we will probably have some sort of post-crash conflict between left and right. That is hardly one. Already, we see guys on here talking about “CWII,” and resources are still really plentiful. Have no illusions, if resources grow scarce enough, it will get nasty in a way we haven’t seen recently, but which is probably more normal to our species than we would imagine, looking at the entirety of our history.
I’m just pointing to the research of others, and saying look at this correlation. If you don’t see it, it is a shame. It is interesting, it cleanly fills in holes people have been wondering about for decades now, and it does it with a well worn body of research. As you can see by this thread, those it hits, feel the ground shake beneath their established paradigm.
That looks like the kind of thinking that got Mitt Romney in trouble: the assumption that poorer people are always going to be Democrats and richer people Republicans. A lot of divorced people in the red states are poor Republicans, and a lot of the people in the blue states who never got divorced are well-to-do Democrats.
I can also see that differences in out-of-wedlock marriage rates may be related to contraception and abortion. But if breeding or child rearing strategies are something real, then such practices -- however distasteful -- are part of such strategies. If you are pursuing a strategy of limited breeding and high investment in offspring then that is what you are doing, you aren't "really" pursuing some other strategy that you'd be following in the absence of condoms and birth control pills.
For one thing, a lot of people would be less sexually active if there were no condoms or birth control pills. Also, the town I grew up in has become quite liberal since my parents' day. Yet when I go back there I don't see everybody hanging out at the local bar for random pick-ups. There's a lot that you can say against the yuppies who've crowded out other people, but they aren't promiscuous, they aren't divorced more often than other people are, and they aren't abandoning their families (though enough of their fathers did that in the 1970s).
In the city things are different, but as their counterparts reach their thirties they do start to settle down (and move out to the suburbs). While marriage rates may be lower for this generation than for some others, for those over 30 or so, it's not exactly all sex all the time.
It sounds like you're really invested in the idea that two parts of America are pursing radically different evolutionary strategies, and also that somehow violent struggle for life is somehow the norm, even though most of our lives don't reflect that. I don't think anything or anybody's going to convince you that you may be taking things too far.