Brahmins – Close Read

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument:

[About the “argument from inevitability”] After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things – but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. … [About the “activist’s argument”] If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself. … If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

There’s also a useful list of what people mean when they say “science is political”:

Ritchie writes below the list: “There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. … But these are just factual statements – and I don’t think the people who always tell you that ‘science is political’ are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points” – referring to the inevitability and activism argument-types.

I agree with some of his positions here, not all, but I also think it might be useful to specify an important set of differences with the way the terms “politics” and “science” are used, and in the contexts in which they’re used. The latter are particularly important.

The statement “science is political” is undeniably legitimate in India – a country defined by its inequalities. Science and technology have historically enjoyed the patronage of the Indian state (in the post-war period) and the many effects of this relationship are visible to this day. State-sanctioned S&T-related projects are often opaque (e.g. ISRO, DAE and DRDO), top-down (e.g. Challakere and INO) and presume importance (e.g. Kudankulam and most other power-generation projects).

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru baked science into the Indian nation-project with his stress on the “scientific temper”; his setting up of institutes of higher science education and research; and the greater liberty – and protection from having to justify their priorities – he accorded the nuclear and space programmes (yoking them to the nation’s prosperity but whose work and machinations today are not publicly accessible).

But counterproductively, the Nehru government’s policies also stunted the diffusion of ‘higher’ technologies into society. Currently, this access is stratified by class, caste, location and gender: wealthy upper-caste men in cities and poor lower-caste women in villages lie at the two extremes of a spectrum that defines access to literacy and numeracy, healthcare, public transport, electricity and water, financial services, etc.

Second, asking the question “is science political?” in some country in which English is the first language is different from asking it in a Commonwealth country. Pre-Independence and for many years after, English-speakers in government were typically Brahmins hired to help run the colonial government; outside of government, access to the English language was limited, though not uncommon. Today, access to English – the language of science’s practice – is controlled through the institutions that teach and/or regularly use the language to conduct trade and research. Yet English is also the language that millions aspire to learn because it’s the gateway to better wages and working conditions, and the means by which one might navigate the bureaucracy and laws more effectively.

In these ways, a question arises of who can access the fruits of the scientific enterprise – as well as, perhaps more importantly, whether one or a few caste-class groups are cornering the skills and benefits relevant to scientific work for ends that their members deem to be worthier. When a member of an outgroup thus breaks into a so-called “top” research institute with the characteristics described above, their practice of science – including the identifies of existing scientists, and their languages, aspirations, beliefs and rituals – is inevitably going to be a political experience as well. Put another way, as access to science (knowledge, tools, skills, findings, rewards) expands, there are also going to be political tensions, questions and ultimately reorganisations, if we take ‘politics’ to mean the methods by which we govern ourselves.

In this regard, the political experience of science in India is inevitable – but that doesn’t mean it will always be: the current historical era will eventually make way for a new one (how political the practice of science will be, and its desirability, in that period is a separate question). Nor does it mean we should lower the thresholds that define the quality of science (relevant to points 2, 6 and 8 in Ritchie’s list) in our country. But it does mean that the things about science that concern a country like ours (post-colonial/imperial, agricultural, economically developing, patriarchal, majoritarian, diverse) can be very different from those that concern the UK or the US, and which in turn also highlights the sort of political questions that concern a country the most.

With this in mind, I’d also contend against junking the “argument from inevitability” simply because, in India, it risks prioritising the needs of science over those of society. A very simple (and probably relatable) example: if a lab that has been producing good research in field X one day admits an ESL student belonging of a so-called “lower” caste, it has to be able to tolerate changes in its research output and quality until this individual has settled in, both administratively and in terms of their mental health. If the lab instead expects them to work at the same pace and with the same quality as existing members, the research output will suffer. The student will of course produce “sub-par” work, relative to what has been expected of the lab, and might be ejected while the institutional causes of her reasons to “fail” will be overlooked.

By undertaking such socially minded affirmative action, research labs can surmount the concerns Ritchie flags vis-à-vis the “argument from inevitability” (i.e. by recalibrating v. compromising their expected outcomes). They can also ensure the practice of science produces benefits to society at large, beyond scientific knowledge per se – by depoliticising science itself by admitting the political overtones mediating its practice and improving access to the methods by which good science is produced. It bears repeating, thus, that where science is a reason of state and daily life in all its spheres is governed by inequalities, science needs to be political.

A Brahmin wedding

I was at a wedding this weekend. It had a distinct Omelas-like quality throughout. For most of the elders present, it was an oru naal koothu — a single-day celebration that has been many weeks in the making. But the bride, whom I knew, didn’t want to get married, especially to the groom her parents had picked out without her consent. I was told they had gone ahead anyway because the bride’s parents had liked the groom’s parents, and the two families had liked each other and wished to be related.

When the bride insisted, as best she could, that the wedding be postponed (or the groom be replaced — not a bad idea considering this was a man who believed sincerely that the women who spoke out in #MeToo were doing so only for attention), she was first met with a barrage of emotional blackmail: “think of what will happen to your mother”, “your grandmother will have a heart attack”, etc. — followed later by her father insisting that she provide a good enough reason, only to dismiss each one (‘don’t like the groom’, ‘don’t want to get married now’) promptly as not being “good enough”.

The wedding itself was a deeply patriarchal affair — an upper-caste conclave in which its members asserted their caste and “culture”, made a display of observing and preserving ancient traditions, brought two families together by unanimously waylaying the life of one woman. Like the story of the Mahabharata seems so different from that pieced together in Yuganta, viewing a Brahmin wedding through the eyes of an unwilling bride can reveal a very different picture from the wedding that everyone else experiences. It is no different from a tradition that her parents, the groom and his parents, and the extended family on both sides — enabled by a swarm of priests — further using the body and soul of one woman, with or without her willing participation. Good wedding ceremonies with willing participants exist, but only the bad ones truly demonstrate their totalitarian character.

For example, furthering the agony are the rituals immediately preceding the knot-tying, in which the bride and the groom are led through a series of joint activities by the priests and the extended family. They are apparently modelled on the rituals of two gods who got married: sitting on a swing together, exchanging garlands while perched on the shoulders of their fathers and brothers, and so forth. Surely these sound like the activities of a pair of people excited about getting married; to force them on a bride who has been brought there by (emotional and social) force has really no meaning, other than to reinforce the importance for all these rituals of a pliant woman, the ultimate vessel of Brahmin assertion.

The instrumentalisation of the bride and her functions begins in fact from the make-up — slathered on the bride, who also has to don silk sarees and other ornaments with no regard for the Chennai weather, while the groom stands next to her in a cotton shirt, a cotton veshti and the customary streak of vermillion on his forehead. She also has to sit through more rituals than him, some of which happen late at night or early in the day (she was woken up at 2 am for the make-up); cannot know when or what she can eat, or if she can visit the canteen or must have food brought to her; and, of course, she is expected to smile at all times for the cameras. While the matrimonial traditions of the families of the bride and the groom overlap for the most part, there are a few differences – yet all of them impose an equally unforgiving information asymmetry on the bride.

Meanwhile, the priests are chanting something in Sanskrit, a language no one in the room understands. It is hard to know what they are saying and why, but even as they are, there is another man with a bag full of cash standing just behind them, possibly belonging to the bride’s side, handing bills to them as part of rituals that require people to exchange wealth or give it away to others — i.e. to more relatives or to the priests themselves. There are some new observances as well, and while everyone is keen to observe them, no one asks the priests of their provenance or meaning. If they’ve been invented, it seems they will be observed — like the bride’s father having to carry a plateful of cash (intended to be donated to a temple) out of the room. They’re clearly nothing other than more lines drawn to distinguish between those whom the priests claim are “real Brahmins” and those who aren’t, and charging a fee to do so.

As the groom tied the three knots and everyone in the hall blessed them, and came away smiling, the wedding ended. Everyone was happy, nodding at each other in an implicit acknowledgment of having brought another conclave to a successful finish. The bride and groom were still onstage, next to a “holy fire”, spelling out the remainder of their prayers. The camera crew was taking a break, the relatives were heading in droves to the canteen, and the bride had to take a quick break in between as her new mother-in-law approached her with a make-up kit.

Featured image credit: Viktor Talashuk/Unsplash.

NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions

Continuing from here…

Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is compared to the international average. But I know that the quality of scientific work emerging from India is grossly disproportionate (in the negative sense) to the size of the country’s scientific workforce, which is to say most of the papers published from India, irrespective of the journal, contain low-quality science (if they contain science at all). It’s not for nothing that Retraction Watch has a category called ‘India retractions’, with 196 posts.

Second, it’s only recently that the global scientific community’s attitude towards retractions started changing, and even now most of it is localised to the US and Europe. And even there, there is a distinction: between retractions for honest mistakes and those for dishonest mistakes. Our attitudes towards retractions for honest mistakes have been changing. Retractions for dishonest conduct, or misconduct, have in fact been harder to secure, and continue to be.

The work of science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik allows us a quick take: the rate at which sleuths are spotting research fraud is far higher than the rate at which journals are retracting the corresponding papers. Bik herself has often said on Twitter and in interviews how most journals editors simply don’t respond to complaints, or quash them with weak excuses and zero accountability. Between 2015 and 2019, a group of researchers identified papers that had been published in violation of the CONSORT guidelines in journals that endorsed the same guidelines, and wrote to those editors. From The Wire Science‘s report:

… of the 58 letters sent to the editors, 32 were rejected for different reasons. The BMJ and Annals published all of those addressed to them. The Lancet accepted 80% of them. The NEJM and JAMA turned down every single letter.

According to JAMA, the letters did not include all the details it required to challenge the reports. When the researchers pointed out that JAMA’s word limit for the letter precluded that, they never heard back from the journal.

On the other hand, NEJM stated that the authors of reports it published were not required to abide by the CONSORT guidelines. However, NEJM itself endorses CONSORT.

The point is that bad science is hard enough to spot, and getting stakeholders to act on them is even harder. It shouldn’t have to be, but it is. In this context, every retraction is a commendable thing – no matter how obviously warranted it is. It’s also commendable when a paper ‘destined’ for retraction is retracted sooner (than the corresponding average) because we already have some evidence that “papers that scientists couldn’t replicate are cited more”. Even if a paper in the scientific literature dies, other scientists don’t seem to be able to immediately recognise that it is dead and cite it in their own work as evidence of this or that thesis. These are called zombie citations. Retracting such papers is a step in the right direction – insufficient to prevent all sorts of problems associated with endeavours to maintain the quality of the literature, but necessary.

As for the specific case of Arati Ramesh: she defended her group’s paper on PubPeer in two comments that offered more raw data and seemed to be founded on a conviction that the images in the paper were real, not doctored. Some commentators have said that her attitude is a sign that she didn’t know the images had been doctored while some others have said (and I tend to agree) that this defence of Ramesh is baffling considering both of her comments succeeded detailed descriptions of forgery. Members of the latter group have also said that, in effect, Ramesh tried to defend her paper until it was impossible to do so, at which point she published her controversial personal statement in which she threw one of her lab’s students under the bus.

There are a lot of missing pieces here towards ascertaining the scope and depth of Ramesh’s culpability – given also that she is the lab’s principal investigator (PI), that she is the lab’s PI who has since started to claim that her lab doesn’t have access to the experiments’ raw data, and that the now-retracted paper says that she “conceived the experiments, performed the initial bioinformatic search for Sensei RNAs, supervised the work and wrote the manuscript”.

[Edit, July 11, 2021, 6:28 pm: After a conversation with Priyanka Pulla, I edited the following paragraph. The previous version appears below, struck through.]

Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? Yes and no… Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. This is the ‘no’ part. The ‘yes’ arises from Ramesh’s actions on PubPeer, to ‘keep going until one can go no longer’, so to speak, which suggests, among other things – and I’m shooting in the dark here – that she somehow couldn’t spot the problem right away. So giving her credit for the retraction would set a low, if also weird, bar; I think credit belongs on this count with the fastidious commenters of PubPeer. Ramesh would still have had to sign off on a document saying “we’ve agreed to have the paper retracted”, as journals typically require, but perhaps we can also speculate as to whom we should really thank for this outcome – anyone/anything from Ramesh herself to the looming threat of public pressure.

Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? No. Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. Perhaps we can speculate as to whom we should thank for this outcome – Arati Ramesh herself, someone else in her lab, members of the internal inquiry committee that NCBS set up, some others members of the institute or even the looming threat of public pressure. We don’t have to give Ramesh credit here beyond her signing off on the decision (as journals typically require) – and we still need answers on all the other pieces of this puzzle, as well as accountability.

A final point: I hope that the intense focus that the NCBS fracas has commanded – and could continue to considering Bik has flagged one more paper coauthored by Ramesh and others have flagged two coauthored by her partner Sunil Laxman (published in 2005 and 2006), both on PubPeer for potential image manipulation – will widen to encompass the many instances of misconduct popping up every week across the country.

NCBS, as we all know, is an elite institute as India’s centres of research go: it is well-funded (by the Department of Atomic Energy, a government body relatively free from bureaucratic intervention), staffed by more-than-competent researchers and students, has published commendable research (I’m told), has a functional outreach office, and whose scientists often feature in press reports commenting on this or that other study. As such, it is overrepresented in the public imagination and easily gets attention. However, the problems assailing NCBS vis-à-vis the reports on PubPeer are not unique to the institute, and should in fact force us to rethink our tendency (mine included) to give such impressive institutes – often, and by no coincidence, Brahmin strongholds – the benefit of the doubt.

(1. I have no idea how things are at India’s poorly funded state and smaller private universities, but even there, and in fact at the overall less-elite and but still “up there” in terms of fortunes, institutes, like the IISERs, Brahmins have been known to dominate the teaching and professorial staff, if not the students, and still have been found guilty of misconduct, often sans accountability. 2. There’s a point to be made here about plagiarism, the graded way in which it is ‘offensive’, access to good quality English education to people of different castes in India, a resulting access to plus inheritance of cultural and social capital, and the funneling of students with such capital into elite institutes.)

As I mentioned earlier, Retraction Watch has an ‘India retractions’ category (although to be fair, there are also similar categories for China, Italy, Japan and the UK, but not for France, Russia, South Korea or the US. These countries ranked 1-10 on the list of countries with the most scientific and technical journal publications in 2018.) Its database lists 1,349 papers with at least one author affiliated with an Indian institute that have been retracted – and five papers since the NCBS one met its fate. The latest one was retracted on July 7, 2021 (after being published on October 16, 2012). Again, these are just instances in which a paper was retracted. Further up the funnel, we have retractions that Retraction Watch missed, papers that editors are deliberating on, complaints that editors have rejected, complaints that editors have ignored, complaints that editors haven’t yet received, and journals that don’t care.

So, retractions ~~– and retractors –~~ deserve brownie points.

Caste, and science’s notability threshold

A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more broadly, we often don’t stop to question the conduct of science itself, how it’s done, who does it, their privileges and expectations, etc., and limit ourselves to the outcomes of scientific practice alone. The Life of Science is one of my favourite publications for making questions like these part of its core work (and a tiny bit also because it’s run by two good friends).

I imagine the organisers will upload a recording of the conversation at some point (edit: hopefully by Monday, says Nandita Jayaraj); they’ve also offered to collect the answers to many questions that went unanswered, only for lack of time, and publish them as an article. This was a generous offer and I’m quite looking forward to that.

I did have yet another question but I decided against asking it when, towards the end of the session, the organisers made some attempts to get me to answer a question about the media’s role in constructing the scientific genius, and I decided I’d work my question into what I could say. However, Nandita Jayaraj, one of The Life of Science‘s founders, ended up answering it to save time – and did so better than I could have. This being the case, I figured I’d blog my response.

The question itself that I’d planned to ask was this, addressed to Gita Chadha: “I’m confused why many Indians think so much of the Nobel Prizes. Do you think the Nobel Prizes in particular have affected the perception of ‘genius’?”

This query should be familiar to any journalist who, come October, is required to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for that year. When I started off at The Hindu in 2012, I’d cover these announcements with glee; I also remember The Hindu would carry the notes of the laureates’ accomplishments, published by the Nobel Foundation, in full on its famous science and tech. page the following day. At first I thought – and was told by some other journalists as well – that these prizes have the audience’s attention, so the announcements are in effect a chance to discuss science with the privilege of an interested audience, which is admittedly quite unusual in India.

However, today, it’s clear to me that the Nobel Prizes are deeply flawed in more ways than one, and if journalists are using them as an opportunity to discuss science – it’s really not worth it. There are many other ways to cover science than on the back of a set of prizes that simply augments – instead of in any way compensating for – a non-ideal scientific enterprise. So when we celebrate the Nobel Prizes, we simply valorise the enterprise and its many structural deformities, not the least of which – in the Indian context – is the fact that it’s dominated by upper-caste men, mostly Brahmins, and riddled with hurdles for scholars from marginalised groups.

Brahmins are so good at science not because they’re particularly gifted but because they’re the only ones who seem to have the opportunity – a fact that Shalini elucidated very clearly when she recounted her experiences as a Dalit woman in science, especially when she said: “My genius is not going to be tested. The sciences have written me off.” The Brahmins’ domination of the scientific workforce has a cascading set of effects that we then render normal simply because we can’t conceive of a different way science can be, including sparing the Brahmin genius of scrutiny, as is the privilege of all geniuses.

(At a seminar last year, some speakers on stage had just discussed the historical roots of India being so bad at experimental physics and had taken a break. Then, I overheard an audience member tell his friend that while it’s well and good to debate what we can and can’t pin on Jawaharlal Nehru, it’s amusing that Brahmin experts will have discussions about Brahmin physicists without either party considering if it isn’t their caste sensibility that prevents them from getting their hands dirty!)

The other way the Nobel Prizes are a bad for journalists indicts the norms of journalism itself. As I recently described vis-à-vis ‘journalistic entropy’, there is a sort of default expectation of reporters from the editorial side to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for their implicit newsworthiness instead of thinking about whether they should matter. I find such arguments about chronicling events without participating in them to be bullshit, especially when as a Brahmin I’m already part of Indian journalism’s caste problem.

Instead, I prefer to ask these questions, and answer them honestly in terms of the editorial policies I have the privilege to influence, so that I and others don’t end up advancing the injustices that the Nobel Prizes stand for. This is quite akin to my, and others’, older argument that journalists shouldn’t blindly offer their enterprise up as a platform for majoritarian politicians to hijack and use as their bullshit megaphones. But if journalists don’t recast their role in society accordingly, they – we – will simply continue to celebrate the Nobel laureates, and by proxy the social and political conditions that allowed the laureates in particular to succeed instead of others, and which ultimately feed into the Nobel Prizes’ arbitrarily defined ‘prestige’.

Note that the Nobel Prizes here are the perfect examples, but only examples nonetheless, to illustrate a wider point about the relationship between scientific eminence and journalistic notability. The Wire for example has a notability threshold: we’re a national news site, which means we don’t cover local events and we need to ensure what we do cover is of national relevance. As a corollary, such gatekeeping quietly implies that if we feature the work of a scientist, then that scientist must be a particularly successful one, a nationally relevant one.

And when we keep featuring and quoting upper-caste male scientists, we further the impression that only upper-caste male scientists can be good at science. Nothing says more about the extent to which the mainstream media has allowed this phenomenon to dominate our lives than the fact of The Life of Science‘s existence.

It would be foolish to think that journalistic notability and scientific eminence aren’t linked; as Gita Chadha clarified at the outset, one part of the ‘genius’ construct in Western modernity is the inevitability of eminence. So journalists need to work harder to identify and feature other scientists by redefining their notability thresholds – even as scientists and science administrators need to rejig their sense of the origins and influence of eminence in science’s practice. That Shalini thinks her genius “won’t be tested” is a brutal clarification of the shape and form of the problem.

Curious Bends – macaroni scandal, bilingual brain, beef-eating Hindus and more

1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala

“‘Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wheat flour and looks like bits of onion leaves, reedy, hollow, but white in colour.’ This paragraph appears in a piece titled: “Ta-Pi-O-Ca Ma-Ca-Ro-Ni: Eight Syllables That Have Proved Popular In Kerala”. Readers, I am not making this up. For a few years, from around 1958 to 1964, food scientists in India were obsessed with tapioca macaroni. Originally called synthetic rice, it was developed by the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) in Mysore as a remedy for the problems of rice shortage, especially in the southern states.” (4 min read, livemint.com)

2. China is using Pakistan as a place to safety test its nuclear power technology

“Pakistan’s plans to build two nuclear reactors 40 kilometres from the bustling port city of Karachi, a metropolis of about 18 million people has become a bone of contention between scientists and the government. They are to be built by the China National Nuclear Corporation. Each reactor is worth US$4.8 billion and the deal includes a loan of US$6.5 billion from a Chinese bank. These reactors have never been built or tested anywhere, not even in China. If a Fukushima or a Chernobyl-like disaster were to take place, evacuating Karachi would be impossible, says a leading Pakistani physicist. He argues that building these nuclear reactors may have significant environmental, health, and social impacts.” (6 min read, scidev.net)

3. Speaking a second language may change how you see the world

“Cognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you think since the 1940s. The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number of studies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certain features of the world. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers, for example. And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by material rather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Still, skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect cultural differences between speakers that are unrelated to language.” (4 min read, sciencemag.org)

4. Nobel-prize winning biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan named president of the Royal Society

“Ramakrishnan grew up in India and has spent the majority of his research career in the United States, moving to the United Kingdom in 1999. He has a diverse scientific background: he switched to biology after a PhD in physics. “That breadth is something I hope will help me,” he says.” (3 min read, nature.com)

5. History is proof most Hindus never had any beef with beef

“To achieve this goal, the RSS has, among other things, turned beef into a Muslim-Hindu issue. So the ban on beef is a device to create a monolithic Hindu community? Yes. You also have to ask the question: When did the idea of not eating beef and meat become strong? Gandhi was essentially a Jain; he campaigned for cow protection as well as vegetarianism. It was Gandhi’s campaign that took vegetarianism to non-Brahmin social groups that were meat-arian. The only people who were not really influenced by Gandhi’s cow protection campaign and vegetarianism were Muslims, Christians and Dalits. If the Dalits were not affected, it was because Ambedkar immediately started a counter-campaign.” (8 min read, scroll.in)

Chart of the week

“Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.” (4 min read, economist.com)

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