I'm curious if there is a notable difference in retention between boys and girls. Anecdotally, the Orthodox Jewish community has a higher retention rate for girls than for boys.
The authors never mention it, and a quick Google search doesn’t find a breakdown. They do talk a little more about unmarried women than unmarried men, though.
There is an Orthodox Jewish phenomenon of unmarried women, more than unmarried men. Proposed causes include demographics (boys traditionally began dating at about 23, while girls traditionally began dating at about 20; with a growing population, this leads to more girls of dating age than boys; this theory has led to calls (occasionally heeded) for boys to begin dating at younger ages) and the higher dropout rates in boys’ high schools (generally blamed on a more intense academic status system).
I wonder whether the Amish are dealing with something like issue #2.
The Amish all leave school after 8th grade and go to work, so they’re well-positioned economically to marry as soon as they’re baptized (usually early 20s). They tend to marry people about their own age. My guess is that the authors talked more about women because the traditional Amish woman’s role is so heavily wife-based that an unmarried Amish woman’s life differs much more from a married one than the equivalent for men.
Sounds plausible. The greater visibility hypothesis was popular at one point in the Orthodox community, essentially a denial of the imbalance, but it's fallen out of favor, and the imbalance has come to be the accepted narrative. Hard data is hard to come by, but I think there were some surveys that helped to settle the narrative, although it was ultimately settled, at least as a matter of communal discussion, by various Rabbis insisting it was settled.
I have no idea if there's good data, or where to find it if it exists.
Frankly if there is an imbalance I assume it’s mostly because women are less likely than men to make *any* kind of big dramatic risky change in their lives. I bet UMC secular liberalism has higher retention among women too.
My understanding is that the Amish retention rate is slightly higher with women rather than men, generating persistent small surpluses of unmatchable women. I'm not aware of any convincing analysis as to why this is the case but it is easy to generate plausible theories.
“You don’t even need to share the ‘no’ if you share enough of the ‘yes’” is a good hypothesis, but I'm not sure it's supported by the evidence you've provided here from the Amish.
Things that are not predictive of high community retention rates:
- No or yes to mechanization
- No or yes to farming and unified household work
- No or yes to teenage liberties
- No or yes to living near other settlements in the community
Things that are predictive of high community retention rates:
- No to self, yes to community: Gelassenheit
- No to individual conscience, conviction, and relationship with God
- No to homeschooling and family culture
- No to interacting with anyone who commits excommunicable offenses
- No to Openness (in the Big Five sense)
- Yes to their particular community regardless of whatever its Ordnung or member list might be at the moment
Also, it provides a surprising amount of support for the often-denied hypothesis that you can have a strong community that's directly and explicitly optimizing for having a strong community rather than as a side effect of some other shared goal (like religion maybe?).
If you are Haidt-pilled, you might recall, though, that costly signaling still seems to work better, somehow, within religious communities than secular ones:
“The anthropologist Richard Sosis…found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/12/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-jonathan-haidts-the-righteous-mind/
As I recall, the Amish, like the Hutterites, were originally urban craftsmen, and farming was just a way to maintain their communities after they left Germany.
I'm curious if there is a notable difference in retention between boys and girls. Anecdotally, the Orthodox Jewish community has a higher retention rate for girls than for boys.
The authors never mention it, and a quick Google search doesn’t find a breakdown. They do talk a little more about unmarried women than unmarried men, though.
There is an Orthodox Jewish phenomenon of unmarried women, more than unmarried men. Proposed causes include demographics (boys traditionally began dating at about 23, while girls traditionally began dating at about 20; with a growing population, this leads to more girls of dating age than boys; this theory has led to calls (occasionally heeded) for boys to begin dating at younger ages) and the higher dropout rates in boys’ high schools (generally blamed on a more intense academic status system).
I wonder whether the Amish are dealing with something like issue #2.
The Amish all leave school after 8th grade and go to work, so they’re well-positioned economically to marry as soon as they’re baptized (usually early 20s). They tend to marry people about their own age. My guess is that the authors talked more about women because the traditional Amish woman’s role is so heavily wife-based that an unmarried Amish woman’s life differs much more from a married one than the equivalent for men.
Sounds plausible. The greater visibility hypothesis was popular at one point in the Orthodox community, essentially a denial of the imbalance, but it's fallen out of favor, and the imbalance has come to be the accepted narrative. Hard data is hard to come by, but I think there were some surveys that helped to settle the narrative, although it was ultimately settled, at least as a matter of communal discussion, by various Rabbis insisting it was settled.
I have no idea if there's good data, or where to find it if it exists.
Frankly if there is an imbalance I assume it’s mostly because women are less likely than men to make *any* kind of big dramatic risky change in their lives. I bet UMC secular liberalism has higher retention among women too.
My understanding is that the Amish retention rate is slightly higher with women rather than men, generating persistent small surpluses of unmatchable women. I'm not aware of any convincing analysis as to why this is the case but it is easy to generate plausible theories.
“You don’t even need to share the ‘no’ if you share enough of the ‘yes’” is a good hypothesis, but I'm not sure it's supported by the evidence you've provided here from the Amish.
Things that are not predictive of high community retention rates:
- No or yes to mechanization
- No or yes to farming and unified household work
- No or yes to teenage liberties
- No or yes to living near other settlements in the community
Things that are predictive of high community retention rates:
- No to self, yes to community: Gelassenheit
- No to individual conscience, conviction, and relationship with God
- No to homeschooling and family culture
- No to interacting with anyone who commits excommunicable offenses
- No to Openness (in the Big Five sense)
- Yes to their particular community regardless of whatever its Ordnung or member list might be at the moment
This seems like a better fit for Scott Alexander’s hypothesis about how costly signaling assists community cohesion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Here's another example of how costly signaling can maintain the boundaries of backscratchers clubs: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers
Also, it provides a surprising amount of support for the often-denied hypothesis that you can have a strong community that's directly and explicitly optimizing for having a strong community rather than as a side effect of some other shared goal (like religion maybe?).
If you are Haidt-pilled, you might recall, though, that costly signaling still seems to work better, somehow, within religious communities than secular ones:
“The anthropologist Richard Sosis…found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/12/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-jonathan-haidts-the-righteous-mind/
As I recall, the Amish, like the Hutterites, were originally urban craftsmen, and farming was just a way to maintain their communities after they left Germany.