Virgins and Virtuecrats

Adapted from The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better and People Feel Worse

When conservatives in the past decade have declared that the key to reducing teen pregnancy is teens having less sex, they were mocked by liberals. That's just old-fogey moralizing, many said. We should accept the ever-rising sexuality activity among teens as inevitable.

This week, the old fogies seem to have pulled out a win. New studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control show that the percentage of American high-school students who have had sexual intercourse declined steadily during the 1990s, and in 2001 fell to the lowest level since 1990. Today, it can be said that the typical American 12th-grade high-school boy or girl has not yet had intercourse. Meanwhile, teen pregnancy is at "the lowest rate ever recorded" in the United States, according to a government study.

Conservatives should certainly take a bow since they helped bring the topic to the foreground in a way that probably helped. But there are plenty of other reasons for the drop in pregnancies among teens. It may be that the movies and music now so relentlessly promote cheap, superficial sex that teens are rebelling against it. If Hollywood and MTV are telling teens to have quick and cheap sex, they sense this means they ought to do the reverse! Or maybe a generation of kids saw that sex and the resultant babies brought nothing approaching happiness to the teens of the 1980s and 1990s.

Here is a fourth possibility: that teens are not so different than the rest of us. Virtue generally is on the rise in the United States. Teens may be simply participating in an overall national revival of personal standards.

Setting aside the recent corporate lying scandal as confined to those who make northward of $1 million a year, it can be argued that nearly all trends related to personal virtue today are positive. Commentators may bemoan society's lack of moral standards or that Americans no longer fear their God. Statistics say otherwise.

Consider:

The use of most illegal drugs has been declining for two decades. Alcohol consumption per capita has been declining for a generation, including among the young. Boozing in the United States is down so much that among Western nations, American is close to the bottom for drinking.

Cigarette use continues to decline, especially by the all-important barometer of youth use, since smoking habits are often set in the teen years. Just 10 percent of American 10th graders smoke today, believed to be the lowest number for this age group since packaged cigarettes became common in the 1920s.

The divorce rate, which had been climbing seemingly inexorably since the 1950s, flattened out in the '90s and at present is in shallow decline. When you attend a wedding, in the United States at least, there is no longer a 50/50 chance you are watching people swear vows that will not last.*

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*Of course some marriages do not work and of course some women need to escape from abusive husbands, but a significant body of academic research shows that being married usually leads to better physical and psychological health for both spouses. In most cases staying married improves the standard of living in both; and in nearly all cases, parents staying married is good for children.