re: Freakonomics podcast on marriage and income

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Couple that with the glorification of sex and a promiscuous lifestyle everywhere from Hollywood to the frickin Disney Channel and you end up with what we have now: a generation of people who were never really kids, grew up to fast, and never think about the consequences of their actions. It's pervading every aspect of life from marriage to job searches.

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EARNEY: The dramatic fall in teen childbearing has been nothing short of spectacular. There are definitely policies and interventions that move the needle a little bit. But the bulk of that reduction really seems to be driven by universal factors, not just access to better contraception, but also — I’ll use economist-speak here — a reduced demand among young women to become teen mothers. We could think about that as a social or cultural win, but people are trying to figure out what made teenagers do this. My colleague Phil Levine and I wrote a paper a few years ago where we looked at the effect of the MTV reality program “16 and Pregnant.” A clip from 16 and pregnant: For most American teens, high school is about having fun. But for these six girls, high school will not be the same. KEARNEY: And what we did was we looked at Nielsen television ratings data. In places where more teenagers were watching MTV, when this show came on the air, you saw those places experienced a larger relative decline in teen childbearing. The places where more kids were watching MTV, this experiment comes on. You could think of it that way. All of a sudden, now they’re watching a show that makes teen motherhood look really hard. You see fewer teen births in that place nine months after the show came on the air. Teen childbearing has been falling steadily at like 2.5 percent a year. Then around the time that that show came on the air you saw a large drop in the sense that it declined 7.5 percent and has stayed at that rate.

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