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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 7:58 pm Post subject: The end of middle America? |
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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/12/19/2010-12-19_the_end_of_middle_america_working_class_white_families_are_unraveling_before_our.html
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The end of middle America? Working class white families are unraveling before our eyes
Foreclosures, plant closings, offshored jobs, underwater mortgages, miserable rates of unemployment, stagnating incomes: Is there any end to the woes of the struggling American middle? Apparently not, because now comes news of a trend guaranteeing trouble ahead for the more than half of the nation that make up the moderately educated and moderately earning middle � even if the economy improves.
That seismic shift, outlined in a new report from the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, is towards more divorce, more out of wedlock births and, ipso facto, fewer kids with a hopeful future.
Family breakdown, to put it simply, has hit white middle America big time.
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In the past, middle America � the report means by that the "moderately educated," those with at least a high school but less than a college degree � resembled the more highly educated in their sexual and marital habits.
No more. In 1982, 13% of the births to those in the economic middle were out-of-wedlock. Today, that number is 44%; that�s a startling increase in such a short period of time. The middle folks are more likely to divorce than both the educated and high school dropouts. Only 58% of the 14-year-old daughters of moderately educated mothers are living with both parents. Not only is that down significantly from 1982 when the number was 74%; it is appreciably closer to the 52% of the daughters of the least educated than it is to the 81% of the girls of the college educated.
The middle Americans in the study are choosing to cohabit rather than to marry; the proportion living together is up 29 percentage points in just 20 years. This increase also well surpasses the numbers for both the most and least educated women.
That is not just surprising; it is deeply threatening to the nation as we know it.
This is, after all, mom and apple pie America; the moderately educated are "the silent majority," "values voters," people who dedicate themselves to the hard work, thrift and delayed gratification that will provide their children a chance to achieve the American Dream. An economy shifting away from manufacturing and a nasty recession has made that dream recede; family breakdown promises to erase it entirely.
Children growing up in single parent homes are at greater risk of a host of social ills, including educational failure and emotional problems. They are also more likely to become single parents themselves.
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On the subject of divorce, too, it�s the college educated who are trending more socially conservative. Close to half of both groups believe it ought to be harder to get a divorce. But while the highly educated group has grown substantially more anti-divorce, the moderately educated have not. One more example of the twilight of middle American traditionalism: In 1995, 62% of 25-to-44-year-old moderately educated women reported having three or more sexual partners; by 2008 the number was 70%. Among college grads, on the other hand, the percentages have gone down in the same period, from 59% to 57%.
The title of the National Marriage Project report, "When Marriage Disappears," is an echo of an influential 1996 book by then-University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, with clear implications for the moderately educated middle. In that work, Wilson argued that the loss of manufacturing jobs was helping to create a dearth of "marriageable men," mainly among minorities. Not only were there few men with a steady job earning decent wages in the poor, black neighborhoods of the nation�s cities; their joblessness coincided with more criminal and anti-social behavior. As women looked over the pool of available husbands, they often chose to have children on their own � that is, outside of marriage.
Wilson's thesis helped to explain the ballooning rates of single-parent families among blacks; today, 72% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
Though the numbers are lower for middle American children, the trends, unfortunately, now look similar. But Wilson's theory tells us only part of the story. It underplays just how much marital breakdown is itself a cause of downward mobility. Manufacturing jobs may have disappeared, but knowledge economy jobs have grown in number and complexity. Those jobs require higher education, which in turn requires good primary and secondary schools, which for their part depend on families who support their children�s stability and learning. As families unravel, so do the chances of children thriving in school and, ultimately, in a complex economy.
Not so long ago, the moderately educated were the imagined heroes of the American Dream. With marriage disappearing, that dream is ending. |
The future isn't very bright. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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Things certainly look very bleak. Obama cannot redistribute wealth because of sovereign debt, especially after compromising with Republicans to run the full Bush tax cuts another two years.
That leaves only one public policy option
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The second strategy for reducing income disparity is indirect: You can invest in technologies and industries with a shot at providing jobs that pay higher wages to the middle class.
New industries don't grow on trees. They require years of investment and development, an educated workforce and an international market for those services. That's why the administration is pushing green energy in the stimulus, offering tax credits for renewable energy and solar power, pushing for expanded community college enrollment, and talking about an export-driven recovery. This sounds smart. But it is the sort of public policy labor whose fruits won't be apparent for years. |
But the green shoots were a very small part of the stimulus (~$50 billion). The US government should become the research and development behemoth it once was. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 9:17 pm Post subject: Re: The end of middle America? |
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| Quote: |
The title of the National Marriage Project report, "When Marriage Disappears," is an echo of an influential 1996 book by then-University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, with clear implications for the moderately educated middle. In that work, Wilson argued that the loss of manufacturing jobs was helping to create a dearth of "marriageable men," mainly among minorities. Not only were there few men with a steady job earning decent wages in the poor, black neighborhoods of the nation�s cities; their joblessness coincided with more criminal and anti-social behavior. As women looked over the pool of available husbands, they often chose to have children on their own � that is, outside of marriage.
Wilson's thesis helped to explain the ballooning rates of single-parent families among blacks; today, 72% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. |
Maybe manufacturing jobs leaving America and increased criminalization surely play a role, but those things hit Latinos hard too, and Latinos are closer to 50% born out of wedlock. There's clearly more at work in the black community than just a lack of work or problems with crime, such that they're over 40% more likely than Latinos to have children out of wedlock.
One of the biggest culprits here may be the absurd set of child support laws we currently have on the books. Why should a woman marry the man who knocked her up when she can instead reap the benefits of a portion of his income for the next 18 years? Three major additions to our child support laws happened after 1982: 1984 (Child Support Enforcement Amendments), 1988 (The Family Support Act), and 1992 (Child Support Recovery Act). What a surprise, then, that after 1982 the rate of out-of-wedlock births shots up. Our legal system encourages it. Why should a young black woman marry her baby daddy if she doesn't really love him? If he actually earns any money, she's legally entitle to a portion of it, plus she can move in with another fellow to benefit from him as well.
If you want fewer out-of-wedlock children, then force women to bear more responsibility for their sexual decisions, because right now they have the least possible responsibility one could imagine. They can abort the baby if they wish, they can give it up for adoption if they wish, and they can keep it and receive a positive income flow off of it if they wish. The results of this system are the out-of-wedlock birth statistics our nation is currently faced with. |
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recessiontime
Joined: 21 Jun 2010
Location: Got avatar privileges nyahahaha
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 11:21 pm Post subject: |
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| fox sure knows a lot about laws regarding child support laws for just a philosophy major. Did you go to law school too or did you just do your own research? |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 11:48 pm Post subject: |
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| recessiontime wrote: |
| fox sure knows a lot about laws regarding child support laws for just a philosophy major. Did you go to law school too or did you just do your own research? |
No, I looked it up myself in order to assist in informing my opinions on the subject. I'm a decided non-expert when it comes to legal matters. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 12:11 am Post subject: |
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Just to add a bit more to this thread, it's worth noting America is hardly alone on this matter. Have a look at this from 2009.
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Country 1980 Current
Japan 1% 2%
Italy 4% 21%
Spain 4% 28%
Canada 13% 30%
Germany 12% 30%
Ireland 5% 33%
Netherlands 4% 40%
United States 18% 40%
United Kingdom 12% 44%
Denmark 33% 46%
France 11% 50%
Norway 15% 54%
Sweden 40% 55%
Iceland 40% 66% |
This isn't just an American matter. Guess which nation on this list has the weakest child support laws:
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In practice, Japanese courts rarely issue child support orders resulting from contested situations. Instead, the parties themselves usually negotiate the figures, often with the assistance of court-appointed mediators. The figures in the Charts are merely �maximum� starting points, from which significant reductions are typically made for special circumstances, such as the father�s health problems, or his pre-existing obligations to support other family members.
The system to collect child support is extremely weak in Japan. Indeed, surveys show that that only 10% to 20% of fathers pay the correct level of child support. For this reason, child support payments are invariably reduced from the Chart levels in order to secure the active consent of father. |
By contrast, in Iceland, the government will step in and pay the child support in place of a parent who doesn't and then attempt to recoup the money themselves, making it essentially guaranteed money. Unsurprisingly, the nations which are often thought of as having "led the way" in terms of things like women's rights (and thus, in matters like child support) have suffered this problem the longest; even before 1980 they had issues.
Now, obviously there's more at work here than just child support laws. None the less, it seems like they've had a noticeable impact on this trend. Reducing, or even totally destroying a mother's financial incentive to marry her child's father can't help but impact decision making. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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It is threads like this that make me appreciate this forum. Thanks for posting the links.
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| By contrast, in Iceland, the government will step in and pay the child support in place of a parent who doesn't and then attempt to recoup the money themselves, making it essentially guaranteed money. Unsurprisingly, the nations which are often thought of as having "led the way" in terms of things like women's rights (and thus, in matters like child support) have suffered this problem the longest; even before 1980 they had issues. |
Is it really a problem though? I see where it can lead to problems (especially here in the USA) and isn't something to seek out, but Iceland doesn't seem to be a bastion of crime and other social ills. Same with a number of other countries on that list.
Also, in a number of European countries, yes, there are a large number of children born out of wedlock BUT the parents are in a civil union or in a relationship that is stable and long-term, they just have elected to not to get married. Why they do this, I'm not quite sure (although their explanation is usually that marriage is an outdated institution or something along those lines), but that stability that a child needs is still there.
I also concede that I am not very familiar with Europe beyond what I read in the news, so perhaps my view is distorted and there is more social unrest than I'm aware of. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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| bucheon bum wrote: |
Is it really a problem though? I see where it can lead to problems (especially here in the USA) and isn't something to seek out, but Iceland doesn't seem to be a bastion of crime and other social ills. Same with a number of other countries on that list. |
How much of a problem it is, and how that problem manifests itself, is obviously going to vary from culture to culture. I think you're correct that the behavior in question doesn't seem to be leading to excessive crime, but it does seem to lead to some measure of social dysfunction. There's a reason, for instance, that there's a fairly strong father's rights lobby in Sweden, and it's because the kind of legislation we're seeing here is both oppressive and harmful to men, to the point where they simply had to respond. Not exactly the same problem that we're seeing in American blacks, but I wouldn't say it's not a problem.
| bucheon bum wrote: |
| Also, in a number of European countries, yes, there are a large number of children born out of wedlock BUT the parents are in a civil union or in a relationship that is stable and long-term, they just have elected to not to get married. Why they do this, I'm not quite sure (although their explanation is usually that marriage is an outdated institution or something along those lines), but that stability that a child needs is still there. |
There's some truth to that. I think these statistics count any sort of legally binding union as marriage, but some will undoubtedly be in non-legally binding yet stable relationships. The same, though, is going to be true for at least some percentage of the out-of-wedlock births in America as well. I don't have the statistics on hand for that, and finding the data to compare for certain European countries will be a pain. In any case, my purpose is more to try to link strong child support laws to an increase in out-of-wedlock births than anything; if a given society is better able to handle out-of-wedlock births than ours, then it will surely be less of a problem for them. |
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Koreadays
Joined: 20 May 2008
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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the rich will continue to get richer and pass on their wealth to their families and in turn will continue to buy everything up .
One day the world will be controlled by a few families. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:57 am Post subject: Re: The end of middle America? |
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| Fox wrote: |
One of the biggest culprits here may be the absurd set of child support laws we currently have on the books. Why should a woman marry the man who knocked her up when she can instead reap the benefits of a portion of his income for the next 18 years? Three major additions to our child support laws happened after 1982: 1984 (Child Support Enforcement Amendments), 1988 (The Family Support Act), and 1992 (Child Support Recovery Act). What a surprise, then, that after 1982 the rate of out-of-wedlock births shots up. Our legal system encourages it. Why should a young black woman marry her baby daddy if she doesn't really love him? If he actually earns any money, she's legally entitle to a portion of it, plus she can move in with another fellow to benefit from him as well.
If you want fewer out-of-wedlock children, then force women to bear more responsibility for their sexual decisions, because right now they have the least possible responsibility one could imagine. They can abort the baby if they wish, they can give it up for adoption if they wish, and they can keep it and receive a positive income flow off of it if they wish. The results of this system are the out-of-wedlock birth statistics our nation is currently faced with. |
One might go a little further in saying that virtually all wealth is produced by the ingenuity, knowledge, risk and ambition of men. Of course, there are many talented women who are as productive as the most productive men, but these are such rare cases, we could be forgiven for overlooking them completely
Welfare benefits aimed specifically at women are therefore essentially the same as all other payments confiscated from production and transfered to the unproductive. So, whilst welfare benefits aimed at women pose a distinct set of problems - namely the plague of fatherlessness and willful idleness - they are very much a symptom; namely, of the high tax wealth redistribution plague, punishing wealth producers and rewarding non-producers, resulting in a quite grotesque moral hazard. The higher the taxes on production (and the greater the payments for non-production), the more likely it is that perverse incentives arise (would-be producers becoming non-producers). A welfare state has the potential to turn a would-be nobel prize winner in physics into an unemployable layabout living on a housing project. When democracy is taken into account, non-producers become a political constituency. The tendency is then for the state to increase its predation on producers and increase its payments for non-producers.
Actually, I'm utterly convinced that the purpose (the real purpose) of the welfare state is not to provide benefits, but to actually provide jobs. That is, provide jobs for those who work for and implement the welfare state. The same very much applies to the war on drugs. If eliminating drugs truly was the purpose behind it, it would have been acknowledged as a disaster 20 or 30 years ago and abolished without a second thought. Make no mistake - the real purpose of the war on drugs is the provision of state jobs and the creation of a political constituency.
But Western politicians aren't even content to stop there. Today's unproductive are not only living off the bounty of today's producers; they are also living off people who haven't even been born yet, creating out of control debt, which governments will resort to the printing press to pay off, in turn destroying the middle class through hyperinflation and civil unrest. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:59 am Post subject: |
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| Middle America has seen their jobs offhsored, their laws written by hostile, elite feminists and social engineers (see Fox's comments) the remaining low wage jobs driven to even lower wages by a flood of illegals. It is not possible to withstand the assault. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:06 am Post subject: |
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Now the straight, white males out in Middle America have to contend with this woman at the EEOC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Feldblum
Does anybody in the country think that a beast like that actually cares if Middle America is falling apart? Is that not her wet dream? |
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Valdi
Joined: 28 Dec 2010
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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[There's some truth to that. I think these statistics count any sort of legally binding union as marriage, but some will undoubtedly be in non-legally binding yet stable relationships."
The Icelandic statistics show any child that is born to unmarried couples as being born out of wedlock.
Most children in Iceland are born in stable relationships but not in marriage.
I suspect that that applies to the statistics of other countries as well.
Sigvaldi |
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Valdi
Joined: 28 Dec 2010
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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[By contrast, in Iceland, the government will step in and pay the child support in place of a parent who doesn't and then attempt to recoup the money themselves, making it essentially guaranteed money. Unsurprisingly, the nations which are often thought of as having "led the way" in terms of things like women's rights (and thus, in matters like child support) have suffered this problem the longest; even before 1980 they had issues.
This is not true at all, child support is pitifully small and not nearly enough to pay more that a small part of the costs of raising a child.
But the percentage of children born out of wedlock in Iceland just reflects the fact that most couples have their children before getting married, they are born to parents that are not married yet or end up never marrying even though they live together for decades.
Most children in Iceland are born to cohabiting couples but the statistics only count the marriages.
Sigvaldi |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Valdi wrote: |
[There's some truth to that. I think these statistics count any sort of legally binding union as marriage, but some will undoubtedly be in non-legally binding yet stable relationships."
The Icelandic statistics show any child that is born to unmarried couples as being born out of wedlock.
Most children in Iceland are born in stable relationships but not in marriage.
I suspect that that applies to the statistics of other countries as well.
Sigvaldi |
Stable relationships aren't the same as legally binding unions. Are you saying that even people in a legally-bound relationship don't count as "married" with regards to these statistics? If so, I'm interested in hearing about it, but I'd really like a source so I can read more.
| Valdi wrote: |
| This is not true at all, child support is pitifully small and not nearly enough to pay more that a small part of the costs of raising a child. |
Given my quoted text was about the reliability and enforceability of child support rather than it's perceived subjective size, I'm not sure how to take this. Saying, "That's not true at all," and then going on to talk about something only marginally related to the point made doesn't make much sense. Perhaps you'd like to revisit your point in hopes of making it a bit more salient? |
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