Culture as Economics
George Packer’s narrative piece on the white working class in Ohio is one of those excellent magazine pieces I’ll just recommend rather than attempting to summarize. Nor will I even really attempt to comment on it, though I would be interested in what some quantitatively oriented political observers have to say. Instead, I thought I would focus on this one point:
“These days, you have to struggle,” she said. “As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can’t take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you’ve got to think how you’re going to put food on the table.” Snodgrass’s parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the “very privileged.” She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. “That’s who’s middle-class now,” she said. “Two parents, two kids? That’s over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don’t have nobody to look out for them. You’re one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck.”
This is an idea that’s starting to attract some attention from cutting edge political thinkers but that, I think, hasn’t yet garnered all the attention it deserves. I first encountered it in my then-colleague Garance Franke-Ruta’s article of several years ago:
Yet the broader social reality suggests that the focus of these middle-income voters on cultural traditionalism is not entirely separate from their economic aspirations. Social solidarity and even simple familial stability have become part of the package of private privileges available to the well-to-do. Behavioral surveys consistently show that, regardless of their political leanings, the better-off and better-educated live more traditional personal lives: They are more likely to marry, far less likely to divorce, less likely to have children outside of marriage, and more likely to remarry when they do divorce than their less accomplished peers. In addition, their kids are more likely to be academically successful and go to college, repeating the cycle.
The new Puritanism and cultural conservatism Frank described can also been seen as symptoms of how, in today’s society, traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to. People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities. In such environments, where there are few paths to social solidarity and a great deal of social disruption, the church frequently steps into the breach, further exacerbating the fight.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pick up on this in Grand New Party, going so far, IIRC, to quote Garance’s article. I’ll quote Norman Ornstein:
Douthat and Salam’s biggest contribution comes in a chapter called “What’s the Matter With the Working Class?” They make a strong case for why the dissolution of families is significant: it leaves people in an increasingly disrupted society, so that their turn to social conservatism is understandable. The authors outline the twin problems of inequality and insecurity in a clear and convincing manner that should resonate as much with Barack Obama as with any Republican. Had Obama read this book before his now-famous “cling to guns and religion” comments, he might have phrased his analysis — which is not out of sync with that of the book — differently.
Of course the problem is that once you recognize the truth of this line of analysis, you’re still left wondering what, exactly, you’re supposed to do about it. Stopping committed gay and lesbian couples from getting married won’t, in the real world, help people build the sort of stable family structures that are an important part of emotional and economic support and security for those who have it. Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap. And it’s hard for me to imagine a government “marriage promotion” initiative that’s heavy-handed enough to be effective, but not so heavy-handed as to be frighteningly authoritarian. But as a pure matter of electoral politics, I think it would probably be easy enough for an enterprising politician to talk a little bit more explicitly about this kind of thing and that would probably help candidates connect with people who, not wrongly, see linkage in their lives between “cultural issues” about family life and the economic challenges facing their family.
81 Responses to “Culture as Economics”
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October 7th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Parents in the past never had to worry about losing their jobs or not having enough money? I find that hard to believe…
October 7th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I think universal healthcare might help. A real minimum wage. A government that worked to redistribute income from the wealthy (if there are any left by next week) who have benefited from globalization to those who haven’t through public works and real skills training. Limits on immigration might help too. Make the rest of the country more like Massachusetts and perhaps we can stop having the same stupid arguments with these bitter gun and religion clinging crackers and start having new ones because that would be good for all of us.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap.
Not fully make up the gap, no. But a robust set of benefits such as government-guaranteed healthcare, child benefit/family allowance, etc., would certainly make it easier to live the 1950s lifestyle (or any lifestyle you choose, for that matter) if that’s what you’re into.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Limits on immigration might help too.
Might help what, exactly?
You may not have noticed this but we already have limits on immigration, Felipe.
Make the rest of the country more like Massachusetts and perhaps we can stop having the same stupid arguments…
I live in Massachusetts but spend a lot of time in Canada. Believe me, Massachusetts has a looooooonngg way to go.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Actually, Mr. Yglesias, outlawing abortion might help the traditional family recover, to some extent. Throughout most of human history, childbearing was an intrinsic element of most long term sexual relationships, and so when looking for a partner, both men and women looked (maybe subconsciously) for those attributes that connoted an ability and willingness to bear and raise children. To put it in blunt terms, women looked for men who had genetic propensity to be a good father, and men knew that this was what was expected of them. Birth control might attentuate this stable system but would not do away with it, since no birth control is foolproof and both men and women would need to be prepared to raise a child if one did result.
Nowadays, childbearing is no longer seen as so inevitable or automatic. Children are seen as a choice rather than a necessary part of marriage. Along with many other ills, this has weakened the natural dynamic between men and women. Men are free to use women for sex, and then tell them to get an abortion. Women are ‘free’ to look for other types of men instead of the ‘good father’ type, and they then get used and discarded by unscrupulous men. I would suggest that legal abortion is not unrelated to the breakdown of family and relationships in modern America.
As I’ve said before, if you can have marriage without the possibility of children, then you can have children without the possibility of marriage.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Most married couples fight about money. Decent jobs really do cut against that.
I know it sounds silly, but a mandatory yearlong course in high school teaching kids the basics of managing money and about financing ripoffs (rent-to-own shops, etc) and scams would probably lower the divorce rate pretty dramatically.
It would also be helpful to teach them the financial implications of marriage, and that “how will we retire, how will we pay for college, who’s going to take care of your mom” are the scary but good conversations to have. People authorized by the state to perform marriages should also hand out these questions and offer themselves to help the couple work through answers if the couple would like to ask them for advice.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Jasper- mostly help to push up wages on the low end of the scale and force the top 20% income types to either pay the local kids to mow the lawn or do it themselves. You know 1950s style.
I don’t want to be Canadian.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
A muddled but not imperfect take on the situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that I demand to know why Matthew hasn’t blogged about Gilbert Arenas on Jeopardy…
October 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Of course, universal health care, wealth redistribution, and the provision of more stable and rewarding employment would be very important aspects of the solution as well. I don’t mention that at length because I figure as Democrats, you guys already know that.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
>> They make a strong case for why the dissolution of
>> families is significant: it leaves people in an
>> increasingly disrupted society, so that their turn to
>> social conservatism is understandable.
> Of course the problem is that once you recognize the
> truth of this line of analysis, you’re still left
> wondering what, exactly, you’re supposed to do about it.
I am not sure what Matt means by “truth of this line of analysis”. That the phenomenon exists? OK, I can accept for the moment that that is a “truth”. That “[the] turn to social conservatism is understandable.”? I guess I still need to see the proof of why that word “understandable” is a truth.
If I am in bad circumstances due to Elbonians destroying my economy I don’t see why it would be “understandable” that I would lash out at Yglesians, a group that has in no way harmed me or contributed to my situation. Common in human history? Yes, that I would agree with. “Understandable”, much less productive? No, that I don’t agree with.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
What to do?
Oh, I don’t know, maybe increase the economic situation for these folks. As we know divorce, single parenthood, abortion, illegitimacy increase in accordance with economic despair. While many of the things people are speaking about and clutching onto are “cultural” so to speak, there root cause is economic. It’s patently clear.
If the trend in inequality produces family disruption, would it not beg the answer to be economic.
This is not that fucking hard.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
“Of course, universal health care, wealth redistribution, and the provision of more stable and rewarding employment would be very important aspects of the solution as well. I don’t mention that at length because I figure as Democrats, you guys already know that.”
Hector is the kind of conservative I can respect.
Vive la France.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Yes, my father lost his job when I was 16 due to illness, and he never really made up the loss of income when he was able to return to work. The difference is that my mother returned to work — thus making up at least in part for the loss. Now, even two income households struggle so that one loses his or her job, the struggle becomes that much more difficult.
I agree that a real safety net guaranteeing some expectation of minimum security and risk against losing everything due to illness would remove at least one very large source of economic instability in family life. Not just allowing, but *encouraging* women to take more control of their reproductive life could also make things a lot better, in not too much time.
But no one should let themselves think that substance abuse and rootlessness won’t still account for a lot of dysfunctional family life.
The thing is, it may take some time for a more egalitarian, generous and nurturing society to take hold and bear fruit, but it’s still the right thing to do.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Garance got the idea from my 2004 article in The American Conservative called “The Baby Gap:”
http://www.isteve.com/BabyGap.htm
October 7th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
It’s not clear from these examples which comes first, the economic prosperity or the personal stability. Couldn’t it be, too, that those who make good decisions about family (e.g., marrying the right person, not having kids out of marriage) are those who also tend to make good economic decisions (getting an education, saving money). It would also make sense that such people would be more confident, maybe more open to others who different.
In that case, what could government do? Teach emotional maturity? Redistributing funds wouldn’t seem to solve the underlying problem.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Not to be an elitist, but are we sure that Garance has got the cause and effect in the right order?
In the 60s and 70s there were all sorts of social “revolutions” which led to traditional social mores about sex, marriage, and family life being challenged. There was, and still is, a strong push-back against this challenge.
GFR looks at the data, sees high rates of divorce and single parenthood in culturally conservative groups and says “A-ha! A traditional family life has become aspirational!” But what is causing these divorces and childbirths out of wedlock? Perhaps I need to go read the article, but somehow this doesn’t follow:
1) Lower middle class
2) ???
3) Breakdown of Nuclear Family!!!
Perhaps, using Occam’s Razor, what is happening is the cultural pushback is leading to things like abstinence-only sex ed., in turn leading to marriages out of wedlock. Maybe those marriages lead to shotgun weddings and single-parenthood, because in that community abortion is not an option.
I know, I know, I sound like some sort of east coast elitist libbbbbruuullllll, and my argument isn’t all sorts of fancy counter-intuitive that’ll get published in the New York Times, but it really seems to me that the intentional self-blinkering of cultural conservatism is more likely the cause of the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family in those communities, than the breakdown of the family (caused by ???) is the cause of cultural conservatism.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
incentives work -
1) raise marginal tax rates to encourage CEO’s not to make so much - so they have more to pay employees
2) raise child tax credits people to raise their own children
3) universal health care to encourage entrepreneurship
4) more vacation time
5) Stop spending so much on bombs
Petey says - Vive la France - we should become more like the French, or the Nordic, or any European country, or Canada for Pete’s ( Petey’s?) sake. Become a kinder, gentler nation that the reasonably sane Bush (41) talked about ( but probably didn’t mean ) .
October 7th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
…mostly help to push up wages on the low end of the scale and force the top 20% income types to either pay the local kids to mow the lawn or do it themselves.
Felipe: as I noted above, we already have limits on immigration. Fairly strict ones, as any Microsoft executive will tell you.
I don’t want to be Canadian.
Nobody’s asking you to be Canadian. In fact, I have it on good authority they don’t want you. Personally, I’ll admit to hoping I live long enough to see the day Canada conquers These United States and cuts loose the old Confederacy. Mounties goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue, baby!
October 7th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Hector, it’s hard for me to believe that abortion has caused men and women to abandon the nuclear family. You’re conflating the effect with the cause, I think. For most families, it is simply not economically feasible to have many children - both parents need to work to make ends meet, and that is simply not conducive to many children. One parent may be able to take a couple of years to raise a child, but it can’t be permanent.
And, let’s be honest, do you really think that men using women for sex, and women choosing unscrupulous partners, started in the second half of this century? Contraception — and abortion — have been around for centuries, just in far less safe forms. If the nuclear family was stronger in the past, it seems to me that legal and social coercion, especially against women, were the reasons. Now, traditional conservatives may welcome a return to the time when such constraints were commonplace, but not, I suspect, most Americans.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Critical point highlighted by Anastasia de Waal in The Guardian. It’s about the UK context, but it applies just as well in the US:
October 7th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
“Mounties goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue, baby!”
Eh?
October 7th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Packer’s article is pretty good at distilling how the perceived culture war mumbo jumbo actually translates into the lives of real people. And boy does it suck.
Instability is simply the common currency for the current median generation (mine). I for one, love the idea of family-as-community-bedrock but the truth often runs counter to this idealized pipe dream (good choice for the photo).
Is a family made up of a single parent and a single child not still a family? Try telling them that. Is Ms. Snodgrass, the woman profiled in Packer’s piece not functioning as a concerned and dedicated parent even though these are not her flesh and blood children? Imposing restrictive characterizations on families is a hallmark of the conservative orthodoxy. Its all Adam and Eve remember?
Personally speaking, my wife and I have one daughter and would love to provide her with a sibling (either one we create or might adopt) but right now we cannot shake the feeling that it feels completely irresponsible to do so. Financially its always a big gamble to bring another life into the world but it seems particularly foolhardy to do so now.
Of course, this attitude may not have any political salience as it certainly muddies the crystal clear ideal of what it is that families do and what goals they pursue. But this is precisely my point. Decisions like this are anguished over every day, all the time. I completely get what Ms. Snodgrass was talking about in Packer’s article. These days almost every decision carries a weight with it that quickly diminishes any perceived value by immediately jeopardizing the fragile stability of the household. As more and more folks slide into the lower rungs, the heft of that weight is compounded by the feeling of hopelessness and failure.
Even if well understood by the politician, couching this in the vacillating winds of electoral politics is at best a dubious translation. As much as working class folks are excited to hear the ruling class speak to their plight, we do not actually believe things will be any different. This is an area in which Obama distinguishes himself insofar as his language is meant to uplift and inspire (you work hard and so will I, together we are better, etc) but its a devil’s bargain insofar as the current existential condition of the American family, its hopes, fears, challenges and triumphs, may be impossible to fully investigate accurately.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Felipe: as I noted above, we already have limits on immigration. Fairly strict ones, as any Microsoft executive will tell you.
Strict compared to what? Just because Microsoft can’t flood the U.S. market with third-worlders willing to work at sweatshop prices, it doesn’t mean that our immigration laws are onerous compared to anyone else’s.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I think it’s funny that Hector thinks women only started liking bad boys when they legalized abortion.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Great reads cited here. It’s amazing to follow the lines of causation on these issues–I think all the evidence points to the fact that education and economic success leads to stable families and social capital, while the evidence for the converse situation is much less apparent.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Ok, but why have the zoo and the movies (and the ballpark) gotten so crazy expensive?
October 7th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
It would help if Matt put up some graphs showing how historically income inequality and job insecurity harm the family. Then maybe he could put up some more charts showing how much better the family is doing in progressive Europe.
But why let empirical evidence get in the way?
October 7th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
For me, the operative segment of the post is this:
Behavioral surveys consistently show that, regardless of their political leanings, the better-off and better-educated live more traditional personal lives: They are more likely to marry, far less likely to divorce, less likely to have children outside of marriage, and more likely to remarry when they do divorce than their less accomplished peers.
Adequately funding education inititives, and in many cases, expanding them, would go a long way to bridging this gap, especially if long-term gains (graduation rates, literacy, college enrollment, workforce competency, etc.) are the goals, not just grades, test scores, etc.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
There’s just one problem here. This:
isn’t true at all. I suppose it might reflect the way people feel, but the fact is, our standard of living is higher than it was a generation ago. There’s absolutely no evidence for the idea that our parents could spend money more freely than we can, without worrying about putting food on our families, as Dubya might say. We may decide to spend our disposable income on iPods instead of trips to the zoo, but it’s indisputable that we have more.
I’m talking in terms of a generation here, 20 or 30 years or more. We don’t really have more than we did at the end of the Clinton years, which is yet another reason to vote for Obama.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
There was a fall in marriage and in childbearing during the depression. Only in the post-war era of the late forties and early fifties did the birthrate boom.
However that may be today’s culture, where people buy houses as “investements” and are expected to pick up and follow the corporation wherever it may lead them, cannot be good for stable communities. Neither can the age segregation that such a life-style entails — not to mention the even more insidious age segmentation of the modern entertainment industry, that pits age-group against age-group and generation against generation. This is a new phenomenon.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Strict compared to what?
Canada, Australia, the USA of 1900.
Just because Microsoft can’t flood the U.S. market with third-worlders willing to work at sweatshop prices…
Actually, Microsoft is in a pretty good position, as it has the resources to allow it to go where the talent is, or to go where there’s a government that will allow it to bring in the talent it needs to stay competitive. And I doubt it would get many takers for its jobs if it really were paying “sweatshop” wages. Last time I checked Vancouver was one one of the priciest towns in North America. That’s one of the things I love most about the Big Bad Global Economy: even powerful countries are not allowed to get away with stupid or xenophobic policies indefinitely…
October 7th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Re: To put it in blunt terms, women looked for men who had genetic propensity to be a good father
Hector, it wasn’t just individual men and women doing the looking: families usually vetted prospective mates up until about a century ago. Sure, people could and did marry against family disapproval, but this was not common and there were usually serious repercussions (an 18th century ancestor of mine was disinherited for marrying outside his father’s church). Moreover, young single people were given far less opportunity to even meet unsuitable mates: they were generally chaperogned (at least the women were) whenever they went out in public, and they would steered away from rogues and harridans. (Of course marriages were not necessarily permanent even in the past, as the chances they would terminate due to early death of a spouse were unpleasantly large.)
But the big question I’d like to ask about Matt’s post is why families are so unstable nowadays among the lower half in the income distrubution. I understand why it is so among the truly poor: all too often there are few marriageable men in such communities as they are mostly unemployed (and unemployable), addicted to something or other, in jail or prematurely dead. But why is there such a problem higher up the ladder among working class people? Economic stress is hardly a new thing: our ancestors endured far worse privations than most of us ever will but their marriages tended to last. What is wrong with Kansas (and Michigan, Ohio, Florida etc.) in this respect?
October 7th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Re “Behavioral surveys consistently show that, regardless of their political leanings, the better-off and better-educated live more traditional personal lives: They are more likely to marry, far less likely to divorce, less likely to have children outside of marriage, ”
—————
That’s because Wealth brings out Divorce Lawyers, not because it brings out better morals.
Plus some women have the view that so long as a man gives them over $200,000 per year in spending money he can fuck whoever he wants.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
RE JonF’s comment “Economic stress is hardly a new thing: our ancestors endured far worse privations than most of us ever will but their marriages tended to last. ”
————
Oh, horseshit. My great-grandfather and grandfather didn’t have a pot to piss in because my great-great-grandfather dumped his wife (and kids) in middle age and picked up a young babe.
Get behind the eight ball (no property or capital) in the old days and you were fucked for life in many locations. Yea, verily , unto the seventh generation were thou fucked.
No colleges, no careers, and horses/land expensive as shit. No social services or security net at all beyond some occasional churches. Sharecropping doesn’t have much of a career ladder.
Course if you went to California and found gold, you could make out. Same thing with Silicon Valley today. So why is most of the population still east of the Mississippi River?
October 7th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I think we can figure out from his comments on this thread the real reason Don Williams had a pathological hate for Hillary Clinton during the primaries…
October 7th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Re: I think it’s funny that Hector thinks women only started liking bad boys when they legalized abortion.
Mpowell,
I’m not sure why (some) women like “bad boys”, but abortion seems to be a likely culprit. Also the advertising and pornography in today’s culture that glorifies sexual promiscuity.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
It was good to see that the primary sources for Packer’s article were women, mostly single, both with and without children because that is the demographic that most needs the change Obama is promising. Hopefully he will deliver more than the very little he is actually promising. Unmarried men could use some change as well.
Here is some information on Unmarried Americans from Census.gov.
Highlights:
92 million -Number of unmarried Americans 18 and older in 2006. This group comprised 42 percent of all U.S. residents 18 and older.
36% - Percentage of voters in the 2004 presidential election who were unmarried.
54% - Percentage of unmarried Americans 18 and older who are women.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
“I’m not sure why (some) women like “bad boys”, but abortion seems to be a likely culprit.”
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
Also see Brando, Marlon.
The “bad boy” trope predates Roe v Wade by a couple of decades, at least.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
“The “bad boy” trope predates Roe v Wade by a couple of decades, at least.”
And, of course, the famed Sinatra mugshot from a full 35 years before Roe v Wade…
October 7th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Re Hector’s comment “I’m not sure why (some) women like “bad boys”, but abortion seems to be a likely culprit. Also the advertising and pornography in today’s culture that glorifies sexual promiscuity.”
———–
While we have our resident Masters and Johnson taking questions, any guesses on what causes widespread pedophilia within the Catholic Church?
October 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Which do you have worse, Don Williams? Your mommy or your priest?
October 7th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I guess the republican message, deep down, has been “winner, loser”. Hitch your wagons to us, you’ll be a winner, and together we’ll stick it to the losers.
And I guess the democrat message, deep down, has been “pain, pleasure”. Vote for us, we’ll make your lives less painful, more pleasurable.
If I had my druthers, I’d rather run on something other than “pain, pleasure”; something like “delayed gratification versus instant gratification”, “the hard right versus easy wrong”, etc. It’s true that voters might eventually tune out that kind of eat-your-peas politics, but there are times when the electorate wants to be moral. And part of morality is legitimate pursuit of self-interest.
And it’s worth noting that Al Gore’s convention speech was *the* single most effective convention speech in modern times (subsequently reversed by his poor debate performances). The basic theme of the speech was “the hard right over the easy wrong” - “the Presidency is more than a popularity contest. It’s a day-by-day fight for people. Sometimes, you have to choose to do what’s difficult or unpopular. Sometimes, you have to be willing to spend your popularity in order to pick the hard right over the easy wrong. . .If you entrust me with the Presidency, I know I won’t always be the most exciting politician. But I pledge to you tonight: I will work for you every day and I will never let you down.”
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/conventions/democratic/transcripts/gore.html
October 7th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I’m only 35 and I’ve noticed some changes in the economic scene since I was a kid. I grew up in L.A. in a single-income household. My dad was an engineer and he was able to buy a decent house at the age of 29 and raise 3 kids comfortably though not extravagantly. My wife and I still live in L.A.; I’m a civil servant with a decent salary and my wife makes a lot more than that, so in total we’re making more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as my dad did. Plus we have no kids. And yet we would not be able to afford the house I grew up in or its equivalent today. But oddly enough, extravagances like big vacations, electronic toys, and eating out a lot are more affordable to us.
My parents bought our house in 1976 for $40,000, added a $35,000 addition in 1984, and sold it in 2005 for $490,000. That’s why we can’t afford to buy a house.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Re: Get behind the eight ball (no property or capital) in the old days and you were fucked for life in many locations.
Was I disagreeing with you? I seem to recall having posted that our ancestors endured a lot worse than we do today.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
The family-wage that provided a working man enough income to support his family began to die out in the early sixties. Then there was the rise of the bachelor with Playboy magazine targeting the new demographic of male consumer with enough disposable income to provide himself with luxuries and his dates with lavish gifts (but not enough income to make supporting a family worth his while). The centerfold was just a big “I’m NOT GAY! proclamation. There was also a corresponding rise of secretaries and telephone operating type jobs for women, with a corresponding lowering of pay for those jobs.
That of course, was not the end of the decrease in the standard of living. It is terribly difficult for a family to live on one working class income. How long has it been since working people could limit their rent or mortgage to 25% of their income? There is no county in the country where a single person working full-time for minimum wage can afford a one bedroom apartment.
The fifties traditional family was based on the family wage for working men in an economy that produced durable goods of high quality that the whole world wanted to buy. Oil was cheap. Family farms were thriving. Food was cheap.
There is no reason for the working-class Americans’ family lifestyles to resemble the “traditional” lifestyle of the fifties. To treat it as some kind of moral failing is to put the cart before the horse AND to conflate the prevailing socially engineered archetype of “the good life” and the model “family” with the substance of daily life and the actual challenges of adapting in the prevailing economic environment.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
The ideal of the separate nuclear family that prevailed in the U.S. from, roughly, 1950-1975, was a historical anomoly made possible by the economic boom of the post-war period.
http://www.economist.com/diversions/millennium/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=346995
The farther we get from that period, the more the nostalgia will fade.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I think it was probably like that back in Roman times.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Re JonF’s comment “Was I disagreeing with you? I seem to recall having posted that our ancestors endured a lot worse than we do today.”
————–
I wasn’t disagreeing with you on that — I was pointing out that divorce wasn’t really economically feasible for many back then.
Society exerted MUCH stronger pressure on men to take care of their families –and for wives to suck it up and tolerate the ole sonofabitch. Because there was no one else to provide for the kids or wife –no social programs.
So I think it is not so much that we as individuals have changed as the social situation. Although even in the old days, things fell apart at times –e.g.,during wars.
Read Bocaccio’s description in the Decameron of how morals went to hell in Florence circa 1380?? when the Black Plague struck and the Church proved useless in dealing with it.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
RE msbklyn’s comment “I think it was probably like that back in Roman times.”
——–
Which was why the Roman rabble supported Julius Caesar. They knew he was a fucking tyrant but they were willing to support anyone who would chop the fucking patricians heads off.
Because the patricians had shown what a con game Roman “democracy” was. The middle class risked their lives to defend Rome in the legions — and the patricians repaid them by seizing the profits of Empire. Throwing the common Roman out on the streets because it was cheaper to bring in foreign slaves. And putting whores in the Senate to ensure the rich got richer and everyone else got poorer. Sound familar?
October 7th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
The Frontline series “Country Boys” is available to watch online. Highly recommended. It follows two Appalachian boys from extremely poor families during their high school years at an alternative school. Shows how “family ties” can cripple if the adults involved are not willing or able to sacrifice for the children.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
No-fault divorce made divorce easier. Before that, people had to drag up some dirt on their partner, or have them committed (to a mental institution) to get a divorce granted. Murdering the spouse was also an option—as you can see in many Hitchcock films and television episodes that hardly make any sense now.
Women were at a terrible disadvantage. It seems quite barbaric now to have to convince a judge to grant a divorce. Guess we’ve made some progress.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
“Perhaps, using Occam’s Razor, what is happening is the cultural pushback is leading to things like abstinence-only sex ed., in turn leading to marriages out of wedlock. Maybe those marriages lead to shotgun weddings and single-parenthood, because in that community abortion is not an option.”
Good point. Malcolm Gladwell had a decent piece a while ago in the New Yorker about how the pill helped to both unleash Irish women’s economic potential while cutting down on out-of-control family size, thus reducing Ireland worker:dependent ratio from around that seen in Africa today to a more first-world number that meant more income left over from each paycheck, which could then be re-invested productively.
Part of what we are going to need to see is cultural change though and that means a rejection of anti-intellectualism. In too many towns, people care more about the high school football team than the math and debate teams. Policy can’t really do this.
Also, the sexual appeal of the dangerous highwayman, pirate, dashing rogue, etc. has been seen in art for centuries. James Bond books started appearing in the US before Roe v. Wade and Connery’s portrayal first hit our shores in the early 60s. In a sense, Bogie in Casablanca was the bad boy as well.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:12 am
OT, but Hector’s 5:15 post is a window into the anti-choice worldview (which, to be fair, he doesn’t follow all the way - ie, he doesn’t seem to oppose reliable contraception). Abortion is BAD because, well, sure, the little baybees, but also because it lets women have teh sex without consequences. And as Hector explains, albeit in terms that don’t exactly map to other reality, so some translation is required, that means that sex between men and women is less of an anxiety-ridden battleground (in anti-choicese, bad men taking advantage of child-like women, and then leaving them/getting them abortions - which does happen, unfortunately, as it always has happened).
Thanks to our pro-choice reality - including good info about sex, and birth control (and, yes, abortion), women (and men) are now much freer to delay (or bypass competely) marriage and childrearing until it makes sense, and to do their best to plan their lives and families in an effective and responsible way.
And really, for those of us that inhabit or aspire to a certain middle-class lifeway/culture, where some degree of higher education, at least a possibility of a career, and very, very possibly a similarly endowed spouse is the norm, where it’s standard to delay marriage past the college years, and (often limited) childbearing likewise, until one or both partners have reached some degree of financial stability to provide for children as expected - well, in anti-choice world this will be impossible unless you just don’t have any sort of sexually intimate relationship (beyond, for men, prostitutes and socially-disposable women - that old story) until your 30s or so.
Which is not to say that it would be impossible for some men -esp. from affluent families, or rather skilled/lucky, but . . . well, I’m not as confident in assigning conscious motive, but it’s hard not to notice that it all works as if the aim was, as Christina Page puts it, having noticed that the organized anti-choice establishment also opposes contraception and childcare and pretty much anything that would actually help modern families:
“Where does this lead? What is the point of this? How can you be against child care if you’re against helping people plan their families? If you don’t want to help people have limited numbers of children, why are you stripping them of the very things that make that possible? The only conclusion that this path leads to is one: The modern family is deeply offensive to the Christian right. The family structures in which we are living today, in which both parents are equal and they both bring home a living, they get to choose the number of children they have to what they can support and want — that is offensive to the pro-life establishment. The whole reason why none of their programs are leading to fewer abortions is because that’s simply not the point. The point isn’t about abortion, it’s about the family. It’s about what the family looks like, it’s about who’s in it, who’s leading it, who has the power, and who’s the spiritual head.”
Reality Man’s point above, about pre-Pill Ireland? Hector’s allies want to do that to us, but in reverse; ultimately, with their never-ending anti-Roe,anti-contraception, anti-childcare, abstinence-”ed” bs, that’s what they want us to go back to. The anti-choice future is countless pregnant Bristol Palins getting teen-married, forever. Doubtlessly they’ll be a heavy economic hit, but what’s worse for me is the human cost; the loss of happiness, of our values, of dreams and hopes squashed down and ground away, most completely for women, but also for men, and of course, for children.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Not to mention that every place where the Church holds significant sway is a miserable shithole. South America. Africa. Gross overpopulation beyond what parents can feed and what the economy can support.
The planet is overburdened as it is — to encourage families to have 6 or 7 children is not just irresponsible, it is an act of war against the civilized world.
A World which is civilized largely because it threw off the shackles of the Vatican in the Enlightenment.
Of course, Church sees misery and deep poverty as a feature, not a bug. It induces deep depression, despair and helplessness. Which makes converts easier — people are more willing to listen to the Vatican’s propaganda.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Thomas Frank makes a good case in What’s the Matter with Kansas that Republican financial elites have done a good job bamboozling middle and lower income groups with their culture war distractions. But what Frank does not seem to fully appreciate is the supreme irony that Republican economic policies favoring the wealthy actually create a high level of economic anxiety and anger among lower income voters which prepares them for Republican culture-war distractions in the first place. Republicans elites, in other words, are able to create their own reality with economic policies that benefit them personally but whose negative impacts on lower income groups can then be blamed on unsuspecting liberal elites in the familiar populist backlash that we saw again from House Republicans in the financial bailout debate.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I remember from my childhood that a lot of costs were picked up by the government. First of all, no one was expected to buy their own school supplies, although we were free to suppliment. Only Catholic schools had fund raisers. In other words, education was more fully funded.
The Zoo and museums were FREE and if we wanted to go to the baseball game, it was $1 for bleacher seats which was well withing the reach of lawn mowing or babysitting earnings.
Now the athletes want so much money and parts of the concessions too, that hardly anyone can afford to go on a regular basis, if at all. Everything is for-profit.
I’m sure conservatives think that is perfect, but it creates inequality of important things like education (including zoos and museums).
Homes were less as a percentage of income as well as other big ticket items like cars. Communities were set up better for walking, if you couldn’t afford cars.
I think that a big improvement would be an honest calculation of the rate of inflation, since wage increases are based on it. If you don’t know it, it hasn’t changed in years because if a factor that is included gets way out of whack, it just gets dropped out of the calculation. Meanwhile, you are still paying for it.
I don’t know how we will address a LIVING wage if we can’t get a handle on globalization. If a company can pull up roots and go to another country where wages are lower, then no one anywhere in the world will be able to get ahead. Even Mexico, the original targe country for relocated companies found itself out in the cold when China and Vietnam offered wages of pennies a day instead of a $1.
Education alone won’t cut it because some third world country will have an educated engineer who will still work for less than a US engineer. If they want us to live on third world wages here, then it’s time they gave us third world prices to match.
These are complicated problems that will tax the most intellectually gifted among us, for sure and not to be solved in a day.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Wow, there are a lot of misconceptions here.
Dan S.,
I don’t have “pro-life allies”, since I am not part of any pro-life “movement”. I support and encourage reliable (chemical) birth control, and I worked at one point in a developing country where I did try and spread awareness about hormonal birth control methods as well as natural family planning.
I do think that the spread of birth control had some bad effects, along with many good effects. I think on balance the good outweighed the bad, but we should not ignore the bad ones. Rather than doing away with birth control, I would suggest that we deal with those bad effects through moral and cultural transformation, as well as through pursuit of social and economic justice.
I applaud women’s increased participation in the workforce, as well as the fact that people today can choose to delay or reduce their number of children, and get out of loveless marriages. I think those are good things. Like other good things, they can be taken too far. Remember Luther’s proverbial drunkard on a horse.
Lastly, anyone who compares pre-1960s Ireland to Africa, to put it charitably, doesn’t know what he is talking about. Traditional Irish and English cultures are viewed by anthropologists as the extreme example of a “Northern European fertility model” (low birth rate, late marriage, high paternal investment) which was at the opposite pole from that of most African cultures. Even before hormonal birth control was widespread, the birth rate in Ireland was relatively low. Men and women married late, had children late, and a large number of men and women remained celibate their whole lives. If you’re going to compare pre-modern Ireland to a third world country it would make more sense to compare it to Buddhist Tibet, another society in which the birth rate was low because of widespread religious celibacy.
Around the mid-20th century the age of marriage dropped and the birth rate increased due to increasing prosperity in Ireland which allowed people to start families younger. So it’s fair to say that in the 1970s, there was a big drop in birth rates compared to the decades immediately before. This “baby boom” was a temporary thing though, and a deviation from the older pattern of a relatively stable, low-fertility population.
Don Williams,
South America is very far from overpopulated, and the average woman there has about 2.5 children, not “6 or 7″. There are very few countries with total fertility rates of 6 or 7, and they tend to be Muslim, not Catholic.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with hormonal birth control, but in the interests of factual truth I would point out that the Catholic-approved “Natural Family Planning” can be highly effective when practiced correctly. NFP is the most common birth control method in contemporary Poland, which had a total fertility rate below the replacement level.
October 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
It is true that NFP can be as effective as the pill or condoms when used correctly. However, as a practitioner I can tell you it is more difficult, and takes more work, to use it correctly. It is a great option (I would argue the best option) for couples in certain situations (committed couples who aren’t repulsed by the idea of being parents (or being parents again) someday, if not anytime soon), but it doesn’t work for everybody. I agree with Hector that hormonal birth control has benefits and costs. I would certainly not presume to dictate for others whether the benefits for them would outweigh the costs, despite my religious convictions in this regard.
However, abortion is a different matter entirely. Abortion is not properly used as a means of birth control - and it actually does a great deal of harm to the most vulnerable citizens because of the incentives and externalities it creates. Those who argue that reducing or restricting abortion would lead to an outpouring of out-of-wedlock births are ignoring reality - illegitimacy has soared since Roe, and it has especially soared among those least equipped to deal with it.
One part of the article struck me even more than the rest — Stable, two-parent families are increasingly becoming a privilege enjoyed by only the upper and upper middle classes, and that is incredibly sad as stable families offer the greatest possibility for upward social mobility. I think there is quite a lot we can do, short of ham-fisted marriage promotion and the like that would align financial incentives with the type of family structure that would improve the economic stability and mobility of the working and lower-middle classes as well as the poor.
October 8th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Pretend Crusader Hector seems to think that in days of yore, middle-class gentlemen didn’t fuck the vulnerable maid or the local whores. Thus, foundling hospitals and Magdalen laundries and other dumping grounds for illegitimate children and women of ill repute are clearly creations of fiction.
The “bad boy” trope predates Roe v Wade by a couple of decades, at least.
Decades? How about a couple of centuries, at least? As long as there have been novels, there have been bad-boy antiheroes getting Ladies of Quality hot under the bodice.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Pseudonymous,
Pre-modern Ireland had a high marital fertility rate, but also a high percentage of celibate men and women, and a high age of marriage. The illegitimate birth rate in Ireland was only about 4%, much lower than other European countries.
I’m not trying to imply that many European countries were not rife with prostitutes, sexual double standards, and illegitimate children. Indeed, the fact that often the Victorian ethic rested on a foundation of widespread whoredom is a big part of the reason why I think that the sexual revolution was, in its essence, a very qualified good thing. However, that isn’t the point at issue. Someone made a remarkably ignorant comment about Ireland, displaying that they know as little about behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology as they do about theology or history. I corrected that point. End of story.
Please see Strassman and Clarke,1998. “Ecological constraints on marriage in rural Ireland.” Evolution and Human Behavior, 19(1).
Sure there have always been bad boys, but the legalization of abortion makes it easier for women to ‘choose’ them, with all the resulting bad consequences. One can argue this on purely theoretical, sociobiology grounds, so I’m not sure why you are disputing it.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Hugo,
Are you familiar with Akerlof’s argument that legalized abortion led to the increase in illegitimacy, by the demise of the old ’shotgun marriage’ idea?
October 9th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Amusingly, if one searches for “akerlof abortion” on yahoo, by the third result one has already hit antichoicers using his work to attack effective birth control. (Which of course doesn’t say anything about the value of the argument; rather, it speaks to the the nature of the organized antichoice movement.
“Sure there have always been bad boys, but the legalization of abortion makes it easier for women to ‘choose’ them, with all the resulting bad consequences. ”
This is starting to sound like a case of Nice Guyism* inflated to astonishing proportions.
* in the sense of ‘generally youngish, lower status males who are bitter about their sense that being non-threatening, decent, and well, nice to women doesn’t help get them a girlfriend, because women apparently like jerks who are mean to them, etc., etc.’
October 9th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Hector, I wasn’t specifically but I am now. I think his argument implicitly makes sense and is certainly one of the arguments I would make. Folks have pointed that there are negative consequences to couples getting married after they unintentionally conceive, and that’s certainly true. But there are also positive effects on society when that happens and that can’t be ignored. As Akerlof points out, and for which I give him great credit, the costs of abortion on demand are skewed toward the lower classes, while the benefits are skewed toward the upper classes. I would argue that the reverse is true of the old way. Now of course you hear the opposite argument trotted out (abortion on demand extends a right to the lower classes that the rich have always had, by virtue of being rich), but I think Akerlof has it exactly right.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:45 am
By the way, by referring to the “old way,” I don’t at all intend to advocate for pre-sexual revolution sexual morality (if indeed such a thing would even be possible). That was rife with foul double standards and inequality and certainly did not serve people, especially women, well.
Rather, I would argue that we take the best lessons of the sexual revolution, the best lessons of the pro-life movement (really just one that I can think of, to be honest, but important), and the best lessons of pre-sexual revolution morality, and forge a new sexual morality for the 21st century and beyond that serves people of all means and colors, based on equality of opportunity (but not sameness), treating all human life with dignity, centrality of the family, an understanding of sociobiology and how it impacts relations between the sexes, public rejection (but not outright illegalization) of what is crass and obscene, and a few other things I don’t have time to get into right now.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Hugo,
That sounds great to me!
Dan S.,
Akerlof was a liberal, who supported contraception and opposed the repeal of Roe v. Wade. It’s interesting that you would casually dismiss his argument.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:35 am
“Now of course you hear the opposite argument trotted out (abortion on demand extends a right to the lower classes that the rich have always had, by virtue of being rich), but I think Akerlof has it exactly right.”
These, I think, are actually two distinct arguments that are more or less independent of one another, rather than in opposition. My (very superficial) understanding of ~20thC pre-Roe abortion history was that the upper classes generally had the resources (economic and social) to get safe abortions. Countless women without these resources desperately turned to often very, very unsafe methods, whether scraping together cash for some back alley abortionist, or trying to do it themselves, often with even more horrific results. As a result, many suffered, were badly injured, or died. Unless I’m badly misinformed, I think this is pretty much historical fact.
Whether it’s correct that that the coats of safe, legal abortion are skewed to the lower classes and the benefits to the upper classes, and vice versa for ‘unsafe, illegal abortion for the lower classes/safe, legal-ish abortion for the upper classes’, I don’t know. Are the enormous costs of unsafe abortion being included in these calculations, along with the supposed undermining of paternal responsibility?
I’ll have to read more about Akerlof’s argument. Until then - well, given that the rise in number/acceptance of out-of-wedlock births has been blamed on everything from welfare to generalized decline in moral standards to Roe, I eagerly await the argument that it’s actually all Bill Ayers’ fault. That unrepentant bastard!
October 9th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
My last comment still in moderation, let me link to something I should have started off with (and actually somewhat on topic, even), Doug Muder’s post ‘04 election essay Red Family, Blue Family
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