Polednice has inspired me to speak against tyranny, and problems in general.
In the US we are facing one of the largest social/demographic shifts in history; the oblivion of marriage (in the lower socioeconomic classes).
http://www.theatlantic.com/business...death-and-life-of-marriage-in-america/252640/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html?_r=1&hp
1. Income inequality
2. The recession
But the economic bloggers I read refute this pretty conclusively.
All of this is, to me, symptomatic of a larger social crisis brewing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html
Now, before you say that this is all sensationalist tripe. A paper from UPenn on female happiness shows that it is, in fact, in decline, and has declined sharply in the past 40 years.
http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Female_Happiness.pdf
I will share my theories on the cause of this later. I want to hear what you guys have to say first.
In the US we are facing one of the largest social/demographic shifts in history; the oblivion of marriage (in the lower socioeconomic classes).
National Marriage Week USA kicks off today, and for many people, a national booster movement for marriage could not come any sooner. The recession did a number on American matrimony, as you've surely heard. The collapse in marriage rates is cited as one of the most important symptoms -- or is it a cause? -- of economic malaise for the middle class. But the statistics aren't always what they seem, and the reasons behind marriage's so-called decline aren't all negative.
At first blush, the institution of marriage is crumbling. In 1960, 72% of all adults over 18 were married. By 2010, the number fell to 51%. You can fault the increase in divorces that peaked in the 1970s. Or you could just blame the twentysomethings. The share of married adults 18-29 plunged from from 59% in 1960 to 20% in 2010. Twenty percent!
http://www.theatlantic.com/business...death-and-life-of-marriage-in-america/252640/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html?_r=1&hp
Most of the blame in the mainstream media attributes the cause toThat's the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray's latest book, "Coming Apart." Murray critically examines family breakdown among working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional values of diligence.
Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with important parts of it. But he's right to highlight social dimensions of the crisis among low-skilled white workers.
My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.
One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it's not heroin but methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in jail, kids are raised on the fly.
Then there's the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.
1. Income inequality
2. The recession
But the economic bloggers I read refute this pretty conclusively.
http://marginalrevolution.com/margi...arginal+Revolution)&utm_content=Google+ReaderAll of a sudden it is pulled out of the closest as a weapon against Charles Murray, such as by Paul Krugman (and here and here), Rortybomb, David Frum, and others. Bryan Caplan brings some sanity to the debate:
I'm baffled by people who blame declining marriage rates on poverty. Why? Because being single is more expensive than being married. Picture two singles living separately. If they marry, they sharply cut their total housing costs. They cut the total cost of furniture, appliances, fuel, and health insurance. Even groceries get cheaper: think CostCo.
These savings are especially blatant when your income is low. Even the official poverty line acknowledges them. The Poverty Threshold for a household with one adult is $11,139; the Poverty Threshold for a household with two adults is $14,218. When two individuals at the poverty line maintain separate households, they're effectively spending 2*$11,139-$14,218=$8,060 a year to stay single.
But wait, there's more. Marriage doesn't just cut expenses. It raises couples' income. In the NLSY, married men earn about 40% more than comparable single men; married women earn about 10% less than comparable single women. From a couples' point of view, that's a big net bonus. And much of this bonus seems to be causal.
More plausibly it is the rise in female income (among other factors, including the rise of birth control, read more here) which is behind the decline in marriage, but that doesn't fit with traditional mood affiliation, which finds the rise in female income to be good (which it is), and the decline in marriage to be - neither good nor bad per se but not exactly worth celebrating. If you can blame capitalism and wage stagnation for the decline of the family among lower earners, so much the better for ideology but as a sociological proposition that is a very weak hypothesis (do you see convincing links to real sociological evidence, showing this to be the dominant factor? No) and as Caplan shows it doesn't fit with the economics either.
All of this is, to me, symptomatic of a larger social crisis brewing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/
This WSJ OP-ED voices some of the same complaints.In his book, Is Marriage for White People?, Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, argues that the black experience of the past half century is a harbinger for society at large. "When you're writing about black people, white people may assume it's unconnected to them," he told me when I got him on the phone. It might seem easy to dismiss Banks's theory that what holds for blacks may hold for nonblacks, if only because no other group has endured such a long history of racism, and racism begets singular ills. But the reality is that what's happened to the black family is already beginning to happen to the white family. In 1950, 64 percent of African American women were married-roughly the same percentage as white women. By 1965, African American marriage rates had declined precipitously, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famously declaring black families a "tangle of pathology." Black marriage rates have fallen drastically in the years since-but then, so have white marriage rates. In 1965, when Moynihan wrote with such concern about the African American family, fewer than 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, considerably more than 25 percent of white children are.
This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out most dramatically among low-income groups, both black and white. According to the sociologist William Julius Wilson, inner-city black men struggled badly in the 1970s, as manufacturing plants shut down or moved to distant suburbs. These men naturally resented their downward mobility, and had trouble making the switch to service jobs requiring a very different style of self-presentation. The joblessness and economic insecurity that resulted created a host of problems, and made many men altogether unmarriable. Today, as manufacturing jobs disappear nationwide (American manufacturing shed about a third of its jobs during the first decade of this century), the same phenomenon may be under way, but on a much larger scale.
Just as the decline of marriage in the black underclass augured the decline of marriage in the white underclass, the decline of marriage in the black middle class has prefigured the decline of marriage in the white middle class. In the 1990s, the author Terry McMillan climbed the best-seller list (and box-office charts) with novels like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which provided incisive glimpses of life and frustrated romance among middle-class black women, where the prospect of marrying a black man often seemed more or less hopeless. (As she writes in Waiting to Exhale: "[Successful black men have] taken these stupid statistics about us to heart and are having the time of their lives. They do not hold themselves accountable to anybody for anything, and they're getting away with murder … They lie to us without a conscience, they **** as many of us at a time as they want to.") Today, with the precipitous economic and social decline of men of all races, it's easy to see why women of any race would feel frustrated by their romantic prospects. (Is it any wonder marriage rates have fallen?) Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class, too: early last year, a study by the Pew Research Center reported that professionally successful, college-educated women were confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects.
"If you're a successful black man in New York City, one of the most appealing and sought-after men around, your options are plentiful," Banks told me. "Why marry if you don't have to?" (Or, as he quotes one black man in his book, "If you have four quality women you're dating and they're in a rotation, who's going to rush into a marriage?") Banks's book caused a small stir by suggesting that black women should expand their choices by marrying outside their race-a choice that the women of Terry McMillan's novels would have found at best unfortunate and at worst an abhorrent betrayal. As it happens, the father of Chantal's child is white, and Denean has dated across the color line. But in any event, the decline in the economic prospects of white men means that marrying outside their race can expand African American women's choices only so far. Increasingly, the new dating gap-where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players-trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html
Now, before you say that this is all sensationalist tripe. A paper from UPenn on female happiness shows that it is, in fact, in decline, and has declined sharply in the past 40 years.
http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Female_Happiness.pdf
How are things in old Europe?The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past
35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of
subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined
both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness
in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being
than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap
is emerging-one with higher subjective well-being for men
By many measures, the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary. The gender wage gap has partly closed. Educational attainment has
risen and is now surpassing that of men. Women have gained an unprecedented level
of control over fertility. Technological change, in the form of new domestic appliances, has freed women from domestic drudgery. In short, women's freedoms within
both the family and market sphere have expanded. Francine D. Blau's (1998) assessment of objective measures of female well-being since 1970 finds that women made
enormous gains. Labor force outcomes have improved absolutely, as women's real
wages have risen for all but the least-educated women, and relatively, as women's
wages relative to those of men have increased for women of all races and education
levels. Concurrently, female labor force participation has risen to record levels both
absolutely and relative to that of men (Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn 2007). IGiven these shifts of rights and bargaining power from men to women over the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men. Yet, in this paper, we document that
measures of women's subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively
to that of men. While the expansion in women's opportunities has been extensively
studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted.
One exception to this is David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald (2004), who
study trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women
report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white
women's happiness in the United States is negative over the period. We will show, in
this paper, that women's happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men's
in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier
than men, and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men.
Moreover, we show that this shift has occurred through much of the industrialized
worldn turn,
better market outcomes for women have likely improved their bargaining position in
the home by raising their opportunities outside of marriage.
I will share my theories on the cause of this later. I want to hear what you guys have to say first.