Martha had what she may have considered numerous good reasons to conceal her pregnancy and childbirth — she was almost 40 years of age and had divorced her husband in 1950 after a 16-year marriage. She may have also been painfully aware of the struggles of a single working mother in a socially oppressive post-war era that lionized couples, marriage, God and family and especially, conformity. Accidental childbirth to an unwed woman was not only maligned but frequently received with ostracism from families and employers and in a few rare cases, criminal charges.
He accurately describes the moral norms that existed at the time and the harsh consequences that those norms had for unmarried women who became pregnant, and in this particular case the harsh consequences for the baby. Implicitly, he sees the change in social norms as all for the good.
But in the 1950s, the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households was much smaller than it is today. I don’t know the figure for the 1950s, but I believe that today it is over 50 percent. I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.
I believe that today it is over 50 percent.
It is about 39% today has fallen a few percent since Great Recession.
In 1960 Belmont (close to 100%) and Fishtown (90%).
In 2010 its like Belmont (90%) and Fishtown (30%).
Thought Belmont kept its numbers up by reducing their marriage and fertility rates…which is not the correct way to solve the problem.
Then what is the correct way to solve the problem? I have jokingly called it the Singapore Solution where they have a very productive economy and low single motherhood. But they also has fertility rates of 1.2 babies per female which is on the low side of other Far East Asian Nations as well. And if you look at the nations with European higher birth rates (France, Ireland) you do see a relatively high tolerance of single motherhood. So lowering single motherhood mostly lowers the birth rates.
For the free market social conservative, the reality is this trend is happening both by free choice and the right reasons. Young people are waiting for marriage and parenthood for good reasons such as finishing education, developing a good/decent career and waiting for health insurance. (Also with less kids parents reinforce better education values on the children.) And the reality of High IQ couples is the know/understand realities and act accordingly. (Note if you show birth rates by income level the lowest is the upper middle class of $250K – $500 per year. The upper class are higher though.)
The reality is the norm of the 1950s were not any different than the norms of past society. However, the local economy and institutions were much stronger in which young people doing the right thing, getting married, also could benefit by getting union card. (Quote from The River by Springsteen) Now with a competitive global economy local institutions is declining economic areas have little impact.
“So lowering single motherhood mostly lowers the birth rates.”
False. There are plenty of groups with higher fertility and no single motherhood. Mormons, Israelis (even the seculars).
It’s not just weird groups either. UMC conservatives have replacement fertility. The shortfall is entirely from UMC liberals. So there is an ideological and cultural problem here.
And more babies being pumped out by single mother welfare queens isn’t what we want.
“right reasons”
Not having clear cultural and institutional paths to forming and keeping lasting and fulfilling long term relationships isn’t a “good reason”. It’s a tragedy we should remedy.
“The upper class are higher though”
Which shows that money and status are part of the issue here. Once people are secure in the idea that they can afford more children without taking a money/status hit, they have them.
Part of the answer is making them less obsessed with money/status, part of it is making having children high status, and part is making having children cost less. The first two you’ll notice are part of what conservatives do, which is why they have higher fertility.
“Then what is the correct way to solve the problem?”
I think there should be a marshal plan for childbirth. What I write below we can always change the numbers around, but its the structure that counts.
1) I think we should have massive tax reductions for people who have children and are married, especially those that are net tax payers today (middle class +). It should scale with number of children.
I’m fine increasing taxes overall and/or on the rich to pay for this.
I’m not talking about debating between a $2,000 or $3,000 tax credit. I’m talking about the kind of money that removes the financial advantages of being childless. If children cost about $250k+ per child, that is the ballpark I’m thinking. Nobody has ever tried an intervention that big.
Without working out the financial specifics, a rough idea in my head is that anyone with 2+ kids shouldn’t be paying any income taxes on the first $100,000 of earnings. I could see giving a break on SS taxes as well (and I’m willing to get rid of the SS salary cap to help pay for it).
I would also provide a sort of “UBI for children”, though I would want to keep it relatively small. If the biological couple is married then UBI would double.
2) I would like to provide some assistance for health care for all children (not just poor children as is what we have now). I’m pretty open to how to do this.
3) I would like to de-couple real estate from public education. Not in the sense of letting poor kids ruin good schools, but letting middle class people get a decent education for their kids without needing to bid up real estate.
I also think giving them affordable ideologic alternatives to leftist public education is important.
4) I would like to provide special benefits/markers of status to those with children. Discounts for children on airline travel. First border status which is advertised at the gate. Etc.
The more opportunities to publicly show the high status of people with lots of kids, the better.
5) I’m open to Handle’s suggestion that it would be beneficial to give people with children a hand up in professional and status competitions. For instance, I would prefer it be much easier for people with children to achieve GS-12+ that those without.
6) I would make fertility treatment and IVF subsidized by the government. This would have a knockoff effect that if embryo selection of crispr reach the point of eugenic effectiveness, it will subside people using them.
7) Several other things, but I’ll focus on only the directly fertility related.
asdf,
I love your ideas. Meanwhile, on the subject of conservatives and religion “making [people] less obsessed with money/status” and “making having children high status” I always think back to this story from Georgia (the country):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7964302.stm
Of course, unlike Dale (and Arnold?) I’m all for bringing back shame to help solve the problem.
UMC conservatives have replacement fertility. The shortfall is entirely from UMC liberals. So there is an ideological and cultural problem here.
I called my UMC Brother-In-Law (with only 2 kids to our family 3) an Obama Republican and it really mind blowing Democrats won all the seats in Orange County which was called Reagan Country in 1984. So the weird part is how much the UMC has turned Democrat in the area which has been led by Asian-Americans. (However, there is Reagan DNA here so Republicans will see bounces after Trump.)
making them less obsessed with money/status
WE LIVE A CAPITALIST SOCEITY!!!!! Leaving behind status, doesn’t the UMC know best what it takes to thrive in a capitalist societies? This seems the WORST idea to tell young people now.
In terms of my kid’s High School, I have really not seen any ideologues teachers. I would agree they are too college focused for too many students although they really promote ROTC and military. (Other working class paths are weak though.)
Looking at modern capitalist nations, only Israel has a high birth rate and they are the society that lives in a Cold War today. And the Mormons in Utah have created a standard of how a Red state should act. (Although their birth rates have fallen quite bit.) But compared to all of Europe, and more importantly, the Far East Asia Tigers we witnessed low birth rates. Even without direct causality , the correlation is strong.
“WE LIVE A CAPITALIST SOCIETY!!!!!”
And we lived in a much more capitalist society when fertility rates were much higher and extra income had much higher utility then it does today.
I agree on the worldwide trend in fertility, I’m saying that we should address it with big time societal carrots and sticks. Because it’s that important, and it will make people happier and pay for itself (all of our big time fiscal problems are due to fertility shortfall).
Finally, even many free marketers are coming around to the idea that having children is an investment in human capital and if we can incentivize investment in physical and intellectual capital certainly we can invest in human capital as well. The childless are free-riders on the investments of others, there is nothing virtuous about being a free rider.
With some quibbles (as a Catholic I can’t support IVF subsidies), I really like asdf’s proposals.
Young people are waiting for marriage and parenthood for good reasons such as finishing education…
But much of schooling is just a Red Queen’s Race. You used to be able to stand out by having a high school diploma. Then going to college. Now a Masters. People stay out of productive employment longer (thus, worsening coming problems like Social Security and pensions). Meanwhile, those who don’t go to school, the less intelligent and the less ambitious, do have babies, including a large number who aren’t “waiting for marriage” at all.
Collin,
I would have (and did) agree with this 25 years ago:
However, at age 53 and childless, I recognize this as a tragic error. Biology and aging are unforgiving. It is a mistake to wait beyond your early 20s, for both males and females, though for somewhat different reasons. Additionally, ones own beliefs will continue to betray you as you age through the 30s and the 40s- one will keep finding “good reasons” to put it off.
“I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.”
And I suppose you would also like to have your cake and eat it, too.
The quoted statement reeks with ideological tendentiousness – which Kling does not notice, presumably because he shares the same prejudices. We are told that the immediate postwar era was “socially oppressive” because socially dysgenic and dysfunctional behavior was deterred by social opprobrium. The era’s positive reinforcement of “couples, marriage, God [?] and family” is mocked, as if the social preferences involved were arbitrary and irrational. To top the whole thing off, we are told that the postwar era particularly valued “conformity.” LOL. Self-awareness is rather scarce among woke academics like Brumfield.
BTW, if single parenthood is (all things being equal) something we should want less of, it might be a good idea to pump the brakes on our importation of poor third-world immigrants, who tend to adopt that lifestyle (among other forms of social dysfunction) once they get here. It never seems to register with free-market ideologues who support open borders that high-volume immigration is destroying the prospects of realizing any of their other goals.
+1
How hard is it to not get pregnant when you’re a single woman? It’s not like a strong breeze blows and boom you’re pregnant.
Based on a quick glance at Brumfield’s article, the “criminal charges” to which he refers in the quoted passage seem to have been for child abandonment. Standing alone, the reference to “criminal charges” gives the false impression that girls were being prosecuted for having gotten pregnant or having sex.
Brumfield’s tone reminds me of Mad Men, in which postwar/pre-counterculture America was portrayed as a dark and evil place, as if it were Germany in the 30s or 17th century Salem.
“And I suppose you would also like to have your cake and eat it, too.
The quoted statement reeks with ideological tendentiousness”
You do know that these two accusations are mutually exclusive, don’t you?
The two “accusations,” as you call them, are directed at statements by two different speakers.
The quote is by Dale Brumfield, but you argue it represents Kling’s belief:
“The quoted statement reeks with ideological tendentiousness – which Kling does not notice, presumably because he shares the same prejudices.”
Kling shares Brumfield’s detestation of the ostracism directed at unwed pregnancy before the late 60s, but he wants less unwed pregnancy without bringing back that ostracism – which was the mechanism by which unwed pregnancy was deterred. So I don’t see any contradiction. Good night.
As far as I can tell, people like Murray take a totally different approach. A return to shaming is like the #1 prescription he has for curbing underclass behavior. At least he bites the bullet on being judgmental.
What about immigration from China? I am pretty sure that you could set up a visa system and fill all the construction, food service, and agricultural jobs with people who already have extensive experience in those fields just with people from China, and I am pretty sure that about a very low percentage of those folks would behave like the current American underclass. They would be way too busy saving money to buy a house for their family (including space for their parents) and so that they can find a Chinese bride. Or if they were married, they would be too busy making sure that their kids do well in school.
That’s interesting but most of our immigration is not from China.
“I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.”
So do I, but it sure sounds like, “I don’t want any Type 1 errors or Type 2 errors.”
You can avoid both types of errors, but it’s hard work. The thing to do is ask what is the economically optimum error rate.
The thing to do is ask what is the economically optimum error rate.
Well, of course. But that implies that you will have some of each.
Who is this “we” that you speak of, white man? There is no “we” in the USA. Those days are long gone too. It is time to dissolve the union.
Or at least get the government defaults out of our schedule, and soon.
50 percent seems way too high. Are you sure it’s not like 15 percent?
UMC bubble.
I posted numbers above for “living with two adults when mother is 40 years old”.
If we applied the metric “lives with both biological parents until age 18” it would be even lower.
In 2014, 46% of American children were living with two parents in their first marriage.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/
And many of those children aren’t 18 yet, and will fall into the other categories by the time they are 18. So the Handle Metric is firmly below 46%.
That’s not the right statistic. I grew up in a nuclear family, but my father was in his second marriage (no children from the first). It’d be ridiculous to group that ‘sociologically’ with ‘single parent household.’ Given how high divorce rates are, that’s surely a significant factor. Even for people who have children from other marriages/non-marriages, I’m not sure why one would see their children within later marriages as more like growing up in a single parent household because of this.
So that’s a troublesome statistic if one’s main concern is adherence to Christian matrimonial morality, but to those of us who don’t care about that, it doesn’t necessarily tell us much about children’s home environments.
Who knows which statistic is ‘right’ or not? Let’s have all the data for all the statistics about how kids grow up, now and in the past, and see what the data tells us about indicators of strong patterns that might be ‘right’.
It’s pretty obvious that being raised by both biological parents, barring actual abuse, is the best way to raise children. All the data and common sense says this. About two thirds or so of divorces since the sexual revolution (the ones without abuse) are basically frivolous, selfish, and bad for the children. People should stick it out, and if they don’t it’s morally wrong of them.
Most children of divorce, even if one remarries, turn out worse than those without divorce (barring, again, actual physical abuse).
If you were to group by hierarchy it would be.
1) Both biological parents
2) Two parents of some kind
3) Single parent
While Christians certainly believe this, it appears that almost everyone believes this. I can think a lot of non-Christian groups in which lifelong monogamous child rearing by biological parents is considered the gold standard and the statistics back up that belief.
My father was in a second marriage too, but I was raised by my two biological parents. My half siblings are fucked up, in large part because of the divorce and being “raised” by my father’s crazy first wife (who re-married like four times).
It doesn’t seem like that 46% are necessarily both the biological parents. Either parent could have brought a child born out of wedlock into their first marriage.
My sense is that typical outcomes of a kid who spends a few years growing up with a single mother or from a cohabitation that falls apart aren’t as strong as a kid who was in a nuclear family from the get go.
The “Handle Metric” is the proportion of people turning 18 who were raised from birth by their two biological parents in marriage. Or, I suppose you could phrase it as the fraction of new adults who were ‘fully nuclearized’.
I think if you were ask the members of this year’s Harvard’s incoming freshman class, “How many of you were fully nuclearized?” you would get a lot of hands, and I’m guessing a strong majority. If you did the same for the departing seniors of a lousy urban public high school, it would be a very small minority. The difference would be night and day and make the big, growing gaps in Coming Apart look minuscule by comparison.
Nevertheless, correlation isn’t causality.
But causality DOES cause correlation, which is why they might be confused.
The data looks to me like failure to be raised in a nuclear home increases the chances of most other lifestyle fails, including failing to learn much in K-12, not to mention more often failing to graduate from college if accepted.
So try to give some evidence that it’s not causality.
“Social Science” is the search, among many correlations, for those few which ARE based on causality.
I have have this theory that society will always work to “diffuse” harm, even if the resulting total harm is much greater than in the original case.
And I’m not even sure that’s wrong. For example, I think stealing $100,000 from one person is a worse crime than stealing $1 from a million people.
Good example on stealing; also explains how easy it is for gov’t to get $1 in taxes from a million folk to “save” them from have $100k stolen by a bad guy; insurance also works like that.
Harm diffusion seems obviously true in families. When one member has problems, the (socialist) family group helps out that member, like an unwed daughter who has a child, or a son with some addiction.
Usually, the family helps even if it’s the daughter’s fault, or the addict son. At least at first, tho there is an issue of patience and times helping. “Forgiving” is not the same as giving cash, and one can often forgive even without cash.
The attempt to make society all “one family”, which is a very Christian Catholic goal, has big problems in resource allocation for the irresponsible.
Because of inevitable Harm Diffusion after irresponsible behavior has increased the probability of costly mistake, it’s possibly optimal to make such actions, like drunk driving, illegal.
–“I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.”–
Eliminating no fault divorce, child support and legal abortion would probably be the best policies to achieve such an outcome.
Without no fault divorce, more families will be likely to remain intact. Without child support and legal abortion, many women will demand that men fully commit to them via marriage prior to any intimacy.
This would reduce single parenthood significantly and perhaps without the same level of social opprobrium of unwed motherhood of the 1950s.
I think not – the big problems, tho they’re going down, is poor, never married girls having children. Divorce isn’t even a part of it.
Child support, like what Hunter Biden might be required to pay, should certainly continue, so that irresponsible, sexy successful womanizers have a bigger incentive to reduce causing pregnancies.
One big support for abortion is to avoid having poor young women raising children. Making abortion illegal will inevitably lead to calls for higher gov’t support for the non-aborted babies. I’ve now changed my own position to support higher gov’t support, to reduce/eliminate legal abortions, but see the out-of-wedlock baby issue as becoming worse without abortion.
Other actions should be taken, possibly with more child support from the bio-father willing to have sex but not willing to marry — making such fathers legally liable for their children seems a good incentive to reduce their irresponsible womanizing.
Interesting thoughts but on the other hand when abortion was illegal, government support of children lower, and mandatory payments to the mothers of illegitimate children nonexistent, there were far, far fewer unmarried mothers raising children than there are now that all of those things exist.
Without child support, women have an incentive to “demand that men fully commit to them via marriage prior to any intimacy.” But men now have the guarantee that any child produced by sex won’t cost them monetarily. Their incentive to “get the milk” has gone up, along with their incentive to “not buy the cow”. Where this would play out is anybody’s guess. But I can imagine a lot of male sweet-talking and promises that can’t be relied on. “We’re engaged. We love each other. Why should we have to wait until after the wedding?”
And, of course, if you trust your birth control, it doesn’t matter.
In the old days (some are still on the books) there were “breach of promise” laws made to address the exact circumstance you described.
When I went to law school a long time ago, I was told that such laws were pretty much dead letters. One of the big problems was what the “remedy” for violation would be. If it’s child support, the law is basically a child support law. But Justin’s hypothetical was that child support laws no longer exist.
They were dead letters when you went to law school, but were they always (I don’t know).
They’re not the same as child support laws, because the standard to establish wage garnishment is higher (a specific agreement vs biological paternity).
Since we can test for paternity now, I think child support laws are a decent concept. However, the mother’s use of the funds needs to be auditable, and there’s no good reason for it to be unbounded based on the father’s income.
And, of course, modern genome testing makes it almost foolproof to determine paternity, something that was not true in the dark ages of my law school career.
The 50s norms, great shame & problems for unwed mothers, was optimal for poor people wanting to get out of poverty. An economic oriented trade-off with high penalties for sub-optimal actions, and few such action. Fairly easy for a women to say “No”.
The norms of today are what? Some gov’t support for unwed mothers, no shame for pregnancy, birth, and abortion, lots of casual sex. Optimal for college educated girls who want to enjoy sexual liberation, and alpha males who have lots of willing partners. A sex oriented trade-off, with lots and lots of poor women having babies without being married, or having abortions. Often hard for a woman to say “No”.
Between carrots and sticks, as incentives – sticks are much cheaper. Like swats on the butt for kids, seems like effective parenting (used on me, maybe too much; I used on my kids some). Most kids learn fast how to avoid crossing the line to get swatted (so they get right up to that line).
Slut-shaming is cheaper. But I don’t see that coming.
So more carrots for those getting married. Lots of good ideas by asdf.
It would be good to set a avg 2.1 fertility rate, 80% or more in marriage, and have big incentives, that keep getting bigger, until those rates are achieved.
It might me too little and two days too late but I’d like to remind anyone who might read this 42nd response that Judith Rich Harris’ Nurture Assumption still has to be integrated into this discussion about changing social norms and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.
The Nurture Assumption tells us that the Nature vs Nurture debate, at least when it comes to personality traits, turns out to be about 50% Nature/Genetics and about 50% Environment but that the environment portion is almost all Peer Environment and the Nurture Environment (parenting and education) contributes approximately nothing.
Anecdotally, we have stories about young unwed women who have unplanned pregnancies and their children eventually make substantial positive sum contributions to society. Some examples are Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Barack Obama.
You get your genes at conception and your experience begins after you’re born. But there is nine months in between. Kevin Mitchell’s 2019 Innate (a very good book, for which Arnold promises a “long review essay”) argues that a good part of Harris’ 50% non-genetic influence comes from those nine months. “Blueprint” is a bad metaphor for your genome because the genome does not specify a finished PRODUCT. Rather, it specifies a PROCESS, and that process is not exact; it is subject to a great deal of randomness, some of which cancels out and some of which blows up. To take a dramatic example, if one identical twin is schizophrenic, there is only a 50/50 chance that the other twin will also be.
This article at Quillette by Rob Henderson is apropos, though perhaps slightly orthogonal to the exact topic.
https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/
Not sure why everyone views satisfying the two sets of norms as so impossible. A strong norm that young women should get long-lasting implantable contraception (such as an IUD) at the onset of menses would reduce unwanted conceptions to minimal levels. And then it would still be possible to be compassionate for the small number that occur without the resulting moral hazard.