Les:

Couple of quick points for now.

I disagree with your assessment. Bush won by three lousy percentage points: 50.8% to 48.3% with roughly 1% going to Nader.

I’m not saying that there is a mandate, but the significance is that for the first time in 12 years a President obtained a majority instead of a plurality.  Viewed in the context of recent elections, it is significant, especically when one views the gains in the Senate and the House.

Michael Moore made a lot of money with ‘Downsize This!’ but even after all that downsizing America has a much lower unemployment rate than Europe. That is because our businesses are more competitive and have fewer job-protection laws.

Again, it would be nice if you’d cite something to back that claim up.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006087

The stats are good.  France and Germany have nearly double the unemployment that the U.S. has.  U.S. workers, and therefore U.S. businesses, are more productive than any other, and we do have fewer job protections.  As to whether there is a cause and effect, that is subject to debate. 

As to the aging population in Europe.  That is also valid, and it is equally valid that Europe doesn’t have a high enough fertility rate to sustain itself.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you need more workers to pay for an aging population.  Nonetheless from American Thinker:

The most up-to-date demographic forecasts project that every single European country will have a smaller population in the year 2050 than today with the possible exception of Ireland and France.  Ireland has a high birth rate by European standards. France still has sufficient immigration to counter declining fertility rates. Some of the former Soviet states already have declining populations.  In Russia the death rate is now 1/3 greater than the birth rate. Russia may be half its current size in 50 years, as might some of the Baltic states. Italy is projected to be 1/4 smaller. Every minute on average, there are 3 births and 4 deaths in Russia.

So Europe’s population is aging and declining, and workers want to work less.  This creates huge social issues. Who will do the work that Europeans increasingly do not want to do themselves: maid service, child care, working with the elderly, dishwashers.  Who will pay the taxes to support the social services which are skewed, as in the US, toward the rapidly growing bloc of the elderly?

Justin has inartfully articulated some aspects of the report he cites.  The portion of the report that he is referring to is in the final chapter.  It states:

What then is that problem? We feel the answer is clear enough. Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world. The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right.

In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families. After that, how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business.

The fundamental importance and urgency of restoring the Negro American Family structure has been evident for some time. E. Franklin Frazier put it most succinctly in 1950:

“As the result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization which only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development. Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relations to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes. Since the widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him."61

The fact that we reached out with welfare benefits that provided a financial disincentive to families, only serve to perpetuate the problem. 

What Justin wants to say is this:  Two parent families are important.  We should be looking for ways to encourage familial development because the lack of strong two parent family households is a problem that we should have been able to divine through the use of simple common sense long ago.  However, if that is not sufficient, some of the problems that arise are well documented in the Moynihan report.

So Europe’s population is aging and declining, and workers want to work less.  This creates huge social issues. Who will do the work that Europeans increasingly do not want to do themselves: maid service, child care, working with the elderly, dishwashers.  Who will pay the taxes to support the social services which are skewed, as in the US, toward the rapidly growing bloc of the elderly?

My two cents on a part of this discussion:

I am 27, just finishing university in Germany, and I can tell you that our generation is not expecting to ‘work less’. In fact we fully expect to work as hard or harder as our parents - and get less for it. We are a generation that’s already past the welfare-state syndrome, I’d say (well, many of us - those that are aiming at at job like me or have one).

I do agree with you on the population/demographics problem though. That’s actually one of the most troublesome things, because it seems so intractable, and no one is really doing anything about it (and even if, it would take decades. We have no sensible immigration laws (i.e. ones aimed at integrating people into our society) and well, most people say the want kids but don’t get them.

KPatrickGlover, you said that the most likeable guy went to the swing voters.  The Essayist Paul Graham came to exactly the same conclusion dating back to the first decisive use of television in a campaign: Kennedy vs. Nixon.  There was a very interesting essay about it up on his website but then he pulled the essay because he wanted to re-analyze the data. 

But as far as I can tell you’re absolutely right.  The election goes to the more likeable guy, every time.  Every time! Obviously the Republicans have figured this out but the Democrats have not. 

Wonder how many unlikeable guys they’ll front before it suddenly hits them?  Maybe by the time history books say, “There once was a political party called Democrats...”

Ingolfson:

Isn’t there an attempt to reduce the average German work week from 38 1/2 hours to 35?

Regards,

Terroran, I laughed right out loud.

Since the widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him."61

I would argue that the solution would be to get it all right at once. 

1.The programs aimed at helping single mothers get off of welfare make it near impossible to care for their families by forcing them to work complicated schedules and not providing for child care.

Read
for
more info

2.Don’t wait until college to start helping black students.

While it’s true that family disorganization is a key problem in the black community, I think we can all see from the bits of the paper posted that the underlying cause of all this mess is slavery, and how slaves were specifically not intergrated properly into American society.  I might add to this dicussion that many slaves simply went back to their old jobs because they had nowhere else to go and no one would hire them.  This bullshit went on and didn’t change much until the civil rights movement, but it still stands today.  Maybe they aren’t working for plantation owners, but is Meijer’s much better?

We can’t wait until college to give these kids the help they need.  When you’ve grown up in a broken home with a struggling welfare mom and a pretty dysfunctional street culture, no amount of free rides to Yale is gonna help.  The truth is that most of the minorities who get help from affirmative action are not the ones who need it most.  All of the black students who attended my private college on multicultural scholarships (and yes, I met all of them in my class) came from homes in which one or both parents had a degree. The kids who really need the help don’t have the educational foundation to survive in college, nor, I would wager, are they even aware of the opportunities available to them. 

We have to start from the top providing a healthy social environment at school (since really, no matter what we do, we can’t control what goes on at home).  From elementary school, all children need similar opportunities to learn and grow and experience.  To provide this experience, schools need adequate funding to pay good teachers and buy the right tools.  Schools need a more uniform setup across states instead of the unconstitutional funding that goes on in many, which allows all the money to stay with the rich kids.  Obviously, there’s more to it than money, but there’s a start.  Johnathan Kozol has written a lot of great stuff on this topic.

Once these issues are addressed (and I’m sure there are many others than I’ve mentioned here...), I think the family situation will resolve itself.  When you’re making enough money that it’s no longer more profitable to steal or sell drugs than it is to just go to work, people will realize that they can have a good life and things will change.  People don’t want to be miserable and live in fear.

I would also like to point out that these solutions help everyone who is poor, not just blacks.  If we want to get rid of racism, we have to quit categorizing with stupid, useless categories (but that’s another rant).

So to sum up, I think we both identify the same problems, Justin, but we have different ideas for solving them.  I think that what I’ve presented is much more likely to actually work, if implemented, and less likely to cause more problems than it solves. (Whereas, encouraging poor people to get married and then forcing them to stay married doesn’t do shit.)

However, let me clarify my position. I would like to eliminate the no-fault divorce laws. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate divorce for abuse or adultury.

Children need to be raised by their biological parents who have made a lifelong loving committment to each other. Anything less is just not fair to the children.

Bullshit.  First of all, plenty of children are raised quite happily and healthily by non-biological parents all the time.  So what, it’s not fair to the children if parents get sick, die, or can’t afford to raise them?  Yeah, life is unfair; it’s a matter of picking the right fights.
This ain’t the fight.

As I’m big on personal examples:

I grew up in a house full of fighting.  It would be no exaggeration to say that my life would have been much easier had my parents not been married to begin with.  There was no adultery, no physical abuse, just a really shitty match and an accidental pregnancy.  If you had your way, Justin, my mother probably would have died of anorexia long ago and never would have gone to x-ray school or met my wonderful stepfather.

Don’t propose to trap women into shit marriages just because there’s no outward evidence of a problem or you think people should “work through it”.  Some people don’t just “work through it”.  Married parents are not always the best thing for a child.  My mother was a much better parent alone than they were together.  My non-"biological" stepfather + my kick ass mom = fucking stellar, and the reason why I’m not crazy.

PS>
I’ll laugh if you propose pre-divorce psychological evaluation.  Don’t even go there.  It’s not the government’s business.

PPS>
The single most powerful tool to reduce child poverty is all the shit-tons of money we’re spending on Iraq!

The single most powerful tool to reduce child poverty is all the shit-tons of money we’re spending on Iraq!

Indeed.  But you know the conservative creed:  if you’re poor, it’s your own fault.  We need the money for better things.

Can’t find Bin Laden?  Invade Iraq.  Blacks are poor?  Make divorce harder.  Duh.

Consi, the portion of the Moynihan report you quoted does NOT assert that FAMILY DISORGANIZATION CREATES POVERTY.  That is what Justin is asserting, and that is NOT what it says, if you reread the parts that Les quoted.  You are trying to make the cart draw the horse to suit your agenda.

It merely says that family disorganization is bad, which we can all agree on. 

But I really wish we would take race out of the discussion and focus on family stability for ALL people living in poverty.

Shana & GM – I agree. Lose the useless racial labels, and at the same time stop trying to lay the blame for poverty (Justin) on the emancipation of 50% of the population. It happened, it’s passed, get over it, and, like Shana said, if you really care that much, start coming up with constructive solutions.

For instance, in Sweden, the welfare state is based on a dual bread-winner model (which grew out of a reaction to a period of widespread poverty and drastic demographic change – including low birth rates) where social adjustments and public policies mean that women no longer have to choose between children and a career. Not only does this model address declining birth rates, but helps deal with problems such as growing numbers of single mothers and increase in child poverty much more efficiently than trying to cram women back into their traditional roles…

�Higher fertility rates are often observed in countries where such adjustments have taken place and where public policies are supportive of gender equality. In contrast, it is clear that countries that have not managed to adjust and to accept multiple roles for women are those facing the most severe problems. Italy, Spain, and Japan are examples of countries where resistance to change goes hand in hand with low birth rates and rapid population ageing. Women’s education and employment levels have risen dramatically in both Italy and Spain in the past two decades. Yet these changes have met with the resistance of society as a whole – and especially of men, who have insisted that women should continue to play their traditional role of mother and homemaker. This inability to adjust means that Italian and Spanish women – in contrast, say, to women in Sweden – have resolved the conflict between career and domesticity by post-poning childbearing. Similar observations have been made in Japan, where low birth rates are largely due to the inflexibility of the marriage institution.�
(Professor Lena Sommestad, Uppsala University and director of the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

So the solution for us all is to introduce more gender equality policies! Hurrah!

By ANNE MANNE
Saturday 15 December 2001

The Swedish case is interesting because of an argument mounted by ANU demographer Professor Peter McDonald, and widely covered in the Australian media, that policies supporting women at work will solve the looming fertility crisis in the West. Sweden has one of the highest female workforce participation rates in OECD countries; the best extended paid parental leave, and extensive child care. It should be the best-case scenario for the women-at-work argument. Unfortunately, the Swedish strategy has failed.

Swedish fertility rates by decade:

1950: 2.21
1960: 2.32
1970: 1.89
1980: 1.65
1990: 2.01
2000: 1.29

From http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Initiatives/pension_sweden.pdf

There are many good reasons for gender equality policies.  Increased fertility rates is not one of them, as evidence by the falling fertility rates of Sweden. The professor is wrong.

Regards,

disagree with your assessment. Bush won by three lousy percentage points:

Liberal rage against red staters (see also, the original post for this thread), the soul-searching and circular firing squads, as well as the heightened battle between the Democrats liberal base and the DLC suggest that you hold a minority position about the health of the Democratic party.

The presidential election was close but the Republicans picked up more seats in the House and Senate. 40 years ago 2/3rds of Americans were registered Democrats. Democrats had 66 Senate seats and a 2:1 edge in the house.

If you don’t think the Democrats have some serious problems, you are in denial.

Despite the lack of such stringent laws here I don’t see any diminishment in the enthusiasm to invest capital into technology that raises productivity by American companies. If anything the ease in which the American worker can be fired just provides incentive for companies to move their jobs to India.

That is the theory of job protection laws, but the result is the opposite. As others in this thread have pointed out, compare unemployement rates. Or take the EU’s word for it. They’ve just acknowledged that the Lisbon Agenda, a plan to make the EU the worlds strongest economy, is failing to meet it’s targets and the Europe is falling further behind the US:

http://www.euobserver.com/?sid=9&aid=18257

Yep, that’s what I love about Conservatives: Rather than work on educating people on why healthy marriages are important and how to ensure you end up in one, their solution to the problem of divorce is to restrict your freedom further by removing it as an option unless you’re getting the crap beat out of you or cheated on.

You mean like Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative?

Having said that, I think it is the realm for parents, engaged couples and churches to teach about the values of marriages. At the national level of policy I’m more concerned about the no-fault divorce laws and the effect they have had on divorce rates. Are you in favor of the no-fault divorce laws?

Ok, some people have been trying to rebut the Moynihan Report by claiming that poverty is the cause of broken families instead of the other way around. Rather than quote selections that prove our point, let’s use Mr. Moynihan himself to explain the meaning, taken from an interview with PBS:

And a friend of mine, James S. Coleman – a great sociologist – was asked to do this survey. And when he undertakes it, they said, “why are you doing this? Everybody knows these schools are unequal in their facilities and that’s why they’re unequal in their outcomes.â€? He said, “Well, everybody knows it, but now we’ll know it for once and all.â€? 

And I’ll tell you, early one evening, there’s a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club, and Seymour Martin Lipset – the incomparable Marty Lipset – walks in, sees me, comes over and says, “You know what Coleman’s finding, don’t you?â€? And I said, “No.â€? He said, “It’s all family.â€? 

And, indeed what [Coleman] found [was that] the predictor of educational achievement was to be found in family setting, structure, and so forth. 

QUESTION: Not in schools? Not principally? 

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Not principally in schools. Now, and he was the sort of first major person in that difficult decade who found out things that he shouldn’t have found out.  Actually, there was an effort – not very serious, but an effort – to expel him from the American Sociological Association. 

QUESTION: For telling the truth? 

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Well, for finding out information that was unwelcome.

...

And you can take this pattern of avoidance and defining deviancy down all across the society. 

QUESTION: What would some of the other examples be? 

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Well, out-of-wedlock births. Drug use of very serious kinds. Very poor performance in school. School violence. 

An interesting thing: Our party, my Democratic Party, became very much into this denial mode.

http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/moynihan.htm

Alternately we can take a look at more modern research. From an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth:

To answer these questions, a regression analysis was performed with “time in poverty” as the dependent variable. The independent variables used to explain the probability of poverty were race, time on welfare, time in a single-parent home, mother’s math and verbal ability level, number of children in the family, age of mother at first birth, regional residence, and rural residence.

...

The results of the regression are shown in Table 2. The R square of the regression is .64, indicating that the model is able to explain 64 percent of the variation in child poverty in the NLSY sample. Time on welfare and time in a single-parent home were found to have strong significant effects in determining the amount of time a child would live in poverty. The number of children in the family, the mother’s math and verbal skill level, and the age of the mother at first birth also had clear significant effects on child poverty rates, although the magnitude of these effects was smaller than the magnitude of welfare dependence and single-parent variables. More children in the family led to more time in poverty. By contrast, higher ability levels of the mother and being older at first birth led to decreases in child poverty.

...

The lack of effect of the racial variables is striking. Both black and other race were shown to be very weak variables without statistically significant effects on poverty. Thus, race per se was found to have no direct bearing on child poverty. If a black child is compared to a white child who is identical with respect to the other variables shown, the poverty rate of the two children will be, on average, nearly identical.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/CDA01-04.cfm

And from this study:

This paper analyzes links between rising income inequality, child poverty, and one-parent families in the United States from 1971 to 1989. One test reallocated weights so that 1989 proportions of children by mother’s marital status resembled the 1971 distribution. A second method used (1) simulated marriages among unmarried men and unmarried mothers in 1989 to reproduce 1971 marital patterns and (2) earnings responses induced by the simulated marriages. The results indicate that the trend away from marriage accounted for almost half the increase in child income inequality and more than the entire rise in child poverty rates. Copyright 1996 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Whups, forgot the reference for the second study:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/econom/v63y1996i250ps119-39.html

Justin- so what? All of the studies you quote simply point out a correlation between poverty and broken families.  This is not news.  None of them shows that broken families cause poverty rather than the other way around.  And there is no evidence to support your claim that stricter divorce laws would do anything to improve the situation.

You mean like Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative? - Justin

If it is anything like his “clear skies” initiative (which actually relaxes the guidleines for industrial polluters) or “healthy forests” intiative (which actually allows for logging on Federal protected lands) then I expect that his “healthy marriage” initiative will result in the highest divorce rate EVER! If Bush says it, reverse it! This administration is the double-speakiest…

Beating dead horses that never were alive to begin with seems to be Justin’s preferred fetish. I’ve got all sorts of my own fetishes, but I grow weary of his. I seriously think we’d have better luck arguing with a brain-damaged ferret, people.

Ingolfson:

Isn’t there an attempt to reduce the average German work week from 38 1/2 hours to 35?

Consi - there may be such rumblings from time to time. However the fact is that by now they are more often rumblings in the OTHER direction - politicians talking about extending work hours to 40 or more. Sure, the unions don’t like it, but the unions are not all that powerful anymore anyway. And fewer and fewer people work in industries and businesses covered by such union rules.

I don’t follow this exactly, because as an engineer to be in a (likely) small- to middle-sized office, I’ll be going to work overtime a lot - without ever getting paid for it. So I don’t really care what the official work hours are. In the office where I work as an intern, the engineers work 50-60 hours a week.

Justin- so what? All of the studies you quote simply point out a correlation between poverty and broken families.

Of course the studies I posted don’t prove causation. Epidemiology is incapable of proving causation. To do that you need randomized, controlled double-blind studies.

However, a little thought the situation for children born out-of-wedlock in comparison to children born in wedlock will shed some further light:

Scenario A) This is the story of most of the girls at my wife’s inner-city middle school: they get knocked up before graduating high school and drop out without ever marrying the father. That is the end of her education, and the teenage boy that knocked her up isn’t really interested in being a father so he drops out of the picture.

Scenario B) Suppose that we could snap our fingers and all of sudden everyone in America would stay chaste outside of marriage and the divorce rate were to drop down to what it was in the mid-1950s.

Now take the same 12 year old middle-schooler I described above and her down the Scenario B) path. At some point she gets married and has children.

Are you really prepared to argue that out-of-wedlock childbirths do not play a causal role in childhood poverty? The deck is stacked against the child in scenario A) but the child in scenario B) has a pretty good chance.

I had a nice, long, and very good reply to this thread and then the Internet ate it. Dammit. I’m going to go play video games for a bit to work out my frustration.

Consigliere said

There are many good reasons for gender equality policies.  Increased fertility rates is not one of them, as evidence by the falling fertility rates of Sweden. The professor is wrong.

I think what she meant but fertility crisis is maybe the the US having too many children. The only country with a higher birth rate (population increase rate) is India. As it stands, the world is already nearing the brink of population for which it can support. I belive the problem we have is overpopulation not underpopulation.

However, I could be wrong.

Eric Paulsen said

If Bush says it, reverse it! This administration is the double-speakiest…

Indeed. Agreed.

Justin reiterated

his is the story of most of the girls at my wife’s inner-city middle school: they get knocked up before graduating high school and drop out without ever marrying the father. That is the end of her education, and the teenage boy that knocked her up isn’t really interested in being a father so he drops out of the picture.

Ok, I think I am geting to understand what you are saying now. People with low family vaues are doomed to be poor. Ha ha, Hugh Hefner, and here I was jealous of all your monies and your girls.

Besides which, my grandmother had 8 children in wedlock, and she took the family to church every Sunday… strange, that didn’t seem to make her any richer. Matter of fact, now that I think about it, I do believe my mothers family was quite poor. Must have been cause they were Irish.

Oh, and I also realize your wife working in the inner city makes you a specialist on poor kids, no need to mention it anymore.

Just a side note, my wife is a social worker, therefore I am a specialist on being social.

I had a nice, long, and very good reply to this thread and then the Internet ate it. Dammit. I’m going to go play video games for a bit to work out my frustration.

I know the feeling! I’m looking forwards to your reply. I think the two most interesting points of debate so far are these:

1. Europe and American economy as the champions for liberal vs. conservative economic policies.
2. The role of out-of-wedlock childbirths on child poverty as an example of the importance of moral values.

Les, how about we create two new threads, one for each of the debates? It may be easier to stay on topic and have a more fruitful debate that way.

It’s been fun! Thanks for a great discussion and I’m looking forwards to it continuing.

Mine was eaten too...yar.  Hopefully I got all of my points in here:

Dear Justin,
“...You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round...”

One of the first things I learned in stats was that correlation does not always imply causation.
Regarding your tiresome assertion on child development, read this:

from Savage Inequalities - New York by Jonathan Kozol

Average expenditures per pupil in the city of New York in 1987 were some $5,500. In the highest spending suburbs of New York (Great Neck or Manhasset, for example, on Long Island) funding levels rose above $11,000, with the highest districts in the state at $15,000. “Why . . . ,” asks the city’s Board of Education, “should our students receive less” than do “similar students” who live elsewhere? “The inequity is clear.”
...
Sometimes a school principal, whatever his background or his politics, looks into the faces of the children in his school and offers a disarming statement that cuts through official ambiguity. “These are the kids most in need,” says Edward Flanery, the principal of one of the low-income schools, “and they get the worst teachers.” For children of diverse needs in his overcrowded rooms, he says, “you need an outstanding teacher. And what do you get? You get the worst.”

*****

It is not only at the grade-school level that inequities like these are seen in New York City. Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, “does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.” Blackboards at the school, according to the New York Times, are “so badly cracked that teachers are afraid to let students write on them for fear they’ll cut themselves. Some mornings, fallen chips of paint cover classrooms like snow. . . Teachers and students have come to see humor in the waterfall that courses down six flights of stairs after a heavy rain.”
...
A “landscape of hopelessness"-"burnt-out apartments, boarded windows, vacant lot upon garbage-strewn vacant lot"-surrounds the school. Statistics tell us, says the Times, that the South Bronx is “the poorest congressional district in the United States.” But statistics cannot tell us “what it means to a child to leave his often hellish home and go to a school -his hope for a transcendent future-that is literally falling apart.”

*****

Victor Acosta and eight other boys and girls meet with me in the freshman counselors’ office. They talk about “the table of brotherhood"-the words of Dr. King that we have heard recited by the theater class upstairs.
“We are not yet seated at that table,” Victor says.
“The table is set but no one’s in the chairs,” says a black student who, I later learn, is named Carissa.
Alexander, a 16-year-old student who was brought here by his parents from Jamaica just a year ago, says this: “You can understand things better when you go among the wealthy. You look around you at their school, although it’s impolite to do that, and you take a deep breath at the sight of all those beautiful surroundings. Then you come back home and see that these are things you do not have. You think of the difference. Not at first. It takes a while to settle in.”
I ask him why these differences exist.
“Let me answer that,” says Israel, a small, wiry Puerto Rican boy. “If you threw us all into some different place, some ugly land, and put white children in this building in our place, this school would start to shine. No question. The parents would say: ‘This building sucks. It’s ugly. Fix it up.’ They’d fix it fast-no question.
“People on the outside,” he goes on, “may think that we don’t know what it is like for other students, but we visit other schools and we have eyes and we have brains. You cannot hide the differences. You see it and compare....
“Most of the students in this school won’t go to college. Many of them will join the military. If there’s a war, we have to fight. Why should I go to war and fight for opportunities I can’t enjoy-for things rich people value, for their freedom, but I do not have that freedom and I can’t go to their schools?”
“You tell your friends, ‘I go to Morris High,’” Carissa says. “They make a face. How does that make you feel?” She points to the floor beside the water barrel. “I found wild mushrooms growing in that corner.” “Big fat ugly things with hairs,” says Victor.
Alexander then begins an explanation of the way that inequality becomes ensconced. “See,” he says, “the parents of rich children have the money to get into better schools. Then, after a while, they begin to say, ‘Well, I have this. Why not keep it for my children?’ In other words, it locks them into the idea of always having something more. After that, these things-the extra things they have-are seen like an inheritance. They feel it’s theirs and they don’t understand why we should question it.
“See, that’s where the trouble starts. They get used to what they have. They think it’s theirs by rights because they had it from the start. So it leaves those children with a legacy of greed. I don’t think most people understand this.”
One of the counselors, who sits nearby, looks at me and then at Alexander. Later he says, “It’s quite remarkable how much these children see. You wouldn’t know it from their academic work. Most of them write poorly. There is a tremendous gulf between their skills and capabilities. This gulf, this dissonance, is frightening. I mean, it says so much about the squandering of human worth....”

I could go on…

more by Jonathan Kozol
who was, btw, a teacher in an inner-city school.  He has worked as a child advocate for the past 35 years.  I had the opportunity to hear him speak and he really had some amazing things to say.

Are you in favor of the no-fault divorce laws?

Just what changes do you want to make to those laws?
I’m in favor of any law that says, “You need to flip that bastard the bird and get the hell out, then you go girl!”

The healthy marriage initiative is basically a program where people say, “we like marriage.” Then they can feel better about themselves for not actually doing anything to help children.  The wording has the potential to develop into a basis for granny police, like in China, but I think about all it will do is spawn posters of happy, married people in churches and on the sides of busses. We already have planned parenthood, marriage counselors, and home ec/financial planning classes, like those proposed by the ‘initiative’.

Scenario B) Suppose that we could snap our fingers and all of sudden everyone in America would stay chaste outside of marriage and the divorce rate were to drop down to what it was in the mid-1950s.

Right.  a. even if we could establish abstinence and lifelong marriage, it doesn’t mean people would be happy. b. yeah, you’re an idealist.  I don’t have a lot of patience for that.  Why don’t you give us a plan rather than repeating, “Wouldn’t it be nice if...”

Wouldn’t it be nice if the sky suddenly rained chocolate down on me RIGHT NOW?
Wouldn’t it be nice if the world worked the way I want it to?
Wouldn’t it be nice if hot men came into the office and began to massage me?

Holy fing a, it’s raining men, hallelujah!

I had a nice, long, and very good reply to this thread and then the Internet ate it.

Happens to me all the time, darn it.  If I’m writing a really involved post or reply, I’ve taken to writing it in Win32pad and then pasting it in.  That way if it gets eaten, no loss.

‘Cept tonight I’m using Gedit ‘cuz I’m at a hotel and somehow with the hotel DSL it seemed like a Linux occasion.

Holy fing a, it’s raining men, hallelujah!

Now that was funny! 

Given you post, you are support vouchers right?

Regards,

Are you really prepared to argue that out-of-wedlock childbirths do not play a causal role in childhood poverty?

Justin, are you really prepared to argue that poverty does not play a causal role in out-of-stable-family childbirths?  Kids who grow up in poverty are more likely to have children before they are able to care for them.  The girls in my high school who had kids- and there were a fair number of them- were, without exception, from poor families.

So which way does the arrow of causality point?  Obviously, both ways- poverty breeds broken families breed poverty.  Equally obviously, the cycle of poverty is complicated, and must be fought at many levels- education, job opportunities, health care, community projects…

Scenario B) Suppose that we could snap our fingers and all of sudden everyone in America would stay chaste outside of marriage and the divorce rate were to drop down to what it was in the mid-1950s.

Shana answered this one for me, except that for her “hot men coming into the office” I would substitute “hot women coming into the workshop”.  I will simply add that your proposed solution, making divorce laws stricter, is a “snapping your fingers” solution: an attempt to deal with a complex problem by finding the sinful juncture, and forbidding the sin.  Even God hasn’t made much headway with this approach, and I find it unlikely that Congress will do any better.