The “marriageable male” has steady income. He pays his bills on time and could help support a child, too. He has long captured the interest of economists, who associate him with a healthier economy.
.. Historically, bursts of prosperity among blue-collar men have reduced the share of kids born to unwed parents.
.. The commitment to childbearing with marriage in the ’70s and ’80s is just no longer there.”
.. Riley Wilson, calculated that every $1,000 per capita increase in an area’s fracking production was linked to an additional six births per 1,000 women. About half of those extra babies, she said, were born to married parents.
In other words, more money seemed to bring more kids — regardless of the parents’ marital status.
This baby boom wasn’t as shocking to Kearney as the unofficial relationships. Babies, she explained, are viewed as “normal goods” — a demand that increases when income increase
.. A 10 percent increase in earnings was tied to a 9.6 percent decrease in the share of unmarried women (ages 15 to 34) — and a whopping 25 percent reduction of children born to single moms.
.. In the United States, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried women
.. Educational differences skew the share, however: Sixty-two percent of such kids have mothers who lack a college degree.
.. In his groundbreaking book, “ The Truly Disadvantaged,” Wilson sought to explain why single motherhood was on the rise in predominately black communities and found that employed women were outnumbering employed men. That imbalance, he concluded, reduced women’s incentive to marry.
Stanley McChrystal: Save PBS. It Makes Us Safer.
Trust among Americans and for many of our institutions is at its lowest levels in generations, and stereotyping and prejudice have become substitutes for knowing and understanding one another as individuals.
.. I’ve seen articles that say PBS and its member stations are ranked first in public trust among nationally known institutions. Why then would we degrade or destroy an institution that binds us together?
We need public media that acts as our largest classroom. We need broadcasting that treats us as citizens, not simply as consumers. We need a strong civil society where the connection between different people and groups is firm and vibrant, not brittle and divided. We need to defend against weaknesses within and enemies without, using the tools of civil society and hard power. We don’t have to pick one over the other.
The Power of a Dinner Table
Bill Milliken, a veteran youth activist, is often asked which programs turn around kids’ lives. “I still haven’t seen one program change one kid’s life,” he says. “What changes people is relationships. Somebody willing to walk through the shadow of the valley of adolescence with them.”
.. The problems facing this country are deeper than the labor participation rate and ISIS. It’s a crisis of solidarity, a crisis of segmentation, spiritual degradation and intimacy.
How Children Went from Worthless to Priceless
Looking back at wrongful death cases in the United States reveals a startling fact: the financial value of a child has changed dramatically.
In 1896, for example, the parents of a two-year-old killed due to the negligence of the Southern Railroad Company of Georgia asked a judge for compensation. They argued that their child performed errands worth two dollars per month, but they received nothing beyond the cost of a burial. The judge concluded “that the child was ‘of such tender years as to be unable to have any earning capacity, and hence the defendant could not be held liable in damages.’”
Today, however, parents do not need to prove the economic value of a lost child to receive compensation. Instead they refer to their emotional pain. On this basis, a judge in a 1979 case awarded the parents of a three-year-old who died from fluoride poisoning at the dentist $750,000.
So why did the value of a child change from worthless to nearly priceless?
.. She argues that children became “sacralized” in the late 1800s and early 1900s—a process that transformed children from un-sentimentalized but economically useful little people to economically useless yet emotionally priceless treasures.
.. Middle class reformers led a movement against child labor, successfully passing legislation despite the objections of working class parents who relied on their children’s contributions to the family finances. Reducing infant mortality became a primary public health concern. Car accidents that killed children incited previously incomprehensible expressions of sorrow and outrage that manifested in public memorials.
.. The dramatic changes in how we conceive of childhood remind us that ascribing outcomes to “the market” can easily obscure how the inputs of supply and demand are coloured by changing social and cultural factors. A cost-benefit analysis of national parks will yield very different answers to a nation of couch potatoes compared to a nation of John Muir outdoorsmen.