Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Conventional wisdom is that the decline in men’s labor force participation and the weakening of marriage as an institution are linked, but only in one direction. The standard narrative is that as men have (for whatever reason) worked less, marriage has been weakened because men are no longer filling the role of breadwinner. There is certainly some logic here, and this must be a least part of the explanation. However, in asserting that the connection works in only one direction the standard narrative requires a series of incredible assumptions.
The first assumption conventional wisdom requires is that a marriage based culture doesn’t create powerful incentives for married men to work hard and maximize their earnings. Denying the incentive marriage provides to men to work harder has left a cottage industry of sociologists and economists scratching their heads trying to figure out why marriage makes men more productive and doesn’t do the same for women. This incentive is denied despite the fact that we implicitly recognize that it is a powerful motivating force in other contexts. Every family court judge in the land knows that marriage creates strong incentives for men to work harder, which is why courts feel the need to assign income quotas (imputed income) to divorced men in order to keep them working as hard after the divorce as they did while married.
The second assumption is that the desire to marry in a marriage based culture doesn’t create an incentive for young men to work hard to signal breadwinner capability or at least breadwinner potential. To believe this, one would have to assume that young men aren’t aware that women place a high value on a man’s employment and earnings status when selecting a prospective husband. This is absurd. The reality is that sex is a powerful motivator for men (young and old); just ask any marketer.
The third assumption is that feminism and the sexual revolution never happened, or at least that they didn’t fundamentally change marriage patterns. Under this assumption, the only reason women are delaying or forgoing marriage is because women simply can’t find men with jobs. Yet we know this isn’t true. Feminists have completed a long and wildly successful march through all of our institutions, and young women are quite open about their plans to maximize their period of casual sex and only marry once they start to see their window of fertility close. The reality is that women are delaying marriage not because marriagable men are scarce, but because they perceive them as so abundant they don’t feel the need to hurry and lock one down.
:
No matter how you view it, we are paying a huge price for our decision to move from a marriage based family structure to a child support family model. Moreover, this price is going to continue to increase as the inertia left over from the former model fades away.
By way of Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.
From the earlier post linked above:
Through a combination of legal and social “reforms”, the US now has what appears on the surface to be a dual family structure but is in legal reality a single family structure organized around the concept of child support. Where in the past a woman needed to secure a formal promise from a man in the form of marriage before she could expect him to support her and the children she bore, in this new structure the law declares that any man she has children by are bound to support her and her children whether she marries or not, and whether or not she honors her own marriage vows.
While men were motivated under the old family structure, they absolutely detest the new child support system of family formation. Under the old system a man who married before fathering children could reasonably expect access to his children and the opportunity to direct their upbringing (in concert with his wife). Under the new system the children are de facto considered the property of the mother, whom the state compels him to pay so she can direct their upbringing generally as she sees fit. Since the new system has removed the incentive for men to work hard to provide for their families, it has to rely instead on threats of imprisonment to coerce men into earning “enough” income. Where men used to take pride in the birth of their children and celebrate with cigars, large numbers of men now fear fatherhood more than anything.
Progressives have done the same thing with fatherhood that they’ve done with charity: Taken the spirit out of it, made it into a system of obligatory payments to some agent that may or may not have the trust of the person making the payments; but, they’re obligatory so what does it matter.
In both cases, it matters because if the sense of trust is no longer there, there may very well be a reason. Are our nation’s taxes really in concert with the goals of someone who wants to help the poor? Is child support really in concert with the goals of a father who wants to be a good one? The people pushing the hardest for higher taxes and more child support, don’t know, and don’t care to learn; but, they still get to brag about helping the poor, and the children, by obligating someone else’s money.
The problem is in there, somewhere, I think. We’ve allowed our entire culture to be reformed by people who really don’t give a fig about what it takes to make it strong, and keep going.
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