Ross Douthat also responded to my response to various promotional articles about Melissa Carney's new book. Mr. Douthat's response is generally OK, but in addition to clarifying my point, he would like to respond to part of Mr. Douthat's article here. Because he's saying something that's been bothering me for a while and that I've been avoiding responding to just because. Most people will probably find my response very aggressive and overly personal. I have no choice.
If you haven't read this far, Carney's new book bravely argues that having two parents in the home is good for children.
I responded to this argument by rehashing what I think is the general view on the issue. This means that living together with parents can be good or bad depending on the characteristics of each parent and how they get along. Based on this view, a relevant study is how many of the 22 percent of children who live in single-parent families actually fare better. their particular parents lived together.
This is a different study than the one Carney and colleagues are working on, as it does not control for the quality of the underlying relationships and assumes that missing parents have average characteristics both in the labor market and at home. They like to create meaningless statistics that make assumptions.
My point here is sometimes oversimplified as a question of whether men cannot marry, but Douthat addresses some of that simplification. But in reality, for the 22 percent of children who don't currently live together, he says, there are four reasons why living with a parent may be negative or impossible.
- One of your parents may be deceased, in prison, or live in a remote location for work reasons. This won't be most people, but it will probably cut a few percentage points out of the total.
- Dad may be a bad person.
- Mom may be a bad woman.
- Mom and dad may be okay, but they shouldn't mix well.
Although some of this text tends to focus on fathers, this is probably because it is common for mothers to raise children, so the question is not just a question about whether to add fathers to the family. It seems like there is. However, this is incorrect. The mother's behavior can be just as problematic for cohabitation as the father's behavior.
Another point worth clarifying here is that non-cohabitation is not the same as abandonment. In some of these cases, the mother and father are both active participants in the child's life, even if they do not live together, and this is usually referred to as “co-parenting.” In fact, if anyone were willing to actually study this, they would find that some non-cohabiting parents spend more time with their children than many cohabiting parents. I say this not to support the idea of non-cohabitation, but rather that the relevant research would require looking at the specific circumstances of these 22 percent of children, which Carney did. I just want to emphasize again that it's not.
In his text, Douthat also writes:
From a left-wing perspective, the importance of marriage and marital childbearing is difficult to ignore precisely because the upper and upper middle classes continue to have higher rates of marriage, postponing childbearing until marriage, and lower rates of marriage than other social classes. The fact is that the frequency of divorce is low. This is because the usual left-wing assumption is that if the wealthy follow certain practices so consistently, their choices must somehow serve class interests.
Why upper-class people often send their children to private schools, hire private tutors, pressure their children to attend elite universities, and try to protect their family's wealth from the taxman. Of course, because of the reproduction of privilege.
Before I get into it, I'd like to add a little detail here: I have to point out that the majority of upper-class people don't send their children to private schools from kindergarten through high school. yeah. It is a Northeastern oddity driven primarily by destructive intra-class status-seeking and paranoia.
Regarding Douthat's marriage issue here, he makes a mistake that almost everyone in this discussion makes, and it's driving me nuts over time. The mistake is to say that upper class people are married as opposed to lower class people.The reason this is wrong is that upper class people don't marry a lower class person.
Following D'Souza's recommendation to look at the behavior of upper-class people to determine what kinds of behaviors reinforce privilege, we find that marrying an upper-class spouse reinforces privilege while , one is forced to conclude that marriage to a lower-class spouse enhances privilege. Instead, it should be avoided. That's how upper class people actually do things. right?
Another common and reasonable way to express D'Souza's argument here is that upper-class people should “preach what they practice,” and support for this phrase people seem to think that means upper-class people should tell lower-class people to get married. However, what upper class people practice is not “marriage.” It's “marriage to a member of the upper class.” right?
In fact, if you need an example of how one marriage advocate has approached marriage in her own life, she conveniently says something like this: new york times Announcement of 2001 marriage details:
Melissa Jean Schettini, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Schettini of Montville, New Jersey, was married yesterday to Daniel Patrick Carney Jr.
The bride and groom, both 27, met at Princeton University, where she graduated from and where she was a top honors student.
Mrs. Kearney is a PhD candidate. She received her PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . . . Her father owns Per Forms, a Montville company that manufactures and sells business forms. . .
Next month, Mr. Carney will become a law student at Yale University. He earned a master's degree in classical studies from Boston University.
The groom's father retired as chief investment officer of Aetna, an insurance company in Hartford. He was also President of Investments and Financial Services.
Does the result of this kind of behavior really mean that you should get married? Or “If your upper class boyfriend gets a letter from Yale Law School, go ahead and lock it up”?
Is it offensive to write this? I collected it by researching society. But why is it offensive? Is it because it's uncomfortable to second-guess people's relationships? If so, what are we to make of people who write entire books doing such things?
