This, essentially. With the added observation that bad economic opportunities impact dysfunctional families more than stable ones. “When the upper class sneezes, the lower class gets pneumonia”. Broken and never-formed families tend to be poor and have less resources. And divorce and single parenting (mostly mothers) correlate with pretty much every social pathology known to man.
Regards,
Shodan
I have never seen any evidence that politicians aren’t bribed, particularly with campaign contributions.
I have never seen any evidence that campaign funds don’t win elections. (The occasional and quite rare event in which a particularly odd politician gets defeated by his own foot in his mouth despite outspending his opponent is hardly evidence that, as a general rule, money fails to buy elections.)
I have seen no evidence that politicians consistently vote in their constituents’ interests against major lobbying efforts. (Voting the way the polls run simply show that the polls are worded to get the results the pols (and their lobbyist backers), would like to see them. For example, the 1992 Republican Contract on America had a huge backing in the polls. Yet, when the 1993 Congress convened and began to dismatle laws to preserve the environment–following their carefully crafted polls, it was polls commisioned by environmental groups that got them to pull back their horns and not go ahead to repeal clean water acts and similar laws.)
Looking over any number of laws intended to secure the propserity of small farmers and small businesses, one discovers that a huge number, perhaps a majority, have been “tweaked” to harm the smaller interests in favor of the large corporations.
We can all make bold assertions about what “the other guy” is doing, but the notion that big money fails to buy political success does not stand up to much scrutiny.
Some of these arguments are VERY reminiscent of why we put in prohibition. Men would be home with their families, putting in a full days labor - not drinking in the pubs. Fewer crimes would be committed without the influence of evil alcohol. Plus all the other sins and vices that alcohol contributes to.
Granted prohibition did go hand in hand with economic prosperity of the 1920s, I think one instance of correlation should get us a nice R-squared value and prove causation…
Just one datapoint to show you are wrong = This pdf report shows (Figures 1 and 2) the lifespan of cars, and shows that it is far higher in 1980 than it was in the golden era of the 1950s. I can’t find data for now, but I believe that better quality has made it higher still. In the 1950s it was very common to buy a car every two years, today it is quite rare, and another cite I found says that people expect to keep their cars at least ten years.
There was no cable back then, so people had to go to the movies. And TVs were far more expensive than today. Long distance calling was a rare and expensive treat. When is the last time you even thought about how far away someone was you were calling? Plain old phone service was pretty expensive also, considering you had to rent your phones.
When complaining about big houses, you neglect the number of people who buy condos and much smaller houses than the average house I grew up in was. Houses had gotten smaller during the post WW II housing boom. My wife grew up in a house from the 1880s which was much bigger than the 1951 vintage house I grew up in, and was targeted to the same economic class.
If you knew anything about economics, you’d realize that basically excluding half the potential working population from employment is inefficient - and especially because much of that excluded population turned out to be smarter and better workers than the traditional employment force. We do have the sad situation where many women must work out of necessity, but you can’t blame womens rights or the desire to own a cellphone for that.
And I must point out that the men the right seems to hate at the worst screw one person at a time. The bankers screwed millions all at once.
Well, those are the ones that social conservatives ALWAYS bring up. They don’t talk about making the workplace family-friendly or increasing wages so that families don’t feel pressured to have dual-incomes. They don’t offer creative ways, non-intrusive ways of incentivizing marriage. The “values” I always hear about revolve around sexuality and reproductive stuff, censorship, putting religion in places where it is not needed, and the nebulous “welfare” state and how it is the downfall of our society.
If social conservatives actually talked about things that directly impact the health of families, rather than acting like they are the only ones who have moral code, they actually may not come across as dicks.
We are in an economic crisis. This is all we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of years.
Even if every under-aged vagina was closed shut…even if every fetus was forced to be born (that wouldn’t be a drain on the economy, no way)…even if divorce was made illegal and unhappy people were joined at the hip forever and forever…even if all the criminals confessed their sins and found Jesus…we’d still be in an economic mess. Because these folks were not the ones who started two expensive wars. They did not create credit default swaps or balloon mortgages, nor did they turn a blind eye to them when they had the power to do something. These folks are not the ones sitting on billions of dollars but pleading for government assistance, while handing out bonus checks to executives and laying off their disposables. These folks are not smoking cigars and looking at the view from the penthouse suites, wondering just what the hell people are talking about with all this “recession” talk.
The problems of poverty DO need to be addressed. But you don’t go after the symptoms. You go after the cause.
So the problem is over-consumerism and rampant capitalism? Well, on this I actually agree! We do buy too much stuff. The American Dream has morphed into an American Delusion. We’re fat physically and psychologically.
Too bad you don’t hear conservatives ever talking about the downsides of capitalism and the free market. I guess it’s like how Christians never blame God for the wrong in the world, but praise him when things are going right. If you do that, you’re blaspheming. If you ever depart from the “capitalism is GOOD!” mantra, you’re a communist.
I submit to you that families were pretty screwed up when Mother worked in the home. You still had heaps of pregnant teens, bratty youth, domestic violence, HORRIFIC poverty, and everything else we have now. Plus, you had tons of unhappy women. The fact that things were economically better for Americans fifty years ago had nothing to do with women staying at home and everything to do with the lowly positions of other economies with respect to us. If you strain just a little, you’ll remember that prior to WWII, Americans were standing in mile-long breadlines with a 25% unemployment rate. Was the Great Depression the result of the lack of “family values” too?
Why do social conservatives think the focus should be on fixing the nuclear family? As if the breakdown of the family is the source of the country’s problems? If the family is in crisis, why aren’t conservatives advocating measures that would incentivize stay-at-home parenting? Or protecting social welfare problems–like WIC, Medicaid, and food stamps–that keep families from totally disintegrating during hard times? How about we do something about mandatory drug sentencing laws? Why are people given a mandatory five years for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine, first-time offense, but you can steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax-payer money and only have to put in four? You wanna talk about what’s breaking families? The prison industrial complex. Think about how many daddies are being thrown away forever, just so some good ole boy who runs the prison can write a nice check to their local congressman come campaign season
I don’t hear social conservatives talking about how to help these men re-enter society and become productive members of society. I hear heaps about executing them or how we’re going to build even more prisons (and create jobs!) to put away even more of them. But I don’t hear them talking about how to stop the flow, beyond moralizing from the pulpit. Which is easy to do.
I guess doing anything more means you’re a “community activist.” Which is the same thing as being a communist.
I don’t want to come across as too snarky because you have never–as far as I remember–have shown yourself to be deserving of snark. But really? You mean I have to actually say “our current economic crisis” to draw your attention away from the very non-earth-shattering realization that the choices we make in life can affect our pocket books?
Sure, unwed teenaged mothers represent a drain on our economy. But not a huge one. Not one that is worth talking about in our current climate. That is my point. Promiscuity is not why people are unemployed right now. Nor is gayness or imaginary wars against Christians.
I found this article from the American Thinker:
I’d guess you’d need to look at proportionate figures for overall income on areas of spending. Assuredly, we have things like mobile phones, the internet, and so on that in terms of “communication costs” (though there’s obvious overlap, into work most obviously) that didn’t factor into our communication costs 50 years ago. But I wonder what’s the difference in average spending on such things in each area with the disparity in incomes taken into account? Compared to 1950’s Me, if I go out and buy myself a car, which will certainly have many more advances than 1950’s Me will be able to choose from, to what extent would I be spending out of my income as compared to him, with other variables like lifetime of use such as you bring up taken into account?
I mean, SA treats the matter as though advances necessarily mean a greater spend, but things like fridge-freezers or microwaves, while appearing to be a greater spend due to the one-time cost, are actually over time very cost-effective purchases.
I really have no idea, but I am going to make some conjectures about the relationships.
My claims are really conjectures. Do not take them as absolutely true:
[ul]
[li]Legalizing abortion clinics creates jobs and allows conducting abortions safer.[/li][li]Legalizing gay marriage creates jobs, because gay people would be happier in society and thus will be willing to work for any kind of employer. (Yeah, gay employees can return home to their hubbies and wives.)[/li][li]Allowing prayer in public schools can help children give thanks to their god(s), boost their morale in school, and ensure better performance.[/li][/ul]
It’s a wild guess. Again, please don’t treat my conjectures as absolute fact.
I think that you misinterpret the argument. Nobody is saying that by forcing women to stay at home or by forcing kids to recite prayers in schools that a light switch would turn on and cause a paradise on earth.
The argument stems from the idea that people as a whole and on their own accord and not through force of law must return to traditional values for the positives to happen.
Again, the argument is not: Let’s make everything, and I mean everything, EXACTLY like it was in 1957. The argument is that traditional moral values help society as a whole.
I definitely won’t try to put the working women genie back in the bottle, and I understand the need for fulfillment, but I remember growing up and getting off of the school bus and having Mom there to make a sandwich and make whatever bad things happened during the day a little bit better. And if I was sick, I knew that she would take care of me.
When Dad got home, he could offer advice on growing up to be a man and telling me to stand up for myself if someone at school was picking on me.
Looking back, I can’t imagine if I came home from school to an empty house or to a babysitter and had Dad and Mrs. Dad (the working Mom) both playing the same role, or even worse a divorced family with Dad every other weekend. That security of the nuclear family was absolutely critical for my comfort level as a child.
Now multiply that times millions. Do you think that kids would be happier, more well-adjusted, and become more productive members of society? I think they would.
As I said in my first post, I don’t agree with the argument because it relies on an understanding of things that vast swaths of the population either don’t understand and/or entirely disagree with.
No attack meant at the OP, but the very reason for this thread proves my point. A lot of people today can’t even understand why a solid family life means anything at all.
Two points:
Communication: If you Aunt Edna lived across the country, you called her at Easter and at Christmas. You didn’t keep up on Facebook every time she had a difficult bowel movement. Costs were minimal.
Cars: Even allowing for advances in technology, the typical family had one car to maintain instead of two (and sometimes three for the 16 year old to get laid on the weekends)
(Yeah, I said two, but it’s 3) Vacations: A typical vacation was a one time a year thing that usually involved camping or staying at a lodge nearby. MAYBE a drive to the beach. No exotic Hawaii and European destinations. Those were crazy things that weren’t even in the minds of most working people..
The problem with saying that you’re only referring to the positive sides of the past, and not the negative, is that the two are tied together. That’s why they both existed, then. I’ll certainly agree that a scenario in which only the positive existed would be positive for me; that’s axiomatic. You can’t simply go back and say “Right, chuck out the racism, let’s get rid of some of the more demeaning sexism, and we’ll keep the good stuff!”, because often the positive are the negatives. As you yourself point out - having the near-guarantee of a mum at home waiting for you was nice for you, but on the flipside it’s condemning a whole gender to a life they may not want. After all, just as for you it was comforting to know that, at the end of your school day, your mom would be there for you, i’ve heard people talk about how terrified it made them that here they were staring at their inevitable, unavoidable future roles. What, for you, was a comforting cradle from the world, might well be (in the same basic situation) very unpleasant.
Posit a perfect family and of course you’ll get well-adjusted kids. But there’s no one formula for a perfect family, and traditional values are one formula, usually poorly adjusted for time.
For a start, if you’re only interested in the past in calling her so rarely, then you’re not interested in the present to check up on her so often. That seems rather a stretched example.
But that said, alright. What are the proportionate costs by income for these things?
Again, “and somtimes three” seems a little bit like a rhetorical point to add to your argument. It seems a little unreasonable. Anyway, again, costs?
Right. So, costs?
You seem to be starting from the position that, obviously, self-evidently, these advances brought with them lesser per-income costs. And that (seemingly) they’re also present to a greater extent than in the past (i.e. that having a phone was widespread to a similar extent that having an internet-connected computer is widespread today) What’s your evidence?
Is traditional moral values something it is concrete? I’m a concrete thinker (for the most part), so examples are helpful for me.
Like, when I think of the traditional family that our society has embedded in its folklore, I think of a mother and father, some kids, maybe a dog or cat. Living in a house, with a car and a front yard. Everyone eats meals together. Boys play catch with Dad. Girls help Mommy make fudge. Everyone goes to church on Sunday, and afterwards there’s dinner and a nice cruise around town in the family car. Kids are happy and well-adjusted and mannerly. The mother is nurturing and a good wife, and if she makes money, she does it when the kids are at school. Dad makes the bulk of the money and is the head of the household, issuing discipline when needed and having the final word in all decisions that affect the family.
Everyone is happy.
My questions:
Is this what social conservatives have in mind when they think of the “traditional” family?
Even if we accept that this the ideal, why do social conservatives think it is their job, in the political arena, to create it? We fall short of so many other ideals and yet we learn to make do with what’s realistic and keep on going. For instance, we still have racism and sexism in this society. We have done a good job of ensuring that the institutions (laws) we have in place are on the up-and-up, and that people have a legal process they can use when they have been wronged. But even I, militant monstro, would cringe if the government tried to do anything more than this. Because people are entitled to free will and a free mind. It shouldn’t be the government’s role to legislate non-racist thoughts and behaviors. Likewise, I don’t think it’s the government’s role to legislate how a family should be structured. It should provide a legal environment that allows families to develop as optimally as they can be, but doing anything more is excessive.
What concrete actions do social conservatives want the government to implement to encourage the growth of “traditional” families that do not deny people their civil rights? I’m having a hard time imagining how this can happen. I can have a child and do whatever I want with that child, as long as I’m not hurting or neglecting it. Do social conservatives want to force me to get married? Will they take away my child for not being married or for being too poor to feed it without government assistance? Will they force me to teach certain values (Believe in God, I said, or you’ll get a spanking! And no dessert!) Will I get in trouble if we don’t go to church? If the answer to these questions is “no”, then I don’t know what the plan is. Because the only way to make that Leave It To Beaver picture become the norm is to force people to change their behaviors in unsettling ways
Why do social conservatives think the “traditional” family is the best way? Like, if we swapped the stay-at-home mother with a stay-at-home dad, would it still be a “traditional” family? If the two parents were of the same gender, why is that bad? You’d still have love there for the kids, right? Morals being passed down and all that jazz. Right?
As long as someone is providing a nurturing environment for the kids, it’s all good IMHO. Parents are important–I’m not denying that, nor the value of having two parents–but even conservatives have to agree that having a parent greet the kid when they hop off the schoolbus is less important than making sure the kids are cared, period. So the solution to the problem of unsupervised, neglected kids isn’t making people get married or forcing one parent to stay at home–which is akin to forcing people to stop thinking racist thoughts. It’s providing child-care assistance. Afterschool programs, Boys and Girls clubs, community centers. Or doing something totally out of the box, like giving major tax breaks to businesses that provide child-care for their employees.
Well, I was a latch-key kid. My mother was a workaholic; my father did a lot of the custodial work around the house. In my memory, I spent lots of time by myself and there wasn’t always someone around to clean my boo-boos or bake cookies. I’m not a perfect adult and I do have my personal weaknesses, but neither I or my siblings became morally deficient simply because my mother wasn’t at home.
Do I think the Leave it To Beaver family is the ideal? No. I think it’s one ideal, a very nice one, but not the only workable plan. And I don’t think wishing and hoping that the ideal would become widespread is what we should be doing. I think we should work with what we have and try to make that better.
I do see the value of a solid family. It’s just that I see the discussion about how good it is being rather irrelevant to fixing the economy.
I appreciate what you have had to say, by the way.
But you don’t really know that , do you? Because you never experienced anything else. You didn’t come home to a babysitter or to grandma or an aunt or to your mother’s best friend from high school who may as well have been your aunt. You didn’t live in an extended family where grandpa lived in the same house, your uncle lived next door and half the kids in your neighborhood were cousins of one sort or another. And of course, a divorced family doesn’t have to mean dad every other weekend- I know divorced fathers who spend more time actually interacting with their children than other fathers who live with their children.
I mean, I think I came out fine (and so did my kids) but I wouldn’t presume to imagine that people who only spoke to Aunt Edna twice a year were in a horrible situation, just because my kids and I grew up in a very different situation and saw grandparents, aunts ,uncles and cousins on a daily basis.
I don’t think anyone doesn’t understand why a solid family life means anything (although I think solid many of us may define solid family life differently than you do ). What I don’t understand is how me being a stay-at-home mom makes the economy better. Does some unemployed man get my job, and that’s the improvement? Does my husband suddenly make twice as much to make up for the loss of my income? If not, how will the companies that provide goods and services continue to employ workers when sales go down because the suddenly one-income families can no longer afford the goods and services? Let’s go to the typical one car you mentioned earlier. If it’s typical for families to have one car rather than two or three, that’s fewer jobs selling cars, repairing cars, washing cars, at the DMV registering cars, selling and servicing car insurance etc. What jobs will be created to replace those? Same thing with vacations - okay, we go back to a time when a family took one vacation a year , not too far away. How do we replace the jobs which are lost at the resorts when people take short , inexpensive trips once a year ? Sure , some of these jobs will be vacated by the women who return home, but not all of them.
You can’t change just one piece of the puzzle without affecting the rest of it. You can’t practically guarantee that there will be a stay-at-home mother without also taking a way a mother’s ability to make a choice. You can’t make it socially unacceptable for a mother to work without also causing additional problems for the women/children in situations where a mother must work (widowed, divorced, abandoned by the father or with an unemployed father). You can’t change from an economy in which many people can afford (perhaps due to a second income) to live better than a '50s family without also losing the jobs that only exist because of the higher standard of living.
Not to mention, there are whole industries that are dominated by women. Like nursing and teaching. Does our society have enough dudes to fill every niche out there?
Also, back in the day, we didn’t have quite so many people as we do now. And we didn’t have as many healthcare options. Or as many expectations for our schools and the kids they mold.
One reason that many women–middle-class women, mostly, since working-class and poor women have ALWAYS worked outside of the home–used to go the stay-at-home route was because less was expected out of them intellectually. Nowadays, boys and girls are expected to do well in school and go on to college. You can’t put a girl through college and then not expect her to have a career afterwards.
And if society suddenly removes this expectation and pressures women to work in the home, then Social Security needs to be revamped so that stay-at-home mothers can collect a pension. And also make sure she has access to healthcare so that her corn-fed babies will have a dependable care-giver.
These are the types of considerations that moralists need to consider when beating the rest of us over the head with their rhetoric.
I think that a few of these ‘family values’ proponents here have proven just how nonsensical their argument is, in regards to the OP.
I have yet to hear one scrap of evidence that removing almost 50% of the american workforce will do anything to help the overall economic picture, besides overcorrecting unemployment with a cudgel. Others have already asked how men will fill the vacancies in the variety of fields emptied by women and I don’t see how the associated rising cost of labor would benefit anyone except single men. Are these ‘family values’ economists arguing that we should start importing some nice nuclear mexican families to help us out?
The idea that this consumism-driven lifestyle is hurting our economy (via 2-income families) is pretty much the most backwards way of thinking I’ve ever heard come from right-wing proponents. Essentially the arguement is that we would be stronger economically if we had a GDP closer to what it was in the 1950’s? Huh? How on earth can you argue we would be better off economically if we only had one car per family, a computer was just something dad had in the office at work and Apple was just something that grew on a tree and you baked in a pie?
All the while they are bitching about gay marriage ruining the family structure, plain old straight people are getting divorced faster than they get married, but I haven’t heard one ‘family values’ proponent argue that divorce should be outlawed, let alone that everyone should be entitled to healthcare so parents aren’t working multiple jobs just to ensure they don’t lose their home over an unexpected illness or injury.
The idyllic nuclear family “Leave it to Beaver” lifestyle was really only idyllic to white men (and women who wanted to play the carreerless stay-at-home mom role) so it’s no surprise that the few proponents for it are white men, with one slightly crazy mother as well.
As is typical when arguing for something that never really existed and isn’t likely to return, it’s best to overlook the ‘failings’ of the majority, which likely consititute the majority of your supporters and focus on the imminent and dire threat perpetrated by a tiny number of outcast ‘others’, who threaten your way of life by having the audacity to disagree with you and ignoring your invented ‘facts’ in an attempt to live their own lives in peace and happiness.
I am still trying to understand this one, because, as I remember… a neighborhood I lived in for many years, started out with lots of us poor people. It was an economically depressed place, with run down dwellings, condemed buildings that housed some homeless, and just a few small markets to shop in. People avoided the area, crime rates were high, and people who owned houses there were more concerned with putting bars on their windows than mowing the lawn.
Lo and behold…gay couples started buying homes there, much to our surprise, and the improvements they made raised property values. More gay couples moved in, and the neighborhood came to life, with coffee shops, cafes, antique stores, health food stores…etc.
The ecomomy in the area did not change over nite, and I can’t say for sure if it was the gay people who made it change. But to this day, the old timers say it was the gay couples who brought the neighborhood out of a blight.
That particular neighborhood is now referred to as the gay mecca for the city that it is in, and hosts all the gay pride parades and lots of high end gay owned business florish there.
This experience might speak to how gay marriage might contribute to the ecomomy. And as far as family goes…adoption is their most likely option, which could also help with family values, and giving homes to the unwanted children of women who were guilt tripped out of having the abortions they wanted- so put their babies up for adoption.
Since when was female unemployment part of ‘family values’? Apart from the upper classes, women have always worked when they could, just like men. They just didn’t have the same jobs that men did. Maids, housekeepers, alewives, nurses, fishwives, brewsters, washerwomen, etc. And even then, when the man was off at work, it was the woman who ran the household - a major job in those days.
The SAHM may be an ideal - after all, it means that the mother can devote more time to her children - but a brief look at history will disabuse you of the notion that it’s anything other than an ideal.
I completely agree with you historically, I realize there was never a time when women were nothing but SAHM’s. But Starving Artist made the argument that latchkey kids are lucky if they can manage to stay out of prison, and jtgain argued life would have been miserable without fresh cookies and a shoulder to cry on every day when they returned from school. So at least some of the ‘family values’ proponents are arguing that SAH moms are part of the package, it would appear.
50% of the workforce may have been (slight) hyperbole, but to me it seems like a large number of the workforce consists of women with children in the home.
It still doesn’t explain any relationship between family values and economic health, unless you can truly prove how much better children are when raised in these ideal settings versus reality.
Fair enough, but I do see their point. But from the Family Values POV it doesn’t have to be the mother that stays at home, but that there is Someone At Home. It could be a (great-)grandparent or babysitter or neighbour. From their POV the aim is a contented family unit.