The two-incomes-is-better-than-one thing only works if two income households - across income strata - have a clear history of raising "healthier" or "more successful" kids on the basis of those dual incomes… and, until the fairly recent present, among higher income folks, dual incomes is exactly what's been correlated with divorce since women who could make their own money are no longer tied to dependency on a jackass-but-breadwinning man. Until the late-70s - when it became clear that higher income dual income marriages were the most stable variety, dual incomes tended to be associated with lower income strata where the wives' income was necessary to the family but insufficient to provide for a household with children on their own and therefore largely furthered earlier eras of gender dependency and thus skewing divorce statistics.
What's FAR more important than Sawhill's point is that dual earner middle-and-above-middle income men and women are delaying marriage and childbearing often into their thirties and the evidence there is clear that later first marriages between relatively more equal partners are those which both provide the most money for kids and the most family stability. Last, we know from the last twenty years of educational research that girls' and women's educational (and, increasingly, professional) attainment - most especially among the lower 50% of families by income - has outstripped boys' and men's attainment and that this has produced a situation where the reasons for childbearing outside of marriage are often wholly different than the racist/masculinist idiocy of Dan Quayle… a racist/masculinist idiocy clearly embedded in Sawhill's editorial/commentary. Add to this the decline in manual, service and industrial men's hourly wages and I don't see how marriage has the power to do what Sawhill implies because - as we all agree - of Doug's point.
A (apologies for top-posting)
-- Alan P. Rudy Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
On Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Max Sawicky wrote:
> Did you read the article? A number of points you raise
> were dealt with. I haven't looked at the underlying research,
> which could be junk.
>
> For instance, it deals with the unmarried cohabiting persons
> comparison. The high divorce rate is irrelevant in light of
> the previous point. Married couples may not stay together,
> but they stay together more than unmarried, which is the
> claim. The stagnation of incomes strengthens Sawhill's
> argument -- two adults are better than one, income-wise.
>
> That said, I'm sympathetic most to Doug's point, that
> births to unmarried women and the break-up of couples
> (married or otherwise) are more consequences than causes. Based purely on
> my own folk wisdom; not sure about the evidence pro or con.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 9:24 AM, Alan P. Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com (mailto:alan.rudy at gmail.com)> wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 8:36 AM, Ismail Lagardien wrote:
> > > Twenty Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown
> >
> > and Unmarried Moms
> > >
> > > On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up,
> > Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to
> > define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the
> > Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown—the fictional
> > 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS
> > sitcom—for her decision to have a child outside of marriage.
> > >
> > > “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said.
> > “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be
> > unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has
> > Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent,
> > highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by
> > bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
> > >
> >
> > http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/05/25-unmarried-mothers-sawhill
> > >
> > > Ismail Lagardien
> >
> > To hell with this, the horse it rode in on and the burr-encrusted saddle
> > strapped to the poor animal. Understanding that this is from a "liberal"
> > institution reposting crap from the Washington Post, this piece collapses
> > unmarried childbearing with irresponsibility, it nods to and then denies
> > the prospect of unmarried cohabiting biological parents (much less
> > unmarried non-cohabiting parents the both provide support for children), it
> > completely ignores the >50% divorce rate, it is wholly silent on the death
> > of the family wage and the end of the forty hour work week much less the
> > reduced meaning of education/debt for career prospects, it refuses to
> > differentiate the "consequences" along income lines, it refuses to engage
> > in any way with changes in social services and public resources and it
> > completely separates the issue of parenting from every other social
> > trajectory in the United States. And that's just without thinking much
> > about this at all… why am I sure that Stephanie Coontz would rip Isabel
> > Sawhill a new one?!
> >
> > --
> > Alan P. Rudy
> > Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
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> >
>
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