Alien Children

In the 1974 NFL Draft, the Steelers found Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, Mike Webster, and Donnie Shell.
In NFL history, no team ever has added so many Hall of Fame players in a single draft, and the league has been staging its Annual Selection Meeting since 1936.

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Alien Children 

Jessamine Chan’s 2022 novel The School for Good Mothers (New York: Simon & Schuster) constructs a bureaucratic dystopia in which unfit parents are ordered by family courts into a re-education camp run by Child Protective Services.

The U.S. already has a legal apparatus for removing children from their parents. And forced re-education has precedent in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were forced into “Indian Boarding Schools” between the 1860s and 1960s under the presumption that the state knew what was best for them. The United States already provides resources for in-home training for people whose children might otherwise be taken away. The government is certainly not hostile to judging parents on any level. 

Birthrates are falling but good, capable children who become good, capable adults are the real point. Raising children is hard but for self-indulgent people, it may be impossible. Of course, some are simply too young, too stupid, or too distracted to be good parents and their being around children may be inherently dangerous. More, bad parents may bring bad genes to their children, perhaps the most difficult wall to climb. And children are touchy; they can be damaged early and it sticks.

Children and youth are no longer a subset of the culture, they have become part of a separate culture and parents are only one factor in their separation. Unproductive--perhaps criminal--youth menace the present and threaten the future. Not only are they dead weight and lost talent, they must be supported, perhaps forever. Replacing parents is part of the options and the Left is not averse to high-minded experiments, like the “Indian Boarding Schools,” especially when they get to be in charge.

Would they consider rebuilding an orphanage system?

Fertility and its Discontents

So if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn’t you care a lot about which ones? Why didn’t my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper’s supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn’t think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn’t even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!--Mastroionanni

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Based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.

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It is crucial to make a distinction between achievements and privileges. This is not simply a matter of semantics. Privileges come at the expense of others, but achievements add to the benefits of others.


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Fertility and its Discontents

I was reading this article on declining fertility by Hanson with notions I found surprising.

"For 250 years we’ve seen a consistent worldwide pattern of falling fertility, on track to soon fall below and then long stay below replacement level. (Innovation will then halt.) Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world. These include valuing birth control, city life, schooling, intensive parenting, “finding ourselves” before marriage, preferring careers and friends to family, and also disliking religion, arranged marriages and traditional gender roles.

Though these values seem authentic and honestly fulfilling, we must face the hard fact that they seem to be in substantial conflict with their persistence over centuries. It’s not so much that humanity might go extinct, though that is a real concern, but that the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews. Similar to how Christians came to dominate the Roman Empire. These groups reject many of the dominant world culture’s cherished values, including innovation and open debate.

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The key issue in such a reckoning is this: which of our usual cherished values that hinder fertility shall we consider compromising or at least substantially moderating in order to ensure the continuation of something like our dominant world culture? It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive. But alas we seem to need pretty big value changes, and thus a pretty big reckoning, for voters to even be willing to consider such large payments."

Populations

CNN is showing Biden polls for the first time. Why?

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So there is a debate over whether schools should inform parents of their children's gender 'choice.' What other things should employees withhold from parents?

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Does anyone believe that Biden is making national and international decisions? If 'no,' who is?

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Populations

From Twitter:
France used to be the "China of Europe"—1 in 25 people globally was French and 1 in 5 Europeans was French. Now, France is smaller than Germany and virtually identical in population to Britain Why? Thanks to some wonderful new work, we probably know the answer! 

3:38 PM · Sep 1, 2023

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636.5K

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Fundamental Principles

"Brian, I can't tell my friends my brother hunts squirrels."--Liz McCague

A lion at a North Carolina private wildlife sanctuary fatally mauled a 22-year-old worker on Sunday before being shot and killed by local law enforcement, officials said.The sheriff's office in Caswell County, North Carolina, said Alexandra Black, who started her job as an intern at the facility two weeks ago, was part of a team doing routine cleaning of an enclosure when she was attacked, local media reported.One of several lions at the sanctuary, the Conservators Center, "somehow left a locked space and entered the space the humans were in and quickly killed one person," the Center said in an emailed statement. "Alex was one of the kindest people I ever met," said a friend, Christina Sluka. "She was dedicated to conservation and animals and was doing what she loved. She cared deeply about our planet and was working for the animals and their futures. If anyone would like to honor her memory, remember the lion who also had to lose his life. I know Alex wouldn't want anyone to forget Matthai.”

Hilary has, for some reason, made a New Year speech offering some of her opinions.

Elizabeth Warren plans to run for President. Apparently the Dems want to expand the personality silliness in D.C. to the philosophical.

This is from Perry's blog, from his most popular article on why socialism always fails:

"A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives."

And speaking of pyramid schemes.....in 1957, 4.3 million babies were born in the United States. In 2017, 60 years later, the number was 3,853,472. That's an 11% decline, in a nation whose population has nearly doubled over those six decades. There are a number of factors--decline in South American immigration, lower birth rate among teenagers--but while many think those factors positive, if the base of the population pyramid narrows, who is going to pay for the Ponzi scheme of benefits at the top? Medicare and Social Security, noble ideas all, assume a growing young population base to pay for them. What happens when that population base shrinks?
If you want to worry over a crisis with a settled science foundation to it, this is it.

Trump is doing with tariffs what Obama did with redistribution: Managing complex systems from the top down. So Obama and his ilk drove for a $15 minimum wage, as if wages are set solely by an act of will rather than supply and demand. And Trump has declared American industrial success by fiat. Someone has to pay these tariffs, and it is not foreigners. Those costs add up and negatively affect profits, which triggers production slowdowns, price increases, and lower sales.
David Prychitko wrote,  “Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias.” That is, the study of Economics does not teach us how to do things, it explains the complexity of things and explains our limitations.

Using a New Deal era crop insurance program, Trump has funneled more than $9 billion to farmers who have been unable to sell their goods to China due to retaliatory tariffs raised in response to Trump’s tariffs. Soybean farmers have been particularly hard hit—the U.S. is the top global supplier of soybeans, but China has all but stopped buying American soybeans—but suppliers of cotton, dairy, and hogs have also received payments.

Intimations of China

A letter to a financial newsletter:

Jeffrey Ho writes:

I just completed a month-long, 2500-mile journey across western China. Signs of an economic boom are everywhere. While there are no Tier 1 or 2 cities in the west (only two western cities, Lanzhou and Urumqi, are considered Tier 3), even tiny cities of a million or less now sport brand new, modern train/bus stations and airports rivaling or surpassing America’s best.

A massive construction boom is evident all across the classic Silk Road. Small towns that have not seen a new building in 50 or 100 years are now being rebuilt with modern high-rise condominiums right alongside the old. What they do have in Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang Provinces is space. Xinjiang, the westernmost province, is 3-times the size of France.

Gansu, once considered an impoverished backwater area that was largely desert is now a green hinterland as modern irrigation and farming techniques have tamed the waters of the Yellow River. To put it in perspective, Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, is the geographic center of China. This means that as modern engineering and agricultural progress turn more of the desert into productive land, China is just beginning to realize their Manifest Destiny.

The ride on the high-speed train was almost boring. You couldn’t tell that you were barreling across the desert at 130mph except for the LED indicator inside the cabin. My fellow passengers were all seated in their assigned seats with no one laying in the aisles, no agricultural produce or live animals, and the only annoyance was perhaps the conductors incessantly making sure that overhead baggage were perfectly in place. If there is one sign that China has achieved their greatest aspiration to be a first world nation, this is it.

Freedom is virtually our only advantage.

Single Mothers and Poverty

"Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

The fact that the  “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants."

This is from Amy Wax, right before she realize how dangerous a position extolling the virtues of hard working serious people from the last century was.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty" in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.” By "new" they meant "old." They meant what Amy Wax was saying.

But Brady, in a NYT article, referenced his own study published  in The American Journal of Sociology, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, which demonstrates that reducing single motherhood here would not substantially reduce poverty.

"Single-mother families are a surprisingly small share of our population. Among households headed by working-age adults, 8.8 percent of people lived in single-mother households in 2013," he wrote.

It is a curious article in which the solution to poverty seems to be to give poor people money which, I suppose, would work. The problem is partly that most people think that poverty in itself is a problem but is also part of a constellation of problems for which money is only a superficial solution.

Apparently the disparity between the study by Brady and the other studies more worried about single parent families is, according to one article, "the sociologists' calculations were based on a different database of incomes and a different definition of poverty — and that these changes inflated the total number of designated poor."

So we can't even define the topic of poverty. Or single mothers.

But we sure know what "bourgeois" means.

Just for reference:

In 2016, 40.6 million Americans had incomes below the government's official poverty line, which was $24,339 for a family of four, including two children. Of those below the poverty line — 12.7% of the population — nearly 5 million were mothers or fathers heading single-parent families; another 8.7 million were children under 18 in these single-parent homes.
Together, single-parent families and their children totaled almost 14 million people, which is roughly a third of all people in poverty.

In 2010, 72% of black births were to unmarried women, up from 38% in 1970; for Hispanics, that rate was 53% in 2010, up from 37% in 1990; for whites, 36% in 2010 and 6% in 1970.

Hairraising Childraising Stats

Definitions are changing and they are having an interesting impact on how populations are evaluated.

About one-quarter of parents living with a child in America in 2018 are unmarried, up from 7% five decades ago, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released Wednesday. This trend to co-parent without getting married has also reduced the rate of single mothers, who accounted for 53% of unmarried parents last year versus 88% five decades ago, the study found. Today, 35% of all unmarried parents are living with a partner.

So unmarried mothers are not single mothers if they are living with someone.

Cohabiting parents are younger, less educated and less likely to have ever been married than single or solo parents, the report said. Single parents have fewer children on average than cohabiting parents. The share of unmarried parents who are fathers has more than doubled to 29% over the past 50 years, the report said. A larger share of solo parents than cohabiting parents live in poverty (27% versus 16%).

The share of children living in a two-parent household is at the lowest point in more than half a century, according to a separate 2014 report, “Parenting in America,” also released by the Pew Research Center. Approximately 69% of children are in two-parent households versus 73% in 2000 and 87% in 1960. And 62% of children live with two married parents — an all-time low.

Non-traditional families now also outnumber traditional two-parent families. The share of children living in one-parent households make up around 26% of all households with children, up from 22% in 2000 and 9% in 1960, and they were more likely to live in poverty. In 2014, 31% of children living in single-parent households were living below the poverty line versus 21% with two cohabiting parents and 10% with two married parents.

The number of single moms in college has soared to 2.1 million in 2012, more than double the number in 1999. Single moms account for over 11% of college students, up from 7.8% in 1999. This was more than twice the rate of growth experienced by the undergraduate student population over the same time period. Yet, due to the financial demands of running a single-parent household, they also struggle to graduate.

Middle Class Charts

Some policy activists and policymakers claim that the middle class is stagnant. But it is hard to square such claims with a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Focusing on the broad middle class, the 21st to 80th income percentiles since 1980 gives us these charts.

“Income before transfers and taxes” — or roughly market incomes plus social insurance benefits such as Social Security and Medicare —  was up 28%. Not zero

“Income after transfers and taxes” — market income plus social insurance benefits plus means-tested transfers (Medicaid, food stamps) minus federal taxes — was up considerably more, 42%. Not zero.

More impressive still: Incomes for the bottom fifth are up nearly 70%.

Eberstadt

Men Without Work

 

 

These are some notes from Nicholas Eberstadt’s new book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He sees a serious, long term problem here that has been going on for a long time, not just recently.  There are some identifying factors: Immigrants work with more regularity than native born Americans, a felony conviction weighs powerfully upon a man's not working, and participation in the community with wives and families are factors that correlate with work.

Between 1948 and 2015, the work rate for U.S. men twenty and older fell from 85.8 percent to 68.2 percent. Thus the proportion of American men twenty and older without paid work more than doubled, from 14 percent to almost 32 percent. Granted, the work rate for adult men in 2015 was over a percentage point higher than 2010 (its all-time low). But purportedly “near full employment” conditions notwithstanding, the work rate for the twenty-plus male was more than a fifth lower in 2015 than in 1948.

Before World War II, the exclusive economic activity for the overwhelming majority of U.S. women was unpaid labor at home. Today the overwhelming majority of women – including women with young children – engage in at least some remunerated employment outside the family. Needless to say, this shift has opened up new prospects for prosperity, as well as new horizons of economic independence and autonomy. The tremendous expansion of economic opportunities for U.S. women created a massive new supply of workers in the postwar economy. The share of women with paid work skyrocketed in every age group and doubled for women between twenty-five and sixty-four. For women twenty-five-to-fifty-four, the work rate was 34 percent in 1948; in 2015, it topped 70 percent. In arithmetic terms, this enormous influx of new workers completely offset the decline in work rates for prime-age men.

In sum, an American man ages twenty-five-to-fifty-four was more likely to be an un-worker in 2015 if he (1) had no more than a high school diploma; (2) was not married and had no children or children who lived elsewhere; (3) was not an immigrant; or (4) was African American….No matter their race or educational status, married men raising a family work more, and never-married men without children or children in their home work less. No matter their ethnicity or race, prime-age men who come to this country work more than those here by birth.

 

Having a criminal record is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.

Employed Canadians and Britons now work at least one hundred hours per year (over two full workweeks) less than working Americans. The gap between the United States and France, according to the OECD, is now nearly three hundred hours (over eight full workweeks). More than four hundred annual hours (over ten full workweeks) separate workers in America and Germany.
20 million men in the U.S. have been convicted of a felony but only a tiny fraction of all Americans ever convicted of a felony are actually incarcerated at this moment. Maybe 90 percent of all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living more or less among us.

But they are not working.

Antiquated Drug Laws

Everyone agrees that the antiquated drug laws are responsible for the high incarceration rates in this country and the disproportionately high number of African-American inmates in prison. Both party's presidential candidates are in accord about this. 46,000-plus federal inmates will be released because their sentences were reduced for exactly this reason.

But is that true?

Drug offenders make up only 19.5% of the prison population. Releasing all 300,000+ drug offenders would still leave our prison population larger than it was 30 years ago and larger than any other industrialized country. More, the percentage of African-American inmates would not change from 37%.

The only way to decrease prison numbers dramatically would be to decrease the frequency and length of incarceration for violent crime itself.

Is that what we want?

Income Disparity Among People and Nations

There is probably a crisis center somewhere out there that just makes up new impending disasters. In a generation the world worry about "world freezing" shifted to "world warming" and now has settled politely upon the ambiguous "climate change." The purity of our foods, the danger of aquifer contamination, the Iranian nuclear power, the North Korean nuclear power, guns in the streets, the flu, the flu vaccine--they tumble out of the crisis factory like so many potato chips or cookies. "Income disparity" is a new world crisis. It sounds bad. Almost revolution-inducing. And a recent study has shown it is getting worse. Worse! And globalization is probably the cause!

Richer countries in 1980 (as measured by GDP per capita) tended to grow faster between 1980 and 2000 than poorer countries. The rich are getting richer! The poor are getting poorer! Globalization is going to create two huge disparate worlds that will soon cancel each other out. Or annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter.

Or is it? The largest populations of poverty are actually in the areas of national success. Both China and India are reaping the benefits of globalization, and so are their poor citizens. Indeed the largest beneficiaries of globalization have been the huge populations of India's and China's poor.

As The Economist points out, 'If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.'

Social Forests and Trees

The illegitimacy rate among women with college educations, while it has tripled since 1960, is still only about 8 percent. (The national rate around 1890 was 6%.) 92% of children whose families make over $75,000 per year are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is the obverse. Only about 20 percent of children in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents. There are clearly some statistical irregularities here; one parent presumably makes half of two and the children likely live with the mother who statistically earns less, divorce and separation. But it is interesting that something so obvious to at least superficial evaluation gets so little discussion. Getting a high school degree, not getting pregnant in your teens, delaying marriage are all profound factors, superficially, in success or failure in the culture.

There are problems, of course. Not finishing high school, early pregnancies and the like may be an expression of a problem, not the problem. This population may be stupid, monumentally careless, defiantly self-indulgent or some combination thereof so that treating the fever of the uneducated pregnancy may shortsightedly miss the disease. But these events, so predictive of social and economic failure in both the parents and their children, are pretty striking. And they do not seem to be related to outsourcing, the tax rate of Buffet's secretary or the caloric count of the Big Mac.

Our government has a lot of opinions. It is curious that our leaders offer so few opinions and such little guidance about something so basic.

The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Jason Hsu, a partner at Research Affiliates, has an article on the current Western economic conundrum called The 3-D Hurricane and the New Normal. It describes how Debt, Deficit and Demographics are working to the disadvantage of the developed nations and to the advantage of the emerging ones. The West has become top-heavy with older citizens. There are less workers to work and produce and to subsidize the older ones. Deficit spending is acceptable as a short term adjustment to a downturn but, when used long term, it becomes debt which steals from productivity and buying power. Inflation and a decrease in living standards is the eventual outcome.

This conflict seems so clear and civilized. Both sides of this coin are so plainly etched. One wonders what progress could be made if we faced these problems squarely.

On the other hand we could confront the problems squarely and have a nice St. John's Dance.