The Future of Marriage Seen from 1926

Eighty years ago advanced people were beginning to understand “that the emancipation of women was changing the nature of marriage.” What would that mean to marriage a hundred years from 1926? The London Times asked some “luminaries from the arts world” for their predictions about marriage. You can see their prophesies (here). Interestingly, the most sensible thinking came from Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and President of the Eugenics Education Society(!). Wrote Darwin:

My anticipations are somewhat different from my hopes. For some time to come the marriage tie will, I believe, become more lax and children brought up without the care of both parents more numerous. Childless intercourse before marriage will increase in frequency, such temporary unions being often followed by childless marriages with the same or some other partner.



The harm done by the abandonment of family life will however become more and more generally apparent and then will begin a slow swing back to more old- fashioned views as to the sanctity of the marriage contract, together with a greater readiness to submit to sacrifices and to impose hardships in order to keep family circles united.

Hilaire Belloc, the comic poet of Cautionary Verses, wrote this:

It would seem probable that the process of regarding marriage as a terminable contract will advance with still greater speed... There is no reason in the new scheme why a man should be compelled to support his wife any more than the wife her husband...



But what I do think probable is conflict between that sort of society and the traditional world which will exist either as a separate area or as a distinct and contrasting social group. I am pretty sure that one will try to kill the other.

The question remains: which group will kill the other first?

Iraq Getting On Its Feet

What is happening in Iraq? With Sunnis appearing to be ready to cry Uncle and end their insurgency, the Shias are beginning to reel in their death squads, the chaps who have been retaliating against Sunni outrages by killing Sunnis.
StrategyPage reports that

the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa.

I’ve been reading about Germany after its defeat in 1918. It’s an amazing story of the stolid Majority Socialists trying to hold the country together while the Independent Socialists and Spartacus whack-jobs were trying to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

There was no army for several months after the Armistice in November 1918, yet the revolutionary left failed to get the German people to make revolution. And the government, such as it was, moved rapidly to set up a democratic election to create a constitutional assembly two months after the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime.

Imagine that. Friedrich Ebert, head of the government by virtue of the previous Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, saying “you’re it,” without an army, with the German Army melted away, organizes Germany’s first democratic election and Constitutional Assembly. All in two months while the lefty whack-jobs like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are trying to work the German workers up into bloody revolution.

The Iraqis aren’t the Germans. But considering that the Iraqis have elected a constitutional assembly, have elected a legislature, now have an elected government in place, and have an army that is rapidly gaining effectiveness, a student of history would have to say that is growing rapidly more and more difficult to imagine the insurgency destroying the power of the current government.

If, as StrategyPage says, the Shias are starting to move against their own radicals, it is beginning to look as if Bush’s policy is working.

New York Times Says Boys Underperforming in College!

Now even the folks at The New York Times admit it. Boys aren’t doing too well in college. Writes Tamar Lewin,

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Of course, this isn’t new. The schoolboy “creeping like a snail/ Unwillingly to school” was already a stereotype when Jaques mourned about life in the Forest of Arden.

But hidden in the article is this little nugget. It turns out that not all boys do worse than girls in college.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education.

Oh really. So “the rich” are doing just fine. It is the middle and lower class boys who aren’t doing too well. The upper-class feminists are taking care of their own even as they visit a murrain upon the sons of the lower classes.

What is to be done, as Lenin once said? Shall we start affirmative action programs for boys? Consciousness raising? New programs to target at-risk male youth?

Let us not be tempted by the the liberal recipe. It is that sort of thinking that got us here, the programmatic, government-funded liberal mindset that turns everything into a government program and turns an independent people into servants cowed by the lash of compulsion.

Let us ask instead big questions, such as:

• What exactly is education for, beyond basic skills such as literacy and numeracy?
• What level of political direction is beneficial, or even prudent, when it comes to education?
• What are we achieving with compulsory education?
• Is it really such a good idea to separate work and learning the way we do?
• What is the point of undergraduate education today?

My own view is that I don’t know what girls want or need in an education. But I do believe that boys need an Education for Adventure, a program that develops in them them a capacity for physical and social risk, so that they can take their adult places in the world with these qualities: “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” Those are the words of General von Seeckt writing about the kind of soldier he wanted in the German army.

Obviously the current education system is designed for some other purpose.

A Nation of Shoplifters

They used to sneer at the Brits as a Nation of Shopkeepers. That’s what the Germans thought when they marched to war in 1914.

But now Mary Wakefield worries that they have become a nation of shoplifters. And she is not talking about boys with pants down around their ankles.

Rob is a kind man, who listens carefully to his conscience and usually follows its advice. He's well off, no family to support, well respected in his field and well balanced - so there's no real explanation, as far as I can see, for the fact that he shoplifts.

Wakefield took a look at all the Evian bottles in his apartment. Expensive habit, she thought. “Not if you steal them from Sainbury’s,” Rob replied.

Didn’t he feel bad?

"Nope," he said, with a defiant smile. "And anyway, your other friends shoplift too."

And it turned out that they did. There are even internet chatrooms where you can discuss how to do it.

"Look, nice-tasting water should be free," said Rob, as I stared at him, still disapproving, over tea. "If I paid for it, I would resent it, and in fact I resent having to go to the horrible supermarket at all."

In Britain, the educated classes rather frown on supermarkets. They have a cult of local and fresh. So that makes it easier to steal from them.

Fortunately the educated classes in the US don’t just frown on Wal-Mart. They wouldn’t be seen dead shopping there. And, of course, they wouldn’t dream of shoplifting in an independent bookstore.

But who knows what they get up to in Barnes & Noble.

But I have a soft spot for the supermarkets. Their workers work hard, and they bring an unimaginable bounty to us every day. On top of that, US retail and food processing are the most productive in the world. It was hard work and attention to detail that got them there.

So I believe they deserve every penny that I spend with them.

Ken Lay: RIP But Still a Crook

Did you know that in Enron’s home town of Houston they regard the Enron collapse as a tragedy rather than an example of capitalist rascals at work?

A Democratic friend seemed surprised that this was so. After all, if you read the New York Times every day you likely think that the Enron fraud was hatched in the offices of Halliburton and signed off by then-Governor Bush in Austin.

Of course, Democrats don’t realize that Republicans feel just as angry as they do about Enron. And Republicans don’t just feel outraged by Enron’s frauds. We also feel betrayed, because we know that there are many Democrats just waiting to blame Republicans and the whole capitalist system when a corporation like Enron collapses. And also hurts because we know that Democrats will be trying to stampede some new regulatory burden on business.

No doubt Democrats have been wondering all along when the fix would be in on Enron. When were Enron’s corrupt Republican friends going to bail them out? Well, it looks like the Republicans’ God stepped in and did the dirty deed.

Columnist Peggy Noonan reminds us that there is another aspect to all this.

Ken Lay, Enron CEO and convicted felon died this week of a massive heart attack. But he also died of a broken heart.

His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him.

Deserved as his conviction for fraud might be, he was also a human. And Noonan recalls a friend who remarked how hard we humans are on each other. How we are all little pirates, and how we are more breakable than we know.

Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics how

[she] once had a priest tell [her] to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament... so that [she] could feel the love of God pour over her.

If you wonder what all the sin and redemption stuff is all about in Christianity think of it this way. It is a way for humans to save themselves when the little pirate in them is broken. When they are in danger of dying from a broken heart.

But Ken Lay is still a crook.

Job Growth Moderating; Or Is It?

Today’s announcement by the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the increase in payroll employment at 121,000 last month. It’s the “nonfarm employment” number from the Bureau’s Establishment Survey, and indicates that payroll growth is moderating from the faster pace of last year.

On the other hand, if you look at the increase in employment from the Bureau’s Household Survey, employment increased by 387,000. Here employment growth is, if anything, accelerating. What is going on? The government is measuring triple the employment growth in the household survey than in the establishment survey.

If you step back and look at graphs of the numbers, the difference in the two surveys is quite stark. Here’s a graph of the household survey and here is a graph of the establishment survey.

The household survey shows strong employment growth consistently for the last two years. Going back to the last recession, it shows negative job growth only for twelve months, and shows employment increase comparable to the glory years of the late 1990s.

The establishment survey shows employment growth moderating since the first of the year. Going back to the last recession, it shows a sharp drop in employment for a year, from January 2001 to January 2002, followed by two years of no job growth. Starting in mid 2003, employment growth has been solid and consistent—five million new jobs—but the job growth has never come close to the job growth in the 1990s.

What is going on?

Brits Rail at US While Teen Thugs Run Riot

The Brits have a rather poor opinion of the United States, according to Ben Fenton. Only 12 percent of them think that the United States can be trusted to act responsibly on the world stage.

Britons, writes Anthony King, feel that

America appears to be a class-divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens equality of opportunity. Nearly three quarters of Britons, 72 per cent, believe American society is essentially "unequal".

It is understandable that they would take a dim view of the US. It helps them to avoid examining the mess in their own country, where teenaged gangs seem to roam around without limit, according to Theodore Dalrymple. It seems to be considered rare sport for young thugs to loiter around and beat up on adults, sending them to hospital with serious brain injuries. And why not? The criminal justice system just gives them a slap on the wrist.

Peter Wareing, a 42-year-old barrister, was attacked in the street by a gang of youths, and suffered permanent brain injury. The two youthful thugs that beat him were sentenced to 18 months in jail and will likely get out in 9 months.

Wareing was no privileged insider, pampered by a privileged upbringing.

He was evidently a man of some spirit: having been a salesman, he decided to study for the law, supported himself at law school by a variety of manual jobs, and qualified at the bar at the age of 40. The extent of his recovery astounded his neurosurgeon, who attributed it to Wareing’s determination and “bloody-mindedness.”

Here’s another story. “An engineer — Philip Carroll, the father of four — was tinkering with his car outside his home. Four drunken youths sat on a wall on his property, and he asked them to leave.” They beat him and caused brain injury. Carroll may never work again. The culprit, Michael Kuba-Kuba, a talented athlete whose parents owned an African foods grocery store, got 12 months in jail. He said he acted in self-defense.

It’s just as well that the Brits are disgusted with the United States, its racism, its inequality, and its imperial ambitions in the world. They wouldn’t want to look at the unequal fight being waged on their own streets between peaceable householders and drunken teen thugs. That might be too unpleasant.