Social Scientist, Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy Of Needs"
Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Thanks for your email.
Admittedly, "Children With Married Parents Are Better Off - But Marriage Isn't The Reason Why" was poorly written, aggravating to read and based on a lackluster study.
Regrettably, I posted Ms. Badger's article as I hurried to my Monday night Spanish class, lacking time for anything more than cursory review.
Regrettably, I posted Ms. Badger's article as I hurried to my Monday night Spanish class, lacking time for anything more than cursory review.
With these disclaimers in place, it is also true that American Idealism -- often "too true to be good" -- is excessively eager to emphasize the bedrock importance of volition, choice and personal responsibility while downplaying any sort of economic determinism.
Diane Rehm: "Adam Lanza's Mother." What Of Christendom's Emphasis On Will?
Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" takes this matter in hand, starting with "the physical" and proceeding to "the metaphysical." I realize "Hierarchy" is "only" a model, but models are useful.
Pope Francis has also joined that long lineage of thinkers who spotlight the central importance of "following the money" and so recognizes (implicitly) Maslow's "physiological" and "safety" needs as prelude to everything else.
Disproportionately, the problems of the poor arise from the idolization of markets, the plutocratic sequestration of profit and the structural causes of inequality.
As Pope Francis notes, "nothing gets solved" until resources are radically re-allocated.
Nothing.
The social sciences may be rife with nonsense but the ravings of Cowboy Capitalism -- which most Americans hold more dear than The Sacred Heart -- are manifestly insane.
Can't argue with "lots of shareholder value."
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Yes. Will power, delayed gratification, marital commitment and other forms of volition are important qualities, but "the structurally disenfranchised" -- whom Francis calls "the excluded" -- seldom make headway and rarely rise above their grunting fardels.
"The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual." St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by G.K. Chesterton (1933)
"Chesterton Quotations... And More"
Gandhi is reported to have said: "God would not dare appear to a hungry person except in the form of bread."
The one thing Emily Badger's article got right is the indispensable importance of bread.
Hungry people have no patience for the kind of idealism whose infernal works are entirely spiritual.
On the other hand, with enough "bread," people can buy entrée to Maslow's hierarchy, can "get a foot in the door," can, at minimum, delight in boisterous animal spirit.
With enough "bread," people can buy good living conditions and the educational opportunities that come with good neighborhoods.
With enough "bread," people can buy good living conditions and the educational opportunities that come with good neighborhoods.
In effect, money allows people to buy security.
Money allows entrance to communities rich in social capital.
Money accesses the free air of hope and anticipation.
Money imparts the clear sense that "there is somewhere to go" other than down.
And once uplifted from the enveloping muck, people can actually see "destinations" and have faith in "getting there."
With enough "bread," people escape the iron-clad cycles of "eternal return," appropriating instead the freedom of "targeted purpose over time."
With enough "bread," people escape the iron-clad cycles of "eternal return," appropriating instead the freedom of "targeted purpose over time."
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I wish good parents on everyone.
But this is not our fate.
What we can insure however -- and what Switzerland came close to achieving with its recent proposal of guaranteed national income -- is that everyone be endowed with "the material makings" of a heavenly world - not a spiritual world with empty fridge, toxic water and verminous dwelling.
"Guaranteed Minimum Income: The Most Conservative Wary To Fight Poverty"
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There are, of course, ascetic, abstemious, self-abnegating exceptions to The Rule of Material Resource.
But they are exceptions... and it is wrong to establish exceptions-to-rules as "New Rules."
Exceptionalism is the original sin of contemporary conservatism, a political philosophy based on anarchic refutation of "common law" and "scientific law."
Exceptionalists are "laws unto themselves." (Consider "The Thinking Housewife's" casual dismissal of "Bergolio." What cause would Laura champion if she were born black, four generations removed from slavery, grindingly poor with disabled children living on mean streets with urinal stairwells and snarling menace on every corner? Pope Paul IV's dictum: "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus?")
G.K. Chesterton: "The Anarchy of The Rich"
Exceptionalists seize on "exceptions" and immediately use them to re-make the world in their own image.
And feel good about it.
And not just good: They become absolute embodiments of the values by which they believe themselves "ordained" to mete out salvation itself.
"Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: The Woe Passages"
It is crucial to remember that not everyone will be saved. (At least not in this life.)
"G.K. Chesterton On Charity, Hope And Universal Salvation"
Even so, more of us will be saved by adequate material resource than by platitudes, pep talks, perfectionism and piety.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
Although our human journey does not end with the making of a material world, it is the only place to start - the only way to "come down from the trees" and "out of the caves."
Despite the many shortcomings of Ms. Badger's article, she obliges us to consider a "preferential option for material resource," and so re-focuses us on the heavenly work of building a material world.
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.
Those of us who grew up in middle class comfort -- with full fridges, central heating, indoor plumbing and a two-car garage -- cannot imagine the gnawing tooth of deprivation any more than a full stomach can imagine hunger.
Nor can we imagine how hunger depraves the deprived. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2217141/I-eat-piece-friend-survive-Torment-1972-Andes-plane-crash-survivor-haunted-ordeal-40-years-later.html
Only when there is bread on the table can we shift our downcast gaze upward.
Without bread, any insistence on the loftiness of "spiritual things" puts the cart before the horse and, as happens in any situation of "intrinsic disorder," hell breaks loose.
Alice was right.
"Begin at the beginning."
Start from ground.
Pax tecum
Alan
Pope Francis Links
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/pope-francis-links.html
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Children With Married Parents Are Better Off - But Marriage Isn't The Reason Why
by Emily Badger
We know that children raised by two parents tend to be more successful — at school, in the future labor market, in their own marriages — than children raised by a single mom or dad. And from this fact, it might seem easy to conclude that marriage wields some outsized power over a child's life — that its absence creates unstable homes and chaotic families, while its presence nurtures them.
In reality, though, the question of why children of married parents are more likely to thrive is an extraordinarily complicated one. From a new analysis by Kimberly Howard and Richard V. Reeves at the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution:
Is it simply because they have, on average, higher family incomes? (Two earners are better than one, and one household is cheaper to run than two.) Or are two committed spouses better able to provide consistent parenting? Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?
Parents who marry differ from parents who don't in many ways beyond the marriage itself. Today, better-educated, higher-income adults are much more likely to marry. That means their children benefit from the marriage,and the income, and the education of their parents. Howard and Reeves also point out that the same skills that make marriages work (like commitment and patience) also come handy for good parenting. And so perhaps it's not that children are better off when their parents marry — it's that the qualities that enable successful marriages also make good parents.
Among all of these factors, it's not easy to tease out what matters most. But the answers (as best as we can identify them) are crucial for public policy. If we believe that marriage itself is what matters for children, then we'd want to encourage parents to marry. If we believe it's the financial stability that matters, then we'd want to find ways to bolster the income of single parents outside of marriage. If we believe it's the good parenting skills so often present in married households that make the difference, we could try to instill those skills in parents regardless of whether they have spouses.
In their analysis, Reeves and Howard offer a large part of the answer. By their calculation, children whose mothers are continuously married grow up to make higher incomes at age 40 than children raised at some point by single parents. The difference amounts to about 14 percentiles in adult income rank (children with married parents grow up to make, at age 40, in the 57th income percentile, compared to the 43rd). How much of that difference might be attributable to factors other than — and perhaps obscured by — the marital status of their mothers?
Their analysis uses a model based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. When they controlled for the income differences of married and single-parent households, the age-40 income gap shrank by 5 percentiles:
Reeves and Howard
Two-parent households don't just tend to have more money (which they might spend on tutors, museums, books or simply better health care and groceries). They also have more time (which they might spend on homework help, library visits and bedtime reading). Add the time factor to the parenting qualities I mentioned earlier (patience, commitment), and it's possible that part of the marriage effect is really a "parenting effect": Children with married parents also have more engaged parents, and it's the engagement that really matters.
When Reeves and Howard controlled for a measure of parenting based on home observation and self-reported behavior, that 14-percentile difference shrank even more dramatically, to 7.5 percentiles. "Parenting" here covers activities like regularly reading or eating meals with children.
Reeves and Howard
When Reeves and Howard controlled for parenting and income at the same time, along with a few other characteristics like race and the age of the mother, that 14 percentile difference shrinks down to a little more than four percentiles. Reeves is confident the gap would shrink even further if researchers had reliable data to account for other factors, like the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods where children grow up, or the quality of schools they attend. At the end of the day, marriage itself might still have some effect on the adult outcomes of children. But it would be a small one.
Parenting skills and income levels are no doubt closely related, so we can't simply add the two effects together in the above analysis. But it's clear here that parenting skills and income levels drive much of the difference we often more simply attribute to marriage itself.
"Those two factors taken together explain most of the better outcomes for the children of married couples," Reeves says. "Not all. But most. And I think the takeaway here is not to mistake a commitment device – which marriage is – for an explanatory device."
Making single parents get married, in other words, won't fundamentally change the other characteristics about them that really drive their children's success. The good news in this is that family income and parenting skills are more realistically addressed through public policy than marriage anyway.
Emily Badger is a reporter for Wonkblog covering urban policy. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities.
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