Culture of poverty, culture of success

I am seeing more chastity related material on EWTN and it appears that the number of those programs is increasing. However, as someone with little kids who is not involved in any of the teen programs, I hear nothing of the sort at the parish level.

On a side note, my parish got a new pastor about a year ago, and he has done an incredible amount to increase pro-life messages and programs in our parish, which I have found very encouraging.

And all of those things go hand in hand, so maybe chastity education is around the corner.

Our present culture just didn't become interested in sex yesterday. This is going back to 2002, but I imagine people would still care about the data. (See page 4 here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr52/nvsr52_19acc.pdf ) Comparing 1990 to 2002, the birth rate for 10- to 14-year-olds has fallen in half. For 15- to 17-year-olds it has fallen by a third. 18- to 19-year-olds have seen their birth rate fall by a fifth.

I think the biggest change culturally is the expectations of men to provide a home.

It's about *parenting*, not money or chastity, as the first article you quote makes clear. Goodness knows those middle-class college kids on spring break aren't all about good morals and chastity. They simply have more access to birth control information, birth control products, and, if all else fails, abortion or family support for raising a baby while they continue their education. Perhaps most importantly, they think highly enough of themselves to feel they *deserve* a bright future. They got that from their parents.

Primates (apes anyway) do not know how to parent instinctively. Female chimps raised in unnatural environments and without parenting role models are *terrible* mothers. The good news is that they can be taught to be good mothers. Humans are even more teachable. It's more than a single parenting class though -- we need to rebuild the culture of good mothering (and fathering) in poor communities of all colors. (I've seen some pretty scary parenting practices among very poor white communities as well.) As Maya Angelou has said about her own journey as a mother, "When you know better, you do better."

Don't get me wrong, I DO despair for the state of our collective culture. But if bemoaning the culture fixed cultural problems, then we'd be doing great in this country. People learn by example from those who accept them as they are,yet encourage them to do better. Which reminds me -- I need to join the parenting support group that meets in a low-income neighborhood just a few blocks from me. I've been invited to join, but haven't done so because I don't feel I need the support. But maybe someone there needs *my* support. Thanks for making me think of that.

As for the black churches, I can't speak much to that since I'm not a member of one, and not too familiar with what they are doing in my city. I don't believe those of us with virtually no knowledge of the situation on the ground in inner cities should be casting stones at those who are at least doing *something* -- even if it looks like not enough from the outside.

"you're going to find people who have fallen away from Christianity."

African Americans have the highest church-going rate of any U.S. demographic. Latinos are not far behind.

If you meet a lot of poor people, many are perfectly happy receiving welfare checks and not working or working only enough to stay on welfare. They are happy. It's middle and upper class Americans who think it's a shame.

If you really think it is a moral problem, you have to be willing to make life harder for poor people and make them angry at you, for their own good.

My own solution is to empower the good culture and disable the bad by ending almost all government welfare. But people say I'm selfish or hate poor people. They may acknowledge all the pathologies created by the state, but they always choose to ease the suffering of today rather than to consider the suffering of generations. But maybe that's why we have such a low savings rate.

If the government will take care of my problems - financial, health, or otherwise - why bother trying to fix them or take care of them myself? Why exercise or watch my health when I can get an Rx for statin drugs and insulin, and government-subsidized lapband surgery?And if Uncle Sam will take care of my problems while I spend 20 hours a day watching TV (and pay for my cable TV bill, too, as well as my soon-necessary digital TV converter box - or maybe they'll just give me a voucher for a free hdtv), all the better.

The problem Other Jim is that welfare didn't happen in vacuum. On Milwaukee's north side - the African American side - you will find plenty of shuttered factories. Some of these places like Tower Automotive employed over 30,000 people at good wages. On the south side of Chicago, Wal-Mart was openning a store, and they received some 5,000 applications for 300 or so positions, positions most of us would claim pay poorly. Now maybe cash welfare wasn't the best solution to the problem, but if you got rid of it tomorrow, there would still be huge problems.

~~~

While entirely a utilitarian calculation, there is significant evidence that suggests out-of-wedlock births highly correlates to the mother's opinion of the upward mobility of the prospective father. In a day and age that sees mothers having higher educational attainment and higher earnings particularly among the young, one would expect out-of-wedlock births to be higher. Marriage at its base level provides protection to a mother against a guy running off once he becomes successful. If the odds of him becoming successful are low, there is no need for the protection; it could even prove a detriment to the mother, offering the father protections.

This long, strange trip began with ideas hatched in the mid-20th century by people named Kinsey, Sanger, Hefner, and Hite. They had the wrong view of human nature, and for that reason their experiment has failed miserably. But because so much of one generation's identity and worldview is linked to the veracity of this project, it is unlikely that anyone of any political influence will call for the dismantling of it any time soon. Aside from JP II, no one has offered a plausible alternative. Virtually every major Protestant group has acquiesced to the project. In fact, the most prominent member of the UCC, Barack Obama, recently referred to a "baby" sired out of wedlock as "punishment," as if a child's intrinsic dignity is altered by the work that one is required to do to care for it. Only someone fully committed to the project would think such a thing.

Unless there is a cultural Berlin Wall that will collapse soon, it's pretty much over.

I think the biggest change culturally is the expectations of men to provide a home.

Amen. This began to become a serious problem when LBJ's Great Society program, with its war to end poverty, started rewarding women for having children out of wedlock -- which had the unintended consequence of making fathers unnecessary. An unneeded man is an angry man, a marginalized and emasculated man, which helps explain the rage that has led to the ridiculous rates of black-on-black homicide and through-the-roof incarceration in the inner cities.

Fatherless homes are also the #1 predictor of juvenile delinquency and violent crime. There are simply no responsible male role models in most urban neighborhoods, let alone father-breadwinners living at home with wife and children. Enter gangs, the surrogate fathers of the day, and pimps as the most admired men in the hood.

Meanwhile, Rod is right on about culture being everything. In an earlier post I made the point that the worst thing a black teenage boy can be accused of by his peers is "acting white." This is code for doing schoolwork, reading and generally not trying to look and act like a dangerous thug. Act "white" and you're asking to get the snot knocked out of you, or worse. Someone answered by suggesting the problem is purely economic: Pimps make more money than people flipping burgers, so what kid wouldn't want to aim for a "position" as pimp. This is, of course, ridiculous. The problem is not purely economic. The black family was strong and together during the Great Depression, for example, when not only were the times far tougher but real racism was a major, major obstacle to providing an honest living for one's family.

And BTW, this is not just theoretical for me. It's personal. I mentored a kid of color for 10 years through the Big Brothers program. Took him every Sunday afternoon for 500 Sundays. Watched my little bro gradually morph from a wide-eyed 9-year-old who loved Pokemon and action figures into a gangsta-rap badass determined to turn his life into, for lack of more evocative shorthand, a Fitty Cent video. He saw racism everywhere he went, including where it wasn't. Complained about it constantly. Stopped returning my calls two years ago.

It's the culture, stupid. And it's the stupid culture.

Amen again.

I'd believe that the Black church would put more emphasis on teaching sexual morality if it had the resources, but the Black church has been historically the center of social justice issues for the black community.

What resources are you talking about? Why is it so hard to say, "This behavior is wrong, and beneath your dignity as a child of God"? And to keep saying it, in a thousand different ways? I don't think the difference between teaching social justice and personal morality is an either-or proposition, but a both-and one.

"So what's different here?"

They are Scandinavians.

Other Jim, then everything must already be so much better.

After all, if you haven't heard, permanent welfare (as in receiving an actual check every month) hasn't been around since 1996. There is a LIFETIME limit of 5 years. Has been for 12 years.

Most people receiving other forms of assistance, from subsidized housing to medical programs to various forms of food stamps, have JOBS.

Maybe a series of jobs with no security, low pay, and zero benefits, but they ARE jobs.

That's why I was wondering when this study was done. There's not really any 'Welfare kids' anymore. Not in the sense people meant it in, say, the 1970's.

So, since 'Welfare' is gone (and it is, its been called 'Aid to Dependent Children' for ages now, and again, its 5 years, total), things should be better, right?

After all, nobody can live on housing subsidies and food stamps alone. They have to work, and if they don't, they end up where I work. (Homeless Shelter), and even that's very temporary.

And since you don't even get those programs without an address, and you don't have an address without actual cash, and you aren't getting that cash (after 5 years) without a job, then it already IS 'get a job or starve'.

The poor, now, mostly, outside of 70's cliches, are the WORKING poor. They often work more than one job, they also barely scrape by.

What has this done for the scenario above?

Very little. Having a low income job, or not having one, doesn't seem to affect the rate of unmarried births. So, they aren't having more kids to get more benefits. Which would indicate that they needed better math skills anyway, since any child is going to cost far more than the slight boost in food stamps is going to give you, and that's ALL you would get, other than WIC and medical care for the child (which you wouldn't need without the child, and doesn't increase anything for the parent, or other children). Parents spend little time around the children, and somehow.. that 40 hours flipping burgers, telemarketing, cleaning, or running a cash register hasn't had all those positive effects they said it would.

Only demonstrates that a 'job' isn't a silver bullet, if it is a low income, dead end job that insures that they will be scraping by just the same 10 years from now as they are today.

It also doesn't encourage people to bring back business. AT least not businesses that help. People making less than 8 dollars an hour don't care if another small business opens. They're only concerned that the local dollar store, outlet discount store, or Walmart is the cheapest venue in town.

And since there's only one per large area, with a plethora of low income jobs of people who will never make much more than that for every manager going up the ladder (its always a pyramid. You're never going to have more managers than stockboys and cashiers), its not making up for the dozens of smaller businesses it drove out of business.

Stefanie - I don't have data to back this up but I'd bet the Scandanavians are finishing high school and not having children in their teens. Just a guess though...

Charles - Are you saying that the abortion rate for "middle class" Americans is higher than for the "underclass"?

Here's a question.

If the lack of religious discipline explains why the poor stay poor, then what explains the middle and upper classes staying where they are? They aren't exactly the most church going group. Seems the blue collar is probably the most religiously observant in this country.

The more money you have, often, the less you go to services. Yet, they aren't getting knocked up, dropping out, and losing all their money.

So, why will it fix one, when lack of it doesn't seem to be impacting the other side?

The difference is very simple. When the daughter of a White, middle class family says that she is pregnant, both parents say, "You're getting an abortion!" No ifs ands or buts about it. The White child learns before puberty that sex is ok, and probably encouraged, but babies are NOT ok.

Not true. The abortion rate for underprivileged minorities is disproportionately high, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites is also (as Rod noted) rising. While around a quarter of all pregnancies in this country are aborted, for the babies that are born more and more, across all ethnic groups, are born out of wedlock.

I don't deny that the culture encourages pretty much everyone that sex is OK in any and all circumstances. That's kind of the point of the post.

I'm amazing that people think children out of wedlock is causing a problem. No. That's the result of a problem, not a problem itself. If you could magically make all those people use birth control by default, you would not have solved a damn thing. Although in a few decades, admittedly, the problem would have lessened, in theory. But while we can solve any cultural problem by just having everyone in that culture die out, we tend to frown on that as an actual solution.

The problem is the culture, not the pregnancy. As I've said before, if I could give any advice to sane people living in the inner cities: Move.

I don't care where, I don't care how. Pick some small town, get a crappy room to live in, get a new min wage job. Even take a pay cut. Get the hell out. The culture is toxic. No, it's not toxic because it's immoral, middle-class youth culture is amazingly immoral and that tends to work out....it's toxic because it's teaching hopelessness and thuggery.

Spending huge amounts of money on education won't help, although it's worth pointing out that underfunding those schools, as many of them are, is contributing to the problem. Not having textbooks or doors on their classrooms is a very good way to tell those kids how much they are valued by society, i.e., not at all.

What does help, assuming we're not going to be moving people enmass, is activities that encourage children, and 'busing', which is a way to 'move' people without actually moving them.

Dilute the culture far enough, and it will turn into the 'white hiphop baggy pants' concept, which is damn stupid but not stupider than, for example, disco, and it will produce people who will become sane adults.

Culture, least we forget, is based on consensus. If 90% of the people we see think X, we're very likely to think X. If only 50% think that, we might decide to think something else, and now only 49% think that. We just have to present actual choices. And we also have to protect people who make those choices, as they are liable to be targeted, both in the education environment and outside.

I find these issues confusing, especially when you compare between countries.

I guess England is somewhere in between the USA and Scandinavia in these respects, as in politics and economics. There is a big problem with family collapse in the (mainly white) underclass. Lifelong welfare is an option, and I'm prepared to defend that - I think it's better for a woman with young children to look after her children than to work - the difficulty is that often such women end up doing neither. I think a lot of the economic problems are due to the collapse of heavy industry - the world in which I grew up, with mills, mines, foundries and steelworks, seems as alien now as the feudal era. There is also the mutual revulsion between whites and Muslims in inner-city areas, which encourages both groups to adopt the most exaggerated and polarised moral perspectives imaginable.

On the other hand, among middle-class and upper-working-class people, illegitmacy is not greatly stigmatised, and is not much of a disadvantage in life.

The foreign country of which I have had most experience is Japan, where the divorce rate is low, and illegitimacy and cohabitation almost unheard-of. However, that is mainly because there is no welfare whatsoever (people actually starve to death), and most people have fairly middle-class aspirations. On the other hand, Japan has an astronomical abortion rate, with abortion not even seen as an issue for moral concern, and prostitution is also astonishingly prevalent, socially acceptable, and in-your-face.

I suppose what I am saying is that I do not really know what is best.

Well, if you want people to marry and have children early (and I'm guessing that's the idea?), then our economy and technological level needs to change. As it is, unless they are going to try to get higher education while simultaneously supporting children, they're not going to be able to get it at all, and have to support those children on low wage jobs.

Same problem, just an additional (or if she stays home, not even that) person trying to support multiple children with a low wage job.

So, in other words, how are they to support these late teen-early twenties families?

And if we bring up history, I will have to note that low tech agriculture and trades where you start apprenticing from your father at twelve, much less hunting and gathering, don't really exist anymore on a large scale in our society.

Other Jim, If you meet a lot of poor people, many are perfectly happy receiving welfare checks and not working or working only enough to stay on welfare. They are happy

Problem solved. Start a new post please.

Steve

I think Charles is incorrect that middle class whites are having more abortions than the underclass. But he does raise the interesting question of whether stigmatizing illegitimacy increases abortions. What does it mean that both abortion and illegitimate pregnancy rates are higher among the poor? Does it mean middle class kids are (a) having less sex, (b) using contraception, or (c) engaging in acts less likely to result in pregnancy?

I don't know the answer and don't really want to know. I suspect it's a combination of the three. Either way it suggests that stigmatizing illegitimacy may not result in increased abortion rates because it deters pregnancy causing sexual activity at the margins.

The problem in the underclass may be that these girls want these babies. They are not averse to having an abortion and may have a few. But they also want a few kids and they don't seem to care whether daddy is willing to stick around or not. Maybe they're looking for someone to love them. Who knows? Whatever its reasons, that mindset is contrary to the common good, regardless of your views on fornication. It should be stigmatized not only in churches but in the public square generally. It wouldn't be a bad idea to redirect some WIC dollars to big billboards in urban areas with the simple slogan: "Have some pride, slut." I suspect that the grandmothers and mothers of third generation bastards living in poverty might take offense. But I think it's been established that their judgment is less than stellar.

Sorry, bad link.

Try this

When I was much, much younger, I met a young African-American woman who became pregnant at 14. For her, this was a "rite of passage" into adulthood. Since then I've heard this on a number of occasions. There is an expectation that having a child will make one "grown-up" when in fact children who have children are incapable of really parenting them, so the end result is generations of feral children.

Years later, there was an African-American receptionist at an office I worked in who, at aged 28 or 29, became a grandmother. Her child became pregnant at approximately aged 13 and had the baby. And the "grandmother" in this case was a very immature, insecure young woman who couldn't do her job at work or at home. That's what comes of children having children having children.

You know, I don't think Jerry Springer is worried about finding guests for his show at any time in the future.

Wow, for all this discussion, I see nothing here of worth or substance. The subject of Rod's posting has it right, it's all about culture. But it's not "American Culture" or "White Culture" or "Black Culture". It is the family culture - whatever that may be. It is the attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, the self image, the belief in what one may or may not be able to do on his or her own, that matters.

How do you change this culture? It is not through laws, it is not through preaching alone. Welfare, racism, etc don't matter that much. What does matter is the CULTURE INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE INDIVIDUAL that matters. As has been pointed out, this culture is passed from parent to child, from peer to peer, from friend and family to child.

And how do you break it? By personal involvement with children.

I'm sorry, but all the information in the world doesn't affect behavior that much. How many readers know you should eat better, get more sleep, exercise better, and perhaps pray more than you do? Most hands would go up, including mine. Knowledge isn't enough.

You need a long term commitment to kids who are at risk - kids who live in a culture that sets them up for at risk behavior. What is at risk behavior? Premature sex, drug experimentation, gang interest, and the list goes on and on. We know what they are. No secret.

So, what do you do? People who have a personal culture of success must mentor, ONE ON ONE, children who have at risk behavior, or in an at risk environment. What do you do? Be their friend. Engage in meaningful activity frequently and reliably. What's the best activity? Service to others.

Want the secret to YOUR church keeping its youth, and also rescuing those of your community? Take one day a week, where you go out, collect, bring in, feed, and then assign service projects to adult+child teams, who then go out and do them. Then they come back, talk about what they did and how it improved someone else's life.

You'll need at least 1 adult per child you wish to reach.

Are you willing to do this? Will you take off one day a week from your normal life, and dedicate it to a child who is at risk? If not, then go away. This is what is required. Will your church's adults turn out one day a week to WORK in service to others?

I sat through a whole weekend seminar by a world-wide-travelled consultant who has studied this for 30 years. He has indeed created plans that work. Through churches. But he said churches are the hardest to motivate to do anything. But if they do, they are the best. Non-religious organizations also achieve success, but they generally achieve social and economic success, but not spiritual. You need to not just save from poverty and bad ends, but the soul as well.

This befriending and mentoring, in an environment unthreatening to all, can change the personal culture of a child before he or she irreversibly travels down the road of at risk behavior. The professor's own research says that ultimately, all other means of outreach marginally change the numbers - ad campaigns, school curriculum campaigns, politial campaigns, etc - have only marginal impact. Even church attendance is not significantly effective in reversing the trends, no matter the message from the pulpit.

Only one on one, mentoring and befriending with a long term commitment of years - has shown to be effective - and it is highly effective, in that of those children in a serious and continued program, only a tiny minority ever "fail".

What, this sounds like parenting?

Maybe God wasn't stupid when he told us to get married, commit long term, and then have children, and then we are to teach them to do well. Maybe that's what children need.

Oh, the old-fogeyness of reality... And what we have to do when we ignore it.

But the good news is... There ARE answers. The bad news? Ask your church to try.

End or radically retrench entitlement programs.

There is some merit in this idea and we have taken some steps that way. This does require some examination of more basic questions. Are we willing to let people die for lack of food or housing? They do i that in other parts of the world. Lets not fool ourselves. We dont have adequate charities to serve as a net if we do this. Our income is more concentrated at the top now and many of those folks arent exactly the good Christian, giving to charity types.

If you are willing to let people die for lack of food and shelter do you think lots of other people feel that way? Do you think either political party would take the risk of proposing such policy? If not, then your 2 is off the table.

Steve

I've never really understood how this middle class getting-married-and-starting-your-family-young thing is supposed to work, a la F.M. Green and some of the posters here.

Female gets married at 19, has three kids and stays home with them till she's ~30 and the youngest is in school. Then she continues her post-high school education, and finishes by ~35. She enters the professional workforce nearly twice as old as other beginning workers. In just a few years, her oldest child is supposed to begin repeating this cycle, and the grandparents are supposed to be able to help support the newly formed family with time and money. How does this happen? Is this the kind of society where women simply do not have professional lives?

Meanwhile, who has she married? An older, established man with education, a career, and health insurance? Or a 19-year old peer, who also needs to complete schooling before becoming established in a family-supporting job? If the older, how does he meet and become involved with the young woman? If the younger (say, a high school classmate), how does he support this family?

I'd like to see rational answers to these problems before we can even begin to address the situation of women who feel called to become doctors, or engineers, or who don't marry young.

It seems like we get the society we deserve. People make choices that are rational for them, and the sum of all those right decisions adds up to the culture we experience.

"It wouldn't be a bad idea to redirect some WIC dollars to big billboards in urban areas with the simple slogan: "Have some pride, slut." I suspect that the grandmothers and mothers of third generation bastards living in poverty might take offense. But I think it's been established that their judgment is less than stellar."

That's right, when in doubt, stigmatize women and children. There isn't even a name for the unwed father who causes these situations. That's because of course he bears no outward and visible sign of his inward and spiritual corruption, unlike the women he victimizes and the children who result.

Yes, there was a time a person could be a store clerk and support a family of four and not even make manager. Sure, not a fancy lifestyle, but I'm not talking about you can't have your cellphone and computer. I'm saying that salary wouldn't pay rent and utilities for six people now.

The difference between then and now is the involvement of government. Restriction of the availablity of inexpensive homes, the increase in prices of most services due to regulation and taxes, and even the taxes themselves have created a situation where low-monetary-demand lifestyles cannot be lived.

In 1935 you could buy a new "kit home" for half an average year's income. This was a home you'd be able to live in the rest of your life, and many of those kit homes are still in existence and still being lived in.

But they could not be sold today. The mandates to 'protect us from ourselves' have raised the cost of a "kit home" to a minimum of about double the average annual income.

In our rush to mandate so many things, from 'taxes fund our charity' to innumerable costs in our cars, travel, homes, and things we use and buy, and services we use and buy, the "low monetary demand" life cannot now be lived.

Of course, the current MO of liberals is to decry this condition as "rampant consumerism" and "the failure of capitalism" and to demand that we fix it with dramatically increased taxes, more mandates, and making jobs harder to get with forced wage increases.

You, of course, get what you vote for. It's just sad that so few actually realize what causes most of what they complain about, and thus turn to the causes themselves as the "solution".

Kimberly,

I have met many people who have had sex before marriage. Among those waiting until marriage, I have met more who were succeeding at 15 than 25. It is none of my business, so do not confuse the following with seeking more detail from you. The statistical data is consistent in showing engagements or dating longer than a year are likely to result in sexual activity. Many 'virgins' I've met have engaged in cunnuligus and fellatio. Again, I'm not giving a personal interrogation. Part of establishing a just society is helping people achieve heaven. A society that encourages its youth to abstain from marriage until their late twenties is encouraging its youth to have premarital relations.

Connie, I'd like to see rational answers to these problems before we can even begin to address the situation of women

Unfortunately, I don't think it really matters what answers we would like to see or not. Darwin never sleeps, and the dude is merciless. The society we get is merely the one who shows up for it.

A very strong negative correlation exists between a women's education level and her fertility. And the apple doesn't fall far from the tree; children vote, worship, and breed in large statistical correlation with their parents. Exhibit A: California.

Kimberly, It's really not that hard to wait

Did I read this correctly :-)?

Amen, Kimberly. I and my 2 sisters and 3 brothers were all virgins when we were married in our mid 20's, and really it wasn't that hard. When you haven't tasted the fruit, you don't know what you are missing. (And no, we didn't do anything that was "technically not intercourse" either. Kissing was about the extent of it, clothes on, hands above the waist) Now, after having been married, I think it would be much more difficult to abstain if I were to find myself in a dating situation once again. But I still would.

DC city gov't and schools alos have HORRIBLE corruption issues that are coming to light. I wouldn't be suprised to hear that the same it true in other big cities. At the beginning of this school year we heard about textbooks that had been bought but never sent out to the schools. Books just sitting in a basement somewhere. Probably the trucking company was paid and did no work because the contract went to a school employee friend or relative.

HOW the money is spent, and the local culture, is more relevant. Even at the lowest rate, Utah spends $125,000 on a class of 25 kids. Maybe $40,000 to the teacher. Think about where the rest goes. What is Washington DC doing with $325,000 per 25 kid classroom that causes them to get the lowest test scores in the country?
It's NOT about the money.

Hmmmmm, just visited my daughter in DC past w/e for the cherry blossom festival. The house she rents there with 2 tother friends was on the market for almost twice the cost of my house and its about 1/2 the size and pretty rundown. Her car insurance is higher than mine (PA), restaurants cost more, heck its an expensive place to live. Wonder if the Utah schools pay the same security costs? Bet it costs more to build and maintain schools in DC than Utah. Lets compare apples to apples is what Im saying here. Yes, Im sure DC has more corruption but thats an argument for reforming that system, not for providing 20 year old books for those kids.

Steve

Though the Brink Lindsey analysis is on safe enough ground when discussing the indispensability for cognitive mastery toward excellence in any chosen sphere of long hours of Aesopian-ant practice while your hoppity neighbors slack and dissipate (eh, Grasshopper?), or what my Austrian-econ brotha-man-sisteren would call lowered-time-preference, it seems to run off the rails a bit toward unexamined class bias here:

"College-educated professional parents make sure their kids are in college-bound peer groups, while working-class and underclass kids tend to gravitate toward others like them. Consequently, children on either side of the class divide grow up with very different attitudes about the importance of school achievement — which leads to different expectations about future life plans and different self-conceptions in relation to larger society."

The unspoken assumption here is that all should ideally be encouraged under pain of parental and social sacrifice toward a college "education", the supreme ticket to the Life Abundant, and that those who for whatever reason eschew its blandishments have been biased in life toward a permanent Loser Class - which isn't even true for many of those who are, "objectively" by college age, eminently "college material." There's a point at which the sort of social-science generalisations by which the center-right op-ed punditariat lives, dies, and kills, however true empirically for majorities in specific cases, are easily conflated into one-size-fits-all public-service-announcement pieties that work to murder truth in obscuring human variations outside the 50-plus-one who are expected to "pull their pants up and get with the program" as defined by think-tankers with more cachet than sense.

I could write books on all the people I've known over the years with Olympian SAT scores, off-charts artistic and verbal gifts, or demo'd entrepreneurial savvy for whom their college "educations", having been sold to them within the usual go-along-to-get-along ethos of our cafeteria high schools, proved in the cold light of day to have been what economists would call a deadweight loss. In my own case, nothing from my college years enhanced my cultural enrichment, that having been self-directed from age three, or my way in the world of work, which has taken place in book and music stores for whom the college diploma is no requirement. I'd have happily gone straight from high school in 1980 into work, a thought virtually laughed out of court in being removed from the table by the Powers Wot Bored Me. Thing was, I *really*, *really*, didn't want to go to college, and wish to Heaven I'd stuck to my guns, and banked the money unto an apprenticeship in a non-academic trade or starting my own business.

Sadly, millions of other affluent kids, under the spell of the gospel of limitless "choice" supposedly afforded the college-bound, are denied the sweetest choice of all: to decline the "opportunity" of college in the first place, in favor of educations without quote marks because more real and more rewarding.

And why is the phenomenon of "working class...kids tend[ing] to gravitate toward others like them" implicitly a Bad Thing by comparison toward the college-bound doing likewise?

By all means, if you're "working-class" and your kid has sparks whose best fans unto blazing are situated within green quadrangles, let's do what we can to be at the social fifty-yard line with pennants and hip-flasks and faux-fur like Jazz-Age Yalies the better to get the kid his sheepskin. But let's also remember that there are a LOT of us who wished we had stockpiled volitional dynamite when it would have made the difference in "blast[ing] our way through here" and out of the rancid bourgeois pieties we had unthinkingly absorbed along the road to the More Abundant Life promised by the Educational-Industrial Complex.

"And you know it's right/And you know that it's right/We have got to get it together/We have got to get it together/Now." - Thundeclap Newman

When I talk to Scandinavians, Finns, etc. about US attitudes towards the relationship between out of wedlock pregnancy and poverty, they laugh. If that were always true, they say, why aren't we all poor? Because many Scandinavians wait until their kids are half-grown to marry, or don't marry at all. Yet they are not mired in poverty. So what's different here?

They're from countries with a functional social contract, in which middle class life is a norm that is enforced. (It has benefits and limitations, of course.) The cultural perspective is that life is long, population small, and waste of human lives is both regrettable and avoidable.

We live in a country in which presently the principle of colonial classes/castes and exploitation- that the few live well and engage in ego games, while the many live in misery- is more important than social function. Which is to say, broad social purpose and contractuality is lost and in its absence advocating and living a selfish life is the common "wisdom".

Scott's point about the upper/middle class perspective is important here. Lots of working class people are as completely turned off by the "let's all go to college and be happy" view as they are by the ghetto culture. John Edwards lost these voters when he trotted out his parents to show how "far" he had come without acknowledging the dignity of their working lives.

Any culture can be turned around by offering something better, but those on the receiving end have to perceive that it IS better! The Victorians, disgusted with some of the same issues we talk about here, turned their culture around in less than a generation.

It's interesting to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, even if you don't agree with his views. The book gives you a glimpse of the bad direction that culture was going in, and it all was pre-"welfare". People really idealize the good ol' days way too much.

Culturally, most of the 1960s happened in the 1920s. But the collective memory of it is gone so it doesn't get trumpeted, and it is politically inconvenient for some because the 1920s wasn't politically or economically liberal.

The extent of "welfare" that people get nowadays is exaggerated. Some posters have got that right, in my opinion. In the late 19th century, prostitution was much more common than it is now. In some ways it's the "world's oldest income program for single moms". People who want to get rid of government assistance for people will just increase prostitution, and also increase mafia-type crime and scary radical political/religious movements.

The socialisation of risk isn't the vagaries of some wayward underclass, its now become "The American Way" ...

... professed by all and sundryexcept the Senator form Kansas whose modicum of frank, biting, candor at yesterday's Banking Committee Hearings was most refreshing to hear amidst the plethora of milque-toast mealy-mouthed platitudes(*):

"Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I will be brief. I am very troubled by the failure of Bear Stearns and I do not like the idea of the Fed getting involved in the buyout. But before making a final judgment I want to hear from our witnesses why they thought it was necessary to stop the invisible hand of the market from delivering discipline.

That ... is... socialism...

not a free market...

... and it must not happen again.

I am also troubled that regulators who were supposed to be watching the types of mortgages being written did not do their job. Neither did the regulators who were supposed to make sure one firm did not become exposed to too much risk.

Other questions need to be answered. Does anyone else think they will get Fed intervention if they get into trouble? Who let our financial system become so fragile that one failure jeopardizes the health of the entire system? I am sure many other questions will come up as well. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses.

(*) read Chesterton's "Platitudes Undone" for a sampling of what our political discourse sounds like to a sane man (prophetic, really, he wrote almost a hundred years ago)

P.S. lets stop worrying about the dangers the destitute pose to our vaunted vantage point, and consider instead what the communists could be up to while we squabble amongst ourselves:

"Bunning, Stabenow, Bayh Introduce Legislation Geared Towards Ending Currency Manipulation By China"

And pray for Mr Bernanke, who has to decide when to send us drug addicts to rehab by closing the Fed's credit window to the Investment bankers he opened for the first time in a biblical three-score-years-and-ten lifetime with the excuse we're in unusual and exigent circumstances... while the rest of the global capital markets hedge their bets and wait like vultures,,,

He's got to play God ...

and yesterday he didn't look like he enjoys it...

Culturally, most of the 1960s happened in the 1920s. But the collective memory of it is gone so it doesn't get trumpeted, and it is politically inconvenient for some because the 1920s wasn't politically or economically liberal.

Indeed. People here like to act like the 60s sprung fully-formed from Timothy Leary's head. No, there's a wave of 'conformatity' vs. 'rebellion' that shows up roughly every generation and a half.

Just like the hippies became famous for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the flappers were into sex, alcohol (illegal at the time), and jazz. The hippies fought for abortion, the flappers fought for contraceptives. The hippies called marriage a sham, the flappers called a wedding ring 'handcuffs'. The hippies had casual sex, the flappers had 'petting parties'.

There was probably less actual sex, but it's not like anyone was keeping score, so we honestly don't know how much the talk about sex was just talk, how much was making out, and how much was actual intercourse. But there was a lot of talk about sex.

And the 20s were 'liberal', socially. Women were voting, driving, smoking. They were protesting in the streets for women's rights. (Yes, I know the right wants to pretend women actually being treated like human beings isn't 'liberal', but, OTOH, this was when liberalism was on the right. Progressives had just spent decades yammering about helping 'fallen women'.) There were fights over contraceptive availability and information.

It's basically 10-15 years of rebellion followed by 30-40 years of normal.(1) It's happened twice since the invention of radio and telephone and is about to happen, or is already happening, again.

1) And, if you do the math, you'll see the previous cycle would hit squarely on the civil war, but that's probably just a coincidence. I'm not one of those people who think all of history runs in cycles, for the simple matter that there wasn't even communications between areas before mass media, and hence even if they were cycling, they'd be out of sync with each other so you wouldn't have nationwide effects.

"If you meet a lot of poor people, many are perfectly happy receiving welfare checks and not working or working only enough to stay on welfare."

Dunno where you meet poor people. The ones I meet are not especially happy. But it sounds as if what really bothers you is the thought that a poor person COULD be happy. When was the last time you read St. Francis?

And besides (my mother used to say that the most interesting part of any sentence is what comes after "but" or "and besides"), admittedly without crunching the numbers, I'm pretty sure that if all of the unemployed more-or-less able-bodied working-age adults in the US went out and got themselves educated, say through high school and 2 years of community college, there still wouldn't be jobs available for more than half of them, even at current wage levels. If they had the nerve to demand a living wage, it would be more like 10%. The people in charge of the economy have never even ASPIRED to full employment. After all, that might drive up wages.

Given that reality, anybody who thinks jobless and poor people should feel miserable on top of that is indulging in pure puritanical sadism. On the contrary, it would make a lot more sense to try to enable poor people to engage in the pursuit of happiness. That would probably lower the rate of street crime.