Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.
The question is to what extent this “coming apart” is treatable by policy.
One of the drivers of this, very likely, was family law. By creating a legal environment where, by creating a couple and then splitting it again, you impose a lifetime liability of income transfer from the higher-earning-potential to the lower-earning-potential members, you create a powerful incentive to stratified mating.
As to the question, I don’t know orders of magnitude, but I’d focus on reducing rather than increasing the subsidies to zero-to-negative externality positional goods competition.
You are talking about U.S. domestic “coming apart.” Global “coming apart” must be at least equally dramatic, and what policies are in play to “deal with” that? (Does Picketty offer any ideas?)
Of course this means Idiocracy was prescicent on the course of human society.
My question: Why should it be treatable by policy?
Well, the government controls marriage/divorce incentiveand parental rights. They even go so far as to shirk enforcing perfectly reasonably termed prenups. I call this dysregulation when the government causes there to be chaos in an area where the market would provide order if it weren’t prohibited to do so by the government. I’d start with those things.
Dr. Kling posits:
“The question is to what extent this “coming apart” is treatable by policy.”
Thomas asks:
“Why should it be treatable by policy?”
Leaving aside “treat*able*” for a moment and confining “policy” to a connection with a Polis, an organized grouping of individuals with diverse motivations and objectives, we can reflect on something like the “Broken Windows” policy of policing as “treatment” to reduce barriers of conduct as barriers to or limiters of interactions in the Polis.
However, “treatable” seems to assume that we know, not just the symptoms, but the “nature” and probable cause(s) of a particular dysfunction. Do we?
Remember that in “Coming Apart” we are observing information on the “White” sectors. Have we really begun to examine the sources for the differentiations in the formations of individual motivations prevalent in the distinct segments of those sectors of “Whites?” What could “policy” of the Polis have to do with those sources of individual motivations? Is the formation of motivations “treatable?”
Are we really asking the useful questions?
32 million more? That’s about 30 more words per minute of time awake.
And where do I learn about how to “pull strings”?
good catch on the arithmetic of words.
I wondering about this, too. As an adult, I am estimating I hear about 100 words a minute when I am watching television, or am engaging with other people face to face, or on a phone. However, I also spend a good part of every day alone reading (but probably am reading even more words/minute). A child hearing a deficit of 30 words/minute during its waking hours would be a child spending a lot of time alone in a wordless room (no television). I can’t quite decide if this factoid is reasonable or not. I lean towards unreasonalbe.
It sounds high but the direction may be rightm
I suspect the functional difference is between 1.5 kids mostly being around adults versus playing in the street with other kids.
I’m not sure it matters for lifetime earnings though we can assume it might. Even if it does, is one group just as happy as the other (not counting envy) throughout life? After all, they continue to give life to children and raise them how they were raised. Maybe the status rat race isn’t as great as we think it is and maybe if we could fMRI for lifetime happiness we’d find it didn’t need remediation.
+1
Yes where does that estimate come from? Aren’t poor people more likely to live in urban (human dense) areas with extended families and what about TV and radio?