Ruth Institute Blog

Learning from the demographics. (From nationalreview.com.)

Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL Read more…

This used to be called prostitution–now it’s just debt reduction:

…There is a plethora of on-line dating sites, calling themselves arrangement sites, where young women looking to pay down college debt are matched to older, wealthy donors. What is not advertised, but is clearly understood by reading young women’s confessionals in a recent Huffington Post piece about “sugar daddies” and the financially beleaguered “sugar baby” girls, is that these arrangements are for paid sex, and the industry is booming. Read more…

From the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Though the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is most often discussed in terms of its effects on health insurance and medical care costs, the ACA will have numerous effects in various facets of American society.  Specifically, its financial and taxing system will create incentives that perhaps the authors of the bill did not foresee, including that the average American worker will be discouraged from marrying and working in a wide range of circumstances, says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. [emphasis added] Read more…

W. Bradford Wilcox, who consults on U.S. demographics, is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

The long-term fortunes of the modern economy depend in part on the strength and sustainability of the family, both in relation to fertility trends and to marriage trends. This basic, but often overlooked, principle is now at work in the current global economic crisis. Read more…

by Christopher White 

Based on projections from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), world population will reach seven billion by the end of this month. According to Hania Zlotnik, director of DESA’s Population Division, “It is very important for the future of humanity that the young people of today have on average fewer children than their parents did.” Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

Have you read the latest on the Greek bailout? Last I heard people who were lucky enough to have government jobs are on strike because they are about to lose them, thanks to austerity measures being forced on the country by the EU and the IMF. Read more…

An urban high school teacher in Connecticut talks about unwed motherhood, fatherlessness, and how it affects the kids in his classroom.

by Gerry Garibaldi

…Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch… Read more…

The State should support families and better enable them to survive and thrive.  California, however, is once again making it difficult-to-impossible for families to care for their own members in their own homes.  AB 889 is expected to soon be on Governor Brown‘s desk.

If you hire someone to care for your children in your home while you work, or care for an elderly parent, or care for someone who is sick or handicapped, AB 889 (Domestic Work Employees) would require you to provide rest breaks every two hours, carry Workers’ Comp insurance, issue paychecks with itemized pay stubs, etc.  It also allows for lawsuits and penalties if “employers” (aka Mom and Dad) fail to know and follow all of the labyrinthine requirements:

AB 889: “Adventures in Babysitting” Bill Is Making Its Way to the Governor’s Desk

 

How will parents react when they find out they will be expected to provide workers’ compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for…babysitters? Dinner and a movie night may soon become much more complicated.

 

Assembly Bill 889 (authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano of San Francisco) will require these protections for all “domestic employees,” including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers. The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature – and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor’s desk. Read more…

Robert W. Patterson

This article was first published June 14, 2011, at WashingtonExaminer.com.

Since President Obama moved into the White House, the unemployment picture has gone from bad to worse. Unless things turn around, 2011 may be the third consecutive year with unemployment exceeding 9 percent, a first since the Labor Department began tracking the stat in 1948. Read more…

by Denyse O’Leary

The new science of neuroeconomics is making big claims. Can they be justified?

Can neuroeconomics rescue shattered economies?

We are asked by some to believe that it can. “Neuroeconomics” is one of many new directions in neuroscience – scanning the brains of floor traders, for example. In ” Testosterone and high finance do not mix: so bring on the women ” in a recent issue of The Guardian, Tim Adams tells us that the new science of neuroeconomics is proving beyond doubt that “hormonally-driven young men” should not be left alone in charge of our finances. Research shows that too much testosterone impaired the risk assessment abilities of traders, and so does too much cortisol. The solution, he thinks — riffing off Michael Lewis’s The Big Short — is to get more women involved: Womenomics. Read more…

by Michael Cook

Who cares if the media ignored World Youth Day?

Read more…

by Robert W. Patterson

This article was originally published at WashingtonExaminer.com.

With his daring deficit reduction plan, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin deserves credit for courageous fiscal leadership. But he is painting Republicans into a corner if he thinks exploding federal outlays can be reduced without addressing underlying family demographics. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

We have discussed recently on this blog the effect of demography on a country’s economy and the potential link between fertility rates and the recession. Today I would like to draw your attention to an article from USAToday which suggests that the link runs both ways. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

The world’s economies, especially in the West seem to be in somewhat of a bind. The markets around the world are currently in a slide; Europe is worried about Spain and Italy; the USA has had its credit rating downgraded by S&P for the first time in its history.  It is therefore an appropriate time for the New York Times to publish an article by Chrystia Freeland, the global editor at large of Reuters, that argues that the world’s economic woes can be linked back to the fact that the West is getting old.  Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

For those who can find time to read longer articles that analyse the factors underlying continuing economic woes — in particular those of the United States — there are some excellent essays on the Family in America website. Read more…

by William Jeynes

Research shows the positive economic effect of two-biological-parent families on our society. Single parenthood and other alternative family structures not only hurt our economy, they hurt our children, those who care for them, and those for whom our children will care later in life. The first in a two-part series. Read more…

by Jennifer Roback Morse

Part 1 of 2

Dr. Morse gave this speech April 23, 2011, at Hong Kong Baptist University, at a conference of Western and Chinese scholars, entitled “The Family and Sexual Ethics: Christian Foundations and Public Values.” China is experiencing numerous problems due to family breakdown, including the one child policy, high divorce rates, and an imbalanced sex ratio. This conference was convened because many in China, even in the Academy of Science and in government,  are interested in what Christianity has to say about marriage, family, sexuality and society.  The conference papers will be translated into Chinese and published in book form.

Read more…

by Ryan T. Anderson

How and why considering distribution will yield a complete economic science. The second in a two-part series.

Having considered the historical genesis of the elimination of personal distribution as a factor in the science of economics in the first part of this article, one might wonder why it matters, or what harm it causes. Consider Harvard-educated Yale Professor David R. Mayhew’s highly influential and widely acclaimed book Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), published by Yale University Press. The book’s underlying thesis–and assumption–is that congressmen are “single-minded seekers of reelection.” With this starting point in place, Mayhew can then engage in empirical research and interpret his findings accordingly. Not surprisingly, all of the activities that congressmen engage in–advertising, credit-taking, and position-taking–can be accounted for, in his model, as means to the end of reelection. Read more…

One has to wonder sometimes if Western Civilization is even going to bother showing up for the the future of the world.

Well, not the way things are going in America lately, at least not according to recent government data as reported in the LA Times:

LA Times:
The maternity business has experienced a recession, too, it appears. Births fell 4% from 2007 to 2009, the biggest drop for any two-year period since the mid-1970s, according to federal government data released Thursday.

Meanwhile across the pond, our British cousins are procreating, but not bothering to get married. Consider a few items published recently by their Office for National Statistics: Read more…

Two articles caught my attention recently. The first was “Japan population shrinks by record in 2010”. The title should be self-explanatory. Already the most aged nation on earth, Japan’s demographic winter in 2010 was the most severe on record.

The result of more and more of their young people “waiting to get married and choosing to have fewer children because of careers and lifestyle issues” is that the proportion of the population over the age of 65 is increasing ever rapidly. (25% now, 40% by 2050) Consider the strain on the economic and social resources of any nation when 4 out of 10 citizens are past retirement age. Read more…