Ruth Institute Blog

by Ryan T. Anderson

February 2, 2012 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4646

Neither liberal nor libertarian, a principled conservative way of helping the poor.

The loudest voices in our national debates about political economy tend to be libertarians and social welfare statists. To our detriment, most public policy discussions are filtered through these two lenses. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one and the same. Read more…

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…

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…

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…

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 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

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 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…

Security in the workplace is taking the place of security in marriage. I have been saying this for some time. But now, the major league self-styled feminist groups are coming right out and saying it. Women and children don’t need stability in marriage if they can have stability in employment.

CNSNews.com asked both activists if the federal government should do all it can to promote marriage between a man and a woman to ensure economic security for women. The “activists” in this quote are Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women and Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy.

CNSNews.com asked both activists if the federal government should do all it can to promote marriage between a man and a woman to ensure economic security for women.

“Personally, no, I do not believe that and I don’t think you’ll find any of the women’s groups who are members of the National Council of Women’s Organizations advocating that position,” Read more…

by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.

a review of the book, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element by John D. Mueller. This review was originally published at Family in America.

John Mueller’s Redeeming Economics is an impressive achievement, really three books in one. Mueller rewrites the history of economics in the first book. In the second book, Mueller expands the concerns of economics in the light of his historical reinterpretation. The third book proposes and critiques public policies through the lens of the theory developed in book two. Readers of The Family in America will probably be most interested in book three. But Mueller’s most lasting contribution to the well-being of the American family may well be book two. His expansion of the concerns of economics has the potential to give economists as well as social conservatives the analytical tools needed to defend the family on its own terms, rather than as a special case of a contract. Read more…

This is really an excellent blog post from the First Things blog. David Lapp dissects one economists’ approach to the decline of marriage among the poor.

While there surely is an economic dimension to marriage, marriage historically has primarily been about bringing children and parents together. So we invented the vacuum cleaner (a standard economic-determinist explanation for why the “household labor” of women is now less valuable than it used to be JRM)—did children then stop needing a mother and father? Sure, women have access to the Pill and work in the marketplace—does that mean the children men and women keep creating suddenly lost the need for married parents? Even if we no longer need our children to be hired hands, women are still bearing children.

He concludes, in effect, that marriage is a social justice issue, but not in the way that advocates of redefining marriage think.
Marriage for the lower classes would provide them and their children, with great social benefits, not readily available in other ways.

consider the norm of bearing children only within marriage. Society says, “Trust us: even though every instinct in your body right now is telling you how wonderful it would be to be a mother and that your boyfriend will be a loving, committed father—trust us when we say that marriage is the institution designed to bind parents to their children.” The norm is meant to protect people—especially women and children—from the fickleness of human nature and to ensure that children have a mother and father. The norm of chastity (now a taboo) does the same. …the acceptance of children outside of marriage comes with a caveat: in this case, the most resourced assure everyone else that all family forms are valid, children are resilient, and can thrive just as well in single-parent families as in married families—and then turn around and admonish their children that they should never, never have children outside of marriage.

There is much more. Read it all here.

by Patrick F. Fagan, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council, and Ruth Institute Advisory Board member.

Republicans and Democrats differ on a wide range of issues, but almost all elected officials in Washington, D.C., believe that a key responsibility of both the White House and Congress is keeping the economy running at full-speed, providing an ever-increasing number of jobs, products, and services for the American people. Elections are won or lost on the public’s perception of the ability of a president and his party to implement policies that contribute to a rising Gross Domestic Product and rising standards of living. The parties differ as to the means to achieve these ends. Read more…

by Joshua Mercer

This hard-hitting editorial makes many of the points I’ve been making: the combination of feminism and the welfare state is making fathers a thing of the past. The UK is further along this path than we are, but we could go this route, if we aren’t careful.

Men from the employable and educated classes are still in strong demand among women. But much lower down the socioeconomic
scale, among the least privileged, men have become — or have come to seem — entirely optional. …
In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.” …
The problem with this new type of extended family, Dench says, is that it is not self-sustaining but tends to be parasitic on conventional families in the rest of society. Read more…

Here is an article about Prof. Doug Allen’s talk at the BYU Symposium. Divorce is important to study, because no one fully anticipated how much changing divorce rules would change many other areas of society. I posted on this lecture, from the conference itself. see here.

Allen said, it’s safe to say between 10 percent and 20 percent of marriages ended as a direct result of no-fault divorce laws. Read more…

My debate at Stanford, with Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, has just been put on our podcast page. Pretty fun debate, pretty friendly debate, too, especially compared with some of my encounters on same sex marriage. I especially like the Q&A at the end of this debate. Enjoy!