One of the signature fads of the Obama Era is "Universal Preschool." A new book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut, by veteran education pundit Chester E. Finn Jr., explains the political sleight of hand involved:
Okay, now I get it!
The Obamanauts' have a multilayered set of reasons for pushing Universal Preschool.
On the high-minded surface, the idea is that since No Child Left Behind has failed to close the racial gaps by pushing K-12 education, then the problem must stem (must) with pre-K years. All other possibilities are unthinkable! Therefore, having logically proven that the racial gaps are caused by disparate treatment before outside of the K-12 experience, the only solution is to spend a lot of government money taking poor black children away from their crack-addict mothers and their moms' knucklehead ex-con boyfriends and have them raised by nice white ladies for as much of each 24 hour cycle as possible.
Oops, did I say that out loud? You are only supposed to think that last part! You are supposed to say something about "offering society's most vulnerable children an enriched learning experience," and everybody will automatically get the message about taking the poor black children away from crack and abusive step-babydaddies and the rest.
But the next layer is that the Obamanauts know that although no alternative points of view are expressible in polite society, most voters still aren't all that excited about paying higher taxes for welfare moms' children. And more Head Start for poor children isn't expensive and expansive enough for what they want to accomplish.
So, one of the real goals is to change the work v. stay-at-home-with-the-kids economic calculus for married women with children. See, from the Democrats' point of view, stay at home married moms are The Enemy. They identify strongly with their husbands' economic interests.
Consider two couples. In one, both spouses earn $50k, while in the other, the husband earns $100k while the wife stays at home to raise their small children. In the United States, both couples pay the same federal income tax because they "file jointly." The couple with the working wife is typically worse off because they have to pay for child care. So, in the U.S., the wife's incentives are to support her husband's career and share his views opposing high taxes, government regulation, and the like.
The long range goal is the Swedenification of America, although that will require a much more radical step than is currently feasible -- reducing or eliminating the joint filing privilege. See, in Sweden, the couple where both spouses make $50k is much better off than the couple where the husband makes $100k, because, in a land of high and steeply progressive marginal tax rates, people are more or less taxed on their individual incomes. (That's a simplification, but that gets the gist of it -- see this Encyclopedia Britannica article). And daycare is free.
That's why you see in Sweden lots of ladies who drop their kids off at the government daycare center X each morning, then drive to government daycare center Y to take care of other ladies' kids who are working at a government daycare center Z taking care of the kids of the workers at government daycare center X.
Moreover, private daycare centers are The Enemy, too. Many have religious affiliations. And there is too large a supply of women who like to work with children for pay to be high under free market conditions of supply and demand. They must be replaced by government employees who pay dues into politically powerful unions who will negotiate with Democratic politicians elected by government employee union muscle.
Most have opted to pursue the “universal” model—prekindergarten for every four-year-old is their campaign slogan— rather than seeking more intensive intervention services targeted on a far smaller group of acutely disadvantaged children. Although the moral energy of the “universalists” derives from the claim that such a program will close educational gaps between America’s haves and have-nots, their political strategy rests on the belief that enacting and funding any such program depends on mobilizing the self-interest of middle-class families who would welcome government-financed day care and an early educational advantage for their own kids. (The flaws in this approach reverberate through the following pages.) ...
Although it serves enormous numbers of small children, today’s ragged armada of day care and preschool operators and programs, with their variegated eligibility requirements, uneven quality standards, and twisted funding streams, dismays advocates whose strategy hinges on propagating identical, universal programs designed to appeal to millions of parents and voters. That strategy relies on gaining the political boost that comes from offering John Q. and Sally Z. Public, both of them now working, the prospect that somebody else will pay for their child care, creating a new middle-class entitlement to government-financed services for their four- (and maybe three-) year-olds, wrapped in much hype about school readiness and social justice for the poor.
Okay, now I get it!
The Obamanauts' have a multilayered set of reasons for pushing Universal Preschool.
On the high-minded surface, the idea is that since No Child Left Behind has failed to close the racial gaps by pushing K-12 education, then the problem must stem (must) with pre-K years. All other possibilities are unthinkable! Therefore, having logically proven that the racial gaps are caused by disparate treatment before outside of the K-12 experience, the only solution is to spend a lot of government money taking poor black children away from their crack-addict mothers and their moms' knucklehead ex-con boyfriends and have them raised by nice white ladies for as much of each 24 hour cycle as possible.
Oops, did I say that out loud? You are only supposed to think that last part! You are supposed to say something about "offering society's most vulnerable children an enriched learning experience," and everybody will automatically get the message about taking the poor black children away from crack and abusive step-babydaddies and the rest.
But the next layer is that the Obamanauts know that although no alternative points of view are expressible in polite society, most voters still aren't all that excited about paying higher taxes for welfare moms' children. And more Head Start for poor children isn't expensive and expansive enough for what they want to accomplish.
So, one of the real goals is to change the work v. stay-at-home-with-the-kids economic calculus for married women with children. See, from the Democrats' point of view, stay at home married moms are The Enemy. They identify strongly with their husbands' economic interests.
Consider two couples. In one, both spouses earn $50k, while in the other, the husband earns $100k while the wife stays at home to raise their small children. In the United States, both couples pay the same federal income tax because they "file jointly." The couple with the working wife is typically worse off because they have to pay for child care. So, in the U.S., the wife's incentives are to support her husband's career and share his views opposing high taxes, government regulation, and the like.
The long range goal is the Swedenification of America, although that will require a much more radical step than is currently feasible -- reducing or eliminating the joint filing privilege. See, in Sweden, the couple where both spouses make $50k is much better off than the couple where the husband makes $100k, because, in a land of high and steeply progressive marginal tax rates, people are more or less taxed on their individual incomes. (That's a simplification, but that gets the gist of it -- see this Encyclopedia Britannica article). And daycare is free.
That's why you see in Sweden lots of ladies who drop their kids off at the government daycare center X each morning, then drive to government daycare center Y to take care of other ladies' kids who are working at a government daycare center Z taking care of the kids of the workers at government daycare center X.
Moreover, private daycare centers are The Enemy, too. Many have religious affiliations. And there is too large a supply of women who like to work with children for pay to be high under free market conditions of supply and demand. They must be replaced by government employees who pay dues into politically powerful unions who will negotiate with Democratic politicians elected by government employee union muscle.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Posts
46 comments:
I hope you will comment on Jim Holt's review of Richard Nisbett's book, "Intelligence and How to Get It"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/books/review/Holt-t.html?pagewanted=all
Damn, this post is downright Menckenian.
You may be right but most people I know expect the woman might be home for a few years, maybe off and on, and then she needs to get a job.
The possibilty of the man losing his job is considerable, even in the best of climates. You need the backup. So the idea of national health and day care and that safety net appeals to a lot of more or less traditional families.
For example, if you are the male breadwinner and you make in the low 20's and your wife doesn't work, what is going to help you out more - lower capital gains taxes, lower payroll taxes, or the stuff the Dem's are promising (regardless of whether they can deliver).
Even if early education is worthless, it eases the burden on young parents, no?
If the whole purpose is to get more Democratic, union jobs it does seem like a slick plan. What are the Republicans going to do to counter this? Taxes are bad. Unions are evil. Good luck with that.
The more daycare we have, the more women must work, and the more women work, the lower the fertility rate drops, and the lower the fertility rate drops, the quicker we arrive at extinction!
Three cheers for The Culture of Death:
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!
It still benefits the middle class, and the women who will work at these new daycare jobs are NOT hardcore leftists but just regular women who like children and aren't qualified to be real teachers.
I'm not necessarily saying I support it.
75 years?
"Damn, this post is downright Menckenian."
That made me think about the differences between Steve and old H.L.
1) Mencken obviously wanted to seem mean. His humor depended on that. He had fun taunting large segments of society. Contrary to what Mr. Saletan has said, Steve isn't mean. He's actually kind of a softy.
2) Substantively, Mencken was a militant atheist, while Steve never talks about his personal take on religion.
Perhaps 1) and 2) are not entirely unrelated.
I hope you will comment on Jim Holt's review of Richard Nisbett's book, "Intelligence and How to Get It"
Here are some comments from Nisbett's Op-Ed piece which covers similar ground:
> The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence.
This is not true. There was nothing misleading, nor incorrect. After 37 years, Jensen's observations have been clearly established as correct.
> In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
False. Anyone who does not understand this may wish to read this:
Rushton, J.P. and Jensen, A.R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294. [easily located on the web]
> The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups.
The B-W IQ gap is larger at the highest level of SES than at the lowest. The above comment is inane. There have been literally hundreds of IQ studies of various racial groups from many different countries and they show the same outcome.
> For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia.
Turkheimer reached this conclusion by studying children who were age 7 and less. This is long before the shared environmental component vanishes.
> This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
For children only. The shared environmental component equals ZERO for adults.
> Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect.
Not true. You have to wonder why this person makes such obviously false assertions. Perhaps he thinks his readers are not familiar with the research. A good bit of the evidence is so specific that it cannot be associated with environmental causes by any means.
See either of the two references I previously gave.
> There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests.
The brain size difference between the sexes is a virtually perfect predictor of the IQ difference between the sexes. The claim that the sexes have identical IQs is at odds with numerous independent findings, although the subject is still being debated.
> Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives .
This person does not understand correlations. Even large numbers of exceptions do not invalidate correlations. One or two points will have little significance, other than to move the correlation coefficient by a tiny amount.
> About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q's than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and "negroidness" of features both measures of the degree of a black person's European ancestry are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
The Black admixture formula (from Lynn) is
IQ = 80 + (admixture % x 0.2)
[see Lynn, Richard (2006). Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Washington Summit Publishers, Georgia.]
This formula predicts the regional and mean IQs of Blacks in the US and Europe.
> During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
This citation is known as the Eyferth study. Environmental proponents always cite it because they have not found any other evidence to cite. But their claim is incredibly lame:
* The "study" consisted of a very small N. Some citations claim 98 and some 69.
* Although the children's IQ was measured, the parents' IQ was not measured (neither was the rank of the US military father measured). So it is not known whether the children inherited the parental IQ.
* About 30 percent of US blacks failed pre-induction mental tests for the military, compared with 3 percent of white. So US black soldiers were a more IQ-selected and less-representative sample of their population than were white soldiers.
* Children were tested prior to the age at which the genotypic aspect of intelligence has become fully manifested.
* 20% to 25% of the Black fathers were not African Americans but French North Africans (i.e., largely Caucasian or Whites as we have defined the terms here).
> But it turns out that skin color and negroidness_ of features both measures of the degree of a black person's European ancestry are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
There is no presently available study (to the best of my knowledge) of within group IQ variation as a function of skin color. But there is a between group study, as cited in my previously referenced article:
Templer and Arikawa (2006):
skin color to winter high temperature r = .85 (p < 0.001)
IQ to skin color r = - .92 (p < 0.001)
The correlation shown above is not even close to "weakly associated." It is very strong. Nisbett did not offer any numbers or references to support his assertion.
> The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.'s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.
All adopted children reached adult IQs that were equal to their biological peers and which had no correlation with their adoptive families. Transracial studies were not limited to Blacks adopted by Whites but included Asians adopted by Whites. The Blacks ended up with lower IQs than their adoptive families and the Asians ended up with IQs higher than their adoptive families.
> That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect.
No, it is not.
> James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002.
Not true. What he found was an increase in raw scores. At the same time scholastic-component raw scores (within the same tests) declined.
> In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift;
He got one right.
> it must have been the result of powerful social factors.
No. There is absolutely no evidence that any social factors were at work. It appears that most or all of the gains were specific and not g loaded and are apparently due to multiple factors such as nutrition, family size, and environmental conditions that exist in very early life, since the secular rise is observable in toddlers.
> Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time.
The IQ boosts that have been reported were temporary (very short lived) and were believed to be largely the result of teaching to the test. That means that the gains were in s loading and not in g loading. No g loading gains have been demonstrated.
> This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes.
No, it is not. Nisbett needs to read (or read again) Rushton, J.P. and Jensen, A.R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294.
>In relation to the French >adoption study
"•The results of the French cross-fostering adoption study strongly support the consensus that heredity accounts for a substantial portion of the variance in mental test scores.
•It is certainly possible that substantial environmental effects can be found where the range of SES is unrestricted. It is unclear, however, that the effects demonstrated here in particular are stable over time. Longitudinal follow-up would have been informative.
•It may be that the genetic effect on mental test scores is concentrated in the g factor. This is important for many reasons, including the general agreement that g accounts for the bulk of the predictive validity of IQ with respect to practical, real-life criteria. More rigorous approaches to this question than my own may be possible.
•These results, while by no means deciding the matter, also leave entirely intact the reasonableness of the hypothesis that genetic differences account for as much of the black-white IQ gap as do environmental factors."
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/06/french-cross-fostering-ado_115070325923398202.php
I hope you will comment on Jim Holt's review of Richard Nisbett's book, "Intelligence and How to Get It"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/books/review/Holt-t.html?pagewanted=all
The reason we have only had one ruling family in the last two thousand years is that they figured out in the first few generations what it took to ensure that the IQ of their offspring remained the highest in the land.
They used all the tricks that have been rediscovered by the anti-hereditarians and more, and they have clearly been successful beyond the wildest dreams of the anti-hereditarians. Obviously, the ruling family, which maintains the intelligence of its offspring using these tricks would rather that we believe IQ is approximately 80% hereditary, but now the secret is out of the bag.
The worst result will be if the certification racket drives out quality preschools. My son goes to a program 3 days a week, and it's run by a woman who has developed a fun curriculum over the years for 3 and 4 year olds, and has a good reputation in the area. But if people like her half to jump through enough hoops, either they will leave the business altogether, or they will have to adopt some standardized curriculum that will take all the fun out of it for the kids.
BTW, this is already somewhat subsidized by the government through an employer savings account - so the dollars spent are pre-tax.
They want to get their hands on the white kids as soon as possible so they can dumb them down and propagandize them (and instill a guilt complex upon them) as soon as possible also.
I wouldn't underestimate the above urge in the left. There is no reason to have a pre-school before kindergarted be "universal". Its simply a first step in taking kids away from their parents at ridiculously YOUNG ages. A four year-old should be enjoying being a late-age toddler with mommy, not being beholden to leftist pre-school teachers. This makes me sick.
M
Josh: > In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
False. Anyone who does not understand this may wish to read this...
Give up the ghost already, dude.
It's like trying to argue with people who believe that the earth is warming, when in fact the earth is cooling, and cooling so rapidly that we are in danger of entering a new Ice Age.
What you're dealing with here is pagan religious fervor - trying to talk reason with these folks is like trying to talk the Mayan priests in Apocalypto out of beheading their prisoners - they're just gonna pause for a moment, look at you quizzically, and then lop off your head as well.
In Finland this day care stuff has been discussed recently. All the experts said that there is a consensus in the field that the daycare is not a good option for very young children. The situation is bad if the groups are big, because that is not a natural for young children for one thing because they have to grow up in an enviroment where there is constant loud noise.
Now still, if you are going to have a welfare state it is good for fertility that there is an universal day care. If you don`t believe me compare fertility rates in Europe between countries which have and which don`t have.
Josh,
Thank you for your thoughtful data based comments.
I think the fear among the sincere do-gooder type leftists is that IQ can be depressed in children by an unhealthy lifestyle during their formative years and that will have a lasting detrimental effect for the rest of their lives. This seems plausible. However, universal preschool does not address this problem at all. Kids who are now in private preschool or at home are much more likely to be in a healthy environment than children who are in gov't run preschool. Parents who pay for preschool take their kids elsewhere when they don't like the program. Gov't ed. is free and once people get something free they will keep on with it. The most serious and determined parents won't be affected, of course because nothing will make them put their kids in gov't schools. The real losers are the kids going from home or private prek to a gov't program.
The thing that bothers me most is the normalizing of institutionalizing another group in society. I am a back to nature freak and this ain't natural. We have kids in age segregated institutions, the aged in institutions, workers at work. It is kind of creepy.
After they make prek universal and free, then they will make it compulsory. There is a move in one state to lower the compulsory attendance age to include kindergarten. Right now most districts provide kindergarten, and that is fine, but compulsory attendance? That is gov't intrusion into family decisions. Some kids are not ready and parents keep them home. More often it is little boys who aren't ready to sit so long. They need to run around.
My fear is first universal, then compulsory.
That is not healthy.
Here in the UK the very high cost of daycare is certainly a deterrent to middle class earners having more children. Of coure we have individual taxation; if we still had joint filing like the US it would be practical for many mothers of young children to stay home. The system is heavily geared towards encouraging mothers to work.
I doubt any Swedish social institutions are directly transferable to America except for the upper midwest perhaps. Once upon a time I lived with many different Swedish roommates (recent immigrants) for a while in a major American city and I came away thinking they were a distinct genetic tribe with personality characteristics that must match up fairly well (as well as anybody) with authoritarian socialism. Their brains are highly skewed to math science and logic. Even the females. Taki has complained on his web site that many Nordic females are relatively unemotional in the bedroom and I would agree (not all). The Swedes are not highly verbal or (at least outwardly) highly emotional people. Not sure how many famous riots (not involving Muslims) have ever occurred in Sweden but I bet it is very few. They are not known by other tribes for their personal charisma, singing or comedy. Some Swedes will probably post replies to this comment about how they have a great tradition of charismatic singers and joke writers and storytellers and comics and fast talking salesmen and/or con men etc. But the fact is that the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. It's all relative.
The Swedish temperament is about as conformist as the East Asians (which is extreme). In the white racial spectrum the Swedes are just about the polar opposite of the Irish or Italians. btw Is it any surprise that the Irish would be the holdout giving the European Union the finger on that treaty vote? Anyway renting to Swedes and living with Swedish roommates is much easier than dealing with certain other ethnic groups. As a group they are highly sane, logical and cool headed (some like Taki would say boring). I got the strong impression that the Swedish approach to heavy state socialism was very much "just explain to us what the goal is and we'll all pull together and make this work efficiently as possible!" Go try looking for that attitude in Los Angeles County today or for that matter anywhere in Tennessee. It's just not in the cards. It doesn't really even work so well in Sweden. Sweden hasn't paid its own defense bills in a very long time. If Denninger is correct and America really does crash in the next few years then people in Sweden and a lot of places are all of the sudden going to be shocked by the real costs of providing for their own national defense. Just watch the scramble for missile defense buildups across the world after someone like say India nukes Pakistan in the next few years.
Would love to see the multicultural indoc they have planned for the young minds. Evil, pure evil.
And daycare is free [in Sweden].Well, it's not free free. The Swedes do pay taxes on EVERYthing (income taxes are just a drop in the bucket).
I wouldn't underestimate the above urge in the left. There is no reason to have a pre-school before kindergarted be "universal". Its simply a first step in taking kids away from their parents at ridiculously YOUNG ages. A four year-old should be enjoying being a late-age toddler with mommy, not being beholden to leftist pre-school teachers. This makes me sick. I agree. No doubt the left thinks it will 'end racism' too.
Moreover, private daycare centers are The Enemy, too. Many have religious affiliationsI do not doubt obama east coast elite backers, many of whom harbor high animosity towards Christianity, will be motivated by this..but there's a problem.
most Jewish groups advocate Jewish day care and early education to combat the 'disease' of assimulation.
How they make an exception for Jewish day care will be interesting- but not unexpected.
"The more daycare we have, the more women must work, and the more women work, the lower the fertility rate drops, and the lower the fertility rate drops, the quicker we arrive at extinction!"
And how many beautiful white children have you produced there, Charlemane?
Silly Girl,
You are exactly right! Thats what I fear.
Universal Pre-K will be free for all at first, then it will be made compulsory later. They will use some "ruse" of course to do it, such as, "we have raised scores by so much, that its unfair to kids NOT in the program", etc. They will rig the tests to queer the scores or whatever, but my hypothesis remains the same........."they" want to take "your" (notice I put that in quotes) kids from you as quickly as possible, so they can get down to the important business of making sure the little white and yellow ones are no smarter than the black and brown ones.
Leftists in college (look up the University of Rhode Island dorm program and "Foundation for Individual Rights in Educaction-FIRE), were perfectly willing to instill a massive guilt complex on white students when given the chance. Well, in the past 30 years MANY leftists (Bill Ayers---watch some of this creature's stuff on YouTube, its enough to make you sick) have went into education and gotten the proper accredidation to be the administrators/teachers of youth of all ages. They didn't do this because they were interested in your kid being able to perform algebra and trig better, I assure you. Its so they can attempt to indoctrinate/instill a guilt complex on our youth.
I wouldn't trust a left-winger if he told me it was raining outside, and I could hear the rain on my roof, I'd still go check the window. Miles
To the Anonymous who called Mencken a "militant atheist", please listen to this interview to hear what he actually thought. (I'd recommend listening to the entire interview, but this portion regards his views on religion)
Starts at the 1:50 mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SytqXH6aQtw
The major unintended consequence of universal preschool will be the further incentivization of single motherhood.
Expect a significant increase in white out-of-wedlock births if it passes.
The people who can't stop patting themselves on the back for saving the world are actually destroying it.
What else is new?
I always love this quote, where Nisbett inadvertently concedes that intelligence is genetic:
About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q's than those who have more African genes.
"Consider two couples. In one, both spouses earn $50k, while in the other, the husband earns $100k while the wife stays at home to raise their small children. In the United States, both couples pay the same federal income tax..."
That's not correct - when two spouses have very similar incomes there is often a "marriage penalty" in the tax structure. A couple with a dual income of $100K will pay $19,002 in taxes whereas two individuals with $50K in income will pay $17,532. http://www.savewealth.com/news/9905/marriagepenalty.html
The tax structure is set up to benefit those couples where one person makes a lot less than the other.
This is one of the calculations people make when they decide to have one spouse stay home. The other big number in the calculation is how much full time and after school care costs. Unless a woman is bringing home at least $50-60K I really can't see the financial justification to work when you have young children. (Self disclosure - I worked full time until my oldest was 4 and pulled down a near-6 figure salary)
The government would prefer to take the kids from the maternity ward and have their raised by bureaucrats. To reach "equality." Like in the book "Brave New World."
As to Mencken, he got it at least as far back as the 1920s. HERE is "Notes on Democracy". He isn't saying anything new, but is blackly cantankerous in style. If you only have time for a selection, start on p. 17 and read as far as you can.
My fear is first universal, then compulsory.
That is not healthy.It's not, but it will also lead to a lot of people waking up to the problem and taking the care of their children seriously, just like what happened with homeschooling.
Think about this: anti-universal preschool activists had the sense to buy the domain.
http://www.universalpreschool.com/
That tells you everything you need to know about who is going to ultimately win out here.
Nice points about H. L. vs. Steve. Maybe Steve's approach is better for our time, given everybody's bias for niceness. It certainly works for me. A good-cop, bad-cop technique spanning the decades.
Steve, good analysis but you're not taking it far enough.
First, most women are now unmarried. link here.
This means not only do most women not have to take into consideration husbands, income, taxes, and the like, but they need childcare if they are middle to low income. Wealthy women can of course hire "Rosa the Illegal Salvadoran Nanny" to fill the kid with all sorts of horrid superstitions. That latter case is common among upper-income women. Which is one reason they support illegal immigration.
This pattern (no marriages or greatly delayed marriages) insures fertility drops.
Lucious Vorenus is quite correct, women are most fertile in their twenties, when they spend most of their time according to Richard Florida chasing the highest status/quality men. When they do marry, it's in their mid-late thirties, with a fairly large number of sexual partners under their belts, reduced attractiveness, and a guy they obviously "settle" for (both know it and both partners resent it). Predictably these pairings don't last, but interestingly enough women are now seeming to forgo that step altogether and particularly among upper-income women have "designer eugenic yuppie babies" through IVF and sperm donors, ala Jodie Foster.
For this class of women, wealthy, influential, powerful, "taste/opinion makers" pre-school is a must.
Because of Demographics (more women than men, and women bloc voting) all throughout the West massive Welfare States were constructed, not out of conspiracies but because they meet female needs, which are vastly different to male needs.
With marriage, and particularly marriage in their twenties (when it really matters in shaping opinions and economic interests) a thing of the past, because women don't NEED or WANT to get married anymore (particularly young professional women), society inevitably moves ever leftward.
In re the marriage penalty: It seems to me that the smart thing to do nowadays would be for the man & woman to NOT get a government marriage certificate, and to game the system for 30 or 40 years, and then only get a government marriage certificate at the very end, right before death, for any possible inheritance tax purposes.
Seriously - if you've got two people who can count on each other [not to run off with the baby-sitter, or with the tennis pro], then what exactly is the point of getting a government marriage certificate in this day and age?
You can still exchange vows in a private religious ceremony to your hearts' content - I just don't see what good comes of formally registering your marriage with the government.
[Heck, in this day and age, I am not entirely sure that I see what good comes of registering the births of your children with the government.]
"In the white racial spectrum the Swedes are just about the polar opposite of the Irish or Italians."
And peaking of the Italians, Silvio Berlusconi has made some statements that have made some people upset. More, says I.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5305030/Italy-does-not-want-to-become-multi-ethnic-says-Silvio-Berlusconi.html
The only problem with socialized medicine is egalitarianism. SM would be non-disastrous if private medicine weren't forbidden under it. By this scheme, taxes would support medical care for the indigent, thus no one would ever be without medical care; and private medicine could continue to make research gains and provide state-of-the-art care to those paying for it.
Here the cry goes up from egalitarians: "That would mean some people will get better care than other people! The rich would purchase superior care! Everyone must be equal instead!" Thus the proposal under the aborted Hillary Clinton SM scheme of *jailing* private physicians and private payers. Cue the Soviet Army Band.
The spectacle of an entire adult society consumed by an analogue of sibling rivalry isn't pretty. ("Mommy! Why does my brother always go first? It isn't fair!...Mommy! He has one more bean on his plate than I do! It isn't fair!" etc. ad infinitum.)
Progress not only requires inequality, it is inequality. A hard truth is becoming clear in every field: Egalitarians - the products of arrested development - are a mortal foe of humanity.
It's not, but it will also lead to a lot of people waking up to the problem and taking the care of their children seriously, just like what happened with homeschooling.
Um, no. Homeschooling is still only used by a small minority of parents, so the public school system still educates the vast majority of children. If universal preschool ends up like homeschooling, we can expect a minority of children to be reared by their mothers at home, and numerous restrictions on these freedom loving parents. Since the public school monster was not slain, it is no looking to expand its territory.
David,
The name of the newspaper of the local community college:
The Egalitarian
Evil Neocon/testing99/whatever-his-screen name-is-on-various-other-sites is on to something about present-day women. He is to be encouraged in that direction - and away from foreign policy, his weaker area. So he can't get a date. It doesn't seem to produce quite the same intensity of exaggeration, the same frequency of errors and omissions of fact, the same hysteria and the same baldness of invention that many of us find in his foreign policy comments. When someone talks sense, you must acknowledge it, no matter who he is. t99 talks tolerable sense about the modern-day Young Female as commonly encountered by the uncalcified male under 40 (not your wife and your times, guys - the coming generation and the future - your daughters excepted, of course). Kudos to t.
"Because of Demographics (more women than men, and women bloc voting) all throughout the West massive Welfare States were constructed, not out of conspiracies but because they meet female needs, which are vastly different to male needs."
t99
But they don't meet children's needs.
Married women still have more children. Those children will grow up with the values learned in their homes. Right now the majority of children in the US are living in families with 3 or more children. At the same time the majority of women have 0-2 children. These folks a dying breed, literally.
Slightly off topic, but in the nineteenth century there was a movement to put children in universal preschool, called the Infant School Movement. Obviously, either the movement failed or the "schools" were abolished in the few places they existed.
Anonymous: Right now the majority of children in the US are living in families with 3 or more children. At the same time the majority of women have 0-2 children.
Do you have sources for those two statistics?
Thanks!
Homeschooling is still only used by a small minority of parentsThe stats on homeschooling alone are deceptive. What you really need to look at is homeschooling + delayed school entry + private schooling + early community college attendance. When you add it all together it's not a small minority anymore.
It's not about *homeschooling* per se, it's about parents taking control of their children's education and picking and choosing from various educational services available to them. This shift has already happened among intelligent people. A push for mandatory preschool would paradoxically strengthen people's resolve and bring more people into the good-parenting camp.
"They are not known by other tribes for their personal charisma, singing or comedy"
I'll grant you comedy, but Sweden punches well above its weight in the arts (high and popular).
I read once that Sweden produced more great opera singers per capita than any other country (In the last century Birgit Nilsson, Jussi Bjorling, Nicolai Gedda, Elisabeth Soderstrom etc)
And in popular music they had Abba (one of the biggest acts in popular music history) and a number of other groups popular in Europe (roxette, ace of base, the cardigans, clawfinger...)
They even score pretty highly in the more rarified field of outsider music with inspired lunatics like Anna Lisa Ingemansson (and some others).
Fascinating stuff. I don't know if it's true or not (it may well be) but just in case -
I will go home tonight and offer my kids, if and when they have children, the free-of-charge use of Grandpa Figgy's Daycare Services, for as long as the traditional, old fart proprietor can manage it.
Do you have sources for those two statistics?
sure, Lucius,
The US census update.
page 3, table 1
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p20-558.pdf
Although, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that you can read a graph AND do middle school math.
Lucius,
Most children live with both biological data.
Census data:
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/children/011507.html
Anonymous Dudes - I have to admit, I was dubious [even after skimming the links], but I just ran the numbers from this PDF, for all women aged 40-44 [who are essentially finished making children]:
0 children: 20.4%
1 child: 16.9%
2 children: 34.4%
3 children: 18.5%
4 children: 6.4%
5 children or more: 3.5%
Now I don't know how to approach the question of "5 children or more", and I don't feel like spending half a day trying to think about just which family of probability distributions you would choose from to try to fit a curve to that data, so I went ahead and ran the numbers with 5, 5.5, and 6 being representative of "5 or more":
0*(20.4) + 1*(16.9) + 2*(34.4) = 85.7
-versus-
3*(18.5) + 4*(6.4) + 5*(3.5) = 98.6
3*(18.5) + 4*(6.4) + (5.5)*(3.5) = 100.35
3*(18.5) + 4*(6.4) + 6*(3.5) = 102.1
Okay, now let's re-run the numbers for "White alone, non-Hispanic" women, aged 40-44:
0 children: 22.5%
1 child: 16.2%
2 children: 35.5%
3 children: 17.7%
4 children: 5.6%
5 children or more: 2.6%
0*(22.5) + 1*(16.2) + 2*(35.5) = 87.2
-versus-
3*(17.7) + 4*(5.6) + 5*(2.6) = 88.5
3*(17.7) + 4*(5.6) + (5.5)*(2.6) = 89.8
3*(17.7) + 4*(5.6) + 6*(2.6) = 91.1
So the situation in the Caucasian community is just about even, but the situation in the NAM community appears to be wildly disparate [with the NAMs really pulling away as you get out to 4, 5, and 6 children per woman].
For instance:
Age 40 to 44 years, 5 or more children:
Asian: 0.5%
White alone, non-Hispanic: 2.6%
Black alone: 5.9%
Hispanic (any race): 7.1%
PS: Anyone wanna hazard a guess as to where those extremely high fertility NAM women lie on just their NAM IQ bell curves [much less vis-a-vis the white/asian IQ bell curves]?
Lucius,
Virtually all of the growth in the black population is from immigration. I don't remember where I found that, so I can't share it right now. Most of those high fertility types are immigrants. Immigrants have higher fertility than native born US citizens. That is true of whites and Asians as well as NAM's.
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