10 ms·

For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end: Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who ar

For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end: Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who are disproportionately likely to be stably married, to preach what they practice—to not only enjoy the benefits of marriage in their private lives but also to advocate for them in public. This is the problem in today's society. You cannot preach good values, because somebody is going to get offended. It is important that all lifestyles are tolerated. But at the same time as a society it is important to instill good values in the next generation, values that will keep them healthy, happy and productive. And the problem is, those values are going to offend someone for sure.

jjj123 4y ago
There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority. Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.
monero-xmr 4y ago
Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school. "Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home "We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them. The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    I don't know if I count as educational elite, but I have a few degrees, so does my wife, and we have talked disparagingly about marriage in the past. My gripe is that marriage, as an institution, ought to evolve to meet the people's changing needs, and by codifying it, the government locks in features (like the assumptions about gender or money or about who gets to make medical choices of certain kinds) which might then later fail to match up with how the people are living. So it's not that I think it's irrelevant, it's just that I think it could serve us better if we kept a cleaner divide between what we practice socially and what we legislate. Whatever it is that you might need a reference to marriage for in the law, instead create separate decoupled systems for handling those things. More flexible that way. We weren't going to bother with the marriage paperwork, because who cares what the state thinks. But then we did our taxes both ways and decided to swallow our pride and take the money.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      I used to think similarly to you, but now I realize that between my wife and I (4 graduate degrees between the two of us so maybe we are in a similar boat) what really matters is that we pattern our life on the concept of traditional marriage we inherited from the past generations rather than put a confused modern spin on it. I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.
      - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
        I don't disagree that traditional marriage works. Despite all attempts to reject tradition, we've ended up living a pretty traditional married life. We wouldn't have ended up here if it wasn't a stable equilibrium. But I think the following are equally valid explanations for the results: > Marriage is good, actually. > Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health. It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  South Bay Area has quite a few prosperous cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga) where the demographics are politically liberal in candidate preference and their public schools are outstanding. Maybe they're not as good as the private schools you're talking about, but the cities in South Bay tend to be brimming with optimism for their young generations. In one well known city with a strong middle class, one might expect half of the students to be on the fastest math track available and half of the math faculty in the local high school to be Calculus teachers. The surrounding cities are not too much different. I wonder what makes your city different? Would you mind specifying what region you're talking about?
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    Top-20 American city in the boundaries of the city proper (not suburbs). The public schools are awful.
  - gamechangr 4y ago
    Pretty much the rest of the country has awful public schools. Every large city has a few good ones and a number of less than wonderful ones. I think a meaningful separation point might be the cost of living and more specifically the taxes raised from housing. If you have houses with an average price of $1M and houses with an average price of $300k, in the latter a public school system would simply have less to work with.
    - HALtheWise 4y ago
      This gets brought up a lot, but in (all? most?) US states the additional state and local funding that goes to low-income schools more that makes up for the decreased local property tax revenue. That manifests as a negative correlation between affluence and per-pupil spend, and (at least in Ohio where I grew up) a negative correlation between per-pupil spend and various measures of academic success. I wish people would look up the data on this sort of thing before confidently making claims. https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
- imajoo 4y ago
  Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases: Surprisingly from the NYT. https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw
lapcat 4y ago
Do we really need more preachers? Eventually, almost everyone figures out for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn't. Moreover, there are plenty of unmarried people who aren't against marriage, who indeed want to get married, but their life circumstances haven't resulted in marriage, for various reasons. They don't need preachers.
- ip26 4y ago
  Keeping universal insight a secret and expecting everyone to figure it out for themselves seems oppressive to me. Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is out of consideration for all the single parents, and you therefore decided to adopt. You figure it out two years later. Years have gone by, and dating is now very difficult. Is this somehow progressive!?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > Keeping universal insight a secret Marriage is hardly a secret. > Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is I think you can guess. Anyway, that's not a secret either. People are aware of these things. The options are not sermonization or censorship; that's a false dichotomy.
    - ip26 4y ago
      Sure, people guess. And I expect most still underestimate it by a country mile. It isn’t very openly discussed, because no one wants to impinge involuntarily single-parenthood households. Being vaguely aware that “single-parenthood is harder than two-parenthood” does not count as informed.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > It isn’t very openly discussed We're openly discussing it right now. I'm truly baffled by the idea that it isn't openly discussed.
        4y ago
nathan_compton 4y ago
I've got kids and I teach them values and no one is offended.
rayiner 4y ago
I come from a south Asian immigrant family in the US. Nearly every single person I know in my extended cohort of immigrants followed the script (because we were socialized to do so): we studied hard in school, pursued financially lucrative majors, eschewed dating at an early age, got married in our 20s, and had kids. My brother is having his first kid at 31–and my dad and I were frankly getting pretty antsy. And for every single one of us that followed the script it paid off, including those whose parents came here without white collar jobs. And of course none of us talk about that in public because we want to seem illiberal to our educated white American friends. For a long time I reconciled myself to that cognitive dissonance. But my wife is American, from a deep blue state. And it’s been eye opening to watch the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution on Americans outside the economic elite. It seems like everybody’s parents are divorced. They hang around any stable family they can find. Nobody is willing to guide their kids: they’re supposed to “discover themselves” on their own. The parents are too scared to impose values: this is what we expect, this is what constitutes a good life, this is what your purpose and function and role is. It’s a mess. If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Thank you for the brave statement. I am an immigrant from the former USSR and have the same exact observations. Somehow the boomer generation convinced themselves, when young, that youth was wiser than age, and then neither their kids nor grandkids got any guidance.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country. How do you figure? Did third world countries have current American culture before we did (I ask rhetorically)?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    You can look at the cultural characteristics of different American groups that were here but didn’t build civilization. Look what the places the Puritans, Germans, and Mormons built. These are cultures that lean towards communal rule following. Contrast that against Appalachians, or the frontiersmen who populated the Oregon coast, and what they built. These are cultures that have emphasized individual self determination.
kar5pt 4y ago
Nobody is anti-marriage. You're just pulling a straw-man out of your ass.
cafard 4y ago
Oh? How stably married has the owner of the Wall Street Journal been? As far as I know, the opinion arm of his TV network is all in favor of monogamy, at least in cases where its ideological adversaries aren't practicing it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jjj123 4y ago

There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority. Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.

monero-xmr 4y ago

Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school. "Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home "We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.

nathan_compton 4y ago
Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them. The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I don't know if I count as educational elite, but I have a few degrees, so does my wife, and we have talked disparagingly about marriage in the past. My gripe is that marriage, as an institution, ought to evolve to meet the people's changing needs, and by codifying it, the government locks in features (like the assumptions about gender or money or about who gets to make medical choices of certain kinds) which might then later fail to match up with how the people are living. So it's not that I think it's irrelevant, it's just that I think it could serve us better if we kept a cleaner divide between what we practice socially and what we legislate. Whatever it is that you might need a reference to marriage for in the law, instead create separate decoupled systems for handling those things. More flexible that way. We weren't going to bother with the marriage paperwork, because who cares what the state thinks. But then we did our taxes both ways and decided to swallow our pride and take the money.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    I used to think similarly to you, but now I realize that between my wife and I (4 graduate degrees between the two of us so maybe we are in a similar boat) what really matters is that we pattern our life on the concept of traditional marriage we inherited from the past generations rather than put a confused modern spin on it. I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      I don't disagree that traditional marriage works. Despite all attempts to reject tradition, we've ended up living a pretty traditional married life. We wouldn't have ended up here if it wasn't a stable equilibrium. But I think the following are equally valid explanations for the results: > Marriage is good, actually. > Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health. It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.
threatofrain 4y ago
South Bay Area has quite a few prosperous cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga) where the demographics are politically liberal in candidate preference and their public schools are outstanding. Maybe they're not as good as the private schools you're talking about, but the cities in South Bay tend to be brimming with optimism for their young generations. In one well known city with a strong middle class, one might expect half of the students to be on the fastest math track available and half of the math faculty in the local high school to be Calculus teachers. The surrounding cities are not too much different. I wonder what makes your city different? Would you mind specifying what region you're talking about?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Top-20 American city in the boundaries of the city proper (not suburbs). The public schools are awful.
- gamechangr 4y ago
  Pretty much the rest of the country has awful public schools. Every large city has a few good ones and a number of less than wonderful ones. I think a meaningful separation point might be the cost of living and more specifically the taxes raised from housing. If you have houses with an average price of $1M and houses with an average price of $300k, in the latter a public school system would simply have less to work with.
  - HALtheWise 4y ago
    This gets brought up a lot, but in (all? most?) US states the additional state and local funding that goes to low-income schools more that makes up for the decreased local property tax revenue. That manifests as a negative correlation between affluence and per-pupil spend, and (at least in Ohio where I grew up) a negative correlation between per-pupil spend and various measures of academic success. I wish people would look up the data on this sort of thing before confidently making claims. https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
imajoo 4y ago
Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases: Surprisingly from the NYT. https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw

lapcat 4y ago

Do we really need more preachers? Eventually, almost everyone figures out for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn't. Moreover, there are plenty of unmarried people who aren't against marriage, who indeed want to get married, but their life circumstances haven't resulted in marriage, for various reasons. They don't need preachers.

ip26 4y ago
Keeping universal insight a secret and expecting everyone to figure it out for themselves seems oppressive to me. Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is out of consideration for all the single parents, and you therefore decided to adopt. You figure it out two years later. Years have gone by, and dating is now very difficult. Is this somehow progressive!?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Keeping universal insight a secret Marriage is hardly a secret. > Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is I think you can guess. Anyway, that's not a secret either. People are aware of these things. The options are not sermonization or censorship; that's a false dichotomy.
  - ip26 4y ago
    Sure, people guess. And I expect most still underestimate it by a country mile. It isn’t very openly discussed, because no one wants to impinge involuntarily single-parenthood households. Being vaguely aware that “single-parenthood is harder than two-parenthood” does not count as informed.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > It isn’t very openly discussed We're openly discussing it right now. I'm truly baffled by the idea that it isn't openly discussed.
      - 4y ago

nathan_compton 4y ago

I've got kids and I teach them values and no one is offended.

rayiner 4y ago

I come from a south Asian immigrant family in the US. Nearly every single person I know in my extended cohort of immigrants followed the script (because we were socialized to do so): we studied hard in school, pursued financially lucrative majors, eschewed dating at an early age, got married in our 20s, and had kids. My brother is having his first kid at 31–and my dad and I were frankly getting pretty antsy. And for every single one of us that followed the script it paid off, including those whose parents came here without white collar jobs. And of course none of us talk about that in public because we want to seem illiberal to our educated white American friends. For a long time I reconciled myself to that cognitive dissonance. But my wife is American, from a deep blue state. And it’s been eye opening to watch the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution on Americans outside the economic elite. It seems like everybody’s parents are divorced. They hang around any stable family they can find. Nobody is willing to guide their kids: they’re supposed to “discover themselves” on their own. The parents are too scared to impose values: this is what we expect, this is what constitutes a good life, this is what your purpose and function and role is. It’s a mess. If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country.

xyzelement 4y ago
Thank you for the brave statement. I am an immigrant from the former USSR and have the same exact observations. Somehow the boomer generation convinced themselves, when young, that youth was wiser than age, and then neither their kids nor grandkids got any guidance.
lapcat 4y ago
> If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country. How do you figure? Did third world countries have current American culture before we did (I ask rhetorically)?
- rayiner 4y ago
  You can look at the cultural characteristics of different American groups that were here but didn’t build civilization. Look what the places the Puritans, Germans, and Mormons built. These are cultures that lean towards communal rule following. Contrast that against Appalachians, or the frontiersmen who populated the Oregon coast, and what they built. These are cultures that have emphasized individual self determination.

kar5pt 4y ago

Nobody is anti-marriage. You're just pulling a straw-man out of your ass.

cafard 4y ago

Oh? How stably married has the owner of the Wall Street Journal been? As far as I know, the opinion arm of his TV network is all in favor of monogamy, at least in cases where its ideological adversaries aren't practicing it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]