Affordability of Family Formation
The February 11 issue of The American Conservative, the one with John
McCain and his crypto-slogan "Invade the World / Invite the World" on
the cover, features my long article "Value Voters," which sums up my
theory of how the affordability of family formation drives the Red
State -Blue State divide. I've published it in bits and pieces over
the years in AmCon, VDARE, and my blog, but I finally had the space to
lay it out fully. It's not online.
Here's the opening:
>>" No matter who wins the 2008 presidential election, pundits will
afterwards hypothesize feverishly about why the country is so divided
into vast inland expanses of Red (Republican) regions versus thin
coastal strips of Blue (Democratic) metropolises. Yet, judging from
2000 and 2004, few will stumble upon the engine driving this partisan
pattern, even though the statistical correlations are among the
highest in the history of the social sciences.
The Republicans lost the popular vote in 2000 while advocating a
"humble" foreign policy, and won in 2004 while defending a foreign
policy that Napoleon might have found bombastic. Yet, all that
happened from 2000 to 2004 was that virtually every part of the
country moved a few points toward the Republicans. The relative
stability of this Red-Blue geographic split suggests that more
fundamental forces are at work than just the transient issues of the
day.
Neither Jane Austen nor Benjamin Franklin, however, would have
found the question of what drives the Red-Blue divide so baffling.
Unlike today's intellectuals, they both thought intensely about the
web tying together wealth, property, marriage, and children. Thus,
they probably would not have been surprised that a state's voting
proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of
what I call "affordable family formation."
First-time readers of Pride and Prejudice frequently remark that
Austen's romance novels are, by American standards, not terribly
romantic. She possessed a hard-headed understanding of how in
traditional English society, wedlock was a luxury that some would
never be able to afford, an assumption that often shocks us in our
more sentimental 21st century.
Economic historian Gregory Clark's recent book, A Farewell to
Alms, quantified the Malthusian reality under the social structure
acerbically depicted in Austen's books. The English in the 1200-1800
era imposed upon themselves the ***ual self-restraint that pioneering
economist Thomas Malthus famously (but belatedly) suggested they
follow in 1798. By practicing population control, the English largely
avoided the cycles of rapid growth followed by cataclysmic famines
that plagued China, where women married universally and young. The
English postponed marriage and children until a man and woman could
afford the accouterments suitable for a respectable married couple of
their class.
In the six centuries up through Austen's lifetime, Clark found,
English women didn't marry on average until age 24 to 26, with poor
women often having to wait until their 30s to wed. And 10 to 20
percent never married. Judging from the high fertility of married
couples, contraceptive practices appear to have been almost unknown in
England in this time, yet, merely three or four percent of all births
were illegitimate, demonstrating that rigid pre-marital self-
discipline was the norm.
Remarkably, a half century before Malthus's gloomy and Austen's
witty reflections on life and love in crowded England, Ben Franklin
had pointed out that in his lightly populated America, the human
condition was more relaxed and happy. In his insightful 1751 essay,
Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind, Franklin spelled out,
with an 18th Century surfeit of capitalization, the first, nonpartisan
half of the theory of affordable family formation:
"For People increase in Pro****tion to the Number of Marriages, and
that is greater in Pro****tion to the Ease and Convenience of
sup****ting a Family. When Families can be easily sup****ted, more
Persons marry, and earlier in Life."
He outlined the virtuous cycle connecting the Colonies' limited
population, low land prices, high wages, early marriage, and abundant
children:
"Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers,
&c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People... Land being thus
plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that
understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to
purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he
may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry ..."
Franklin concluded: "Hence Marriages in America are more general,
and more generally early, than in Europe."
The Industrial Revolution broke the tyranny of the Malthusian Trap
over food, but the supply of and demand for land never ceased to
influence decisions to marry and have children. As America's coastal
regions filled up, affordability of family formation began to differ
sharply from state to state (disparities partially masked over the
last few years by subprime mortgages and other financial gambits). CNN
re****ted in 2006:
"More than 90 percent of homes in [Indianapolis] were affordable
to families earning the median income for the area of about $65,100.
In Los Angeles, the least affordable big metro area, only 1.9 percent
of the homes sold were within the reach of families earning a median
income for the city of $56,200."
When I lived in the Midwest, from age 24 to 34 I attended numerous
weddings, but as my social circle matured, the invitations naturally
dried up. Yet, when I moved back to my native, but now much more
expensive, Los Angeles in 2000, I suddenly started being invited to
weddings again. Like male characters in a Jane Austen novel, four of
my seven closest friends from my high school class of 1976 got married
and bought houses for the first time in their early forties.
Similarly, the cost of childrearing varies more across the country
than ever before. A study of Census data by the New York Times found
that "Manhattan's 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being
raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005." <<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/affordability-of-family-formation.html
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