No one is claiming that changes in the nature of labor fully explain the obesity epidemic, or at least I hope no one is claiming that. Obviously, the obesity epidemic in children is one of the most worrisome things to be concerned about, and children don't even have jobs. Clearly, the size of plates, the size of portions, the crap filled with corn syrup that agribusiness sticks into processed food in order to maximize their profits, the Federal government's agricultural subsidies, which are closely related to the former, the sub-threshold addictive characteristics of information technology that has now surpassed television in creating the proverbial couch potato, and more besides are all related to the obesity epidemic. And the obesity epidemic, in turn, is a major influence in healthcare costs, because everybody knows that overweight people are expensively unhealthy. There is just no getting away from the basics, and basic causal connections.
The second story is buried back on page A22. The headline reads, "Married Couples Are No Longer a Majority, Census Finds." According to the article, married couples dropped below half of all American households some years ago, sometime during the past decade, but only the 2010 census data show the shift. Deeper down in the article is really quite a breathtaking statistic. Married couples represented 48% of American households in 2010, compared to 78% in 1950. That is a shocking change in just 60 years. On a state-by-state basis, in 2000 there were only six states in which the number of married people constituted less than half the population; by 2010 that number had jumped to 37 states. That is a shocking change in just 10 years. According to experts cited in the article, the biggest change over the past 10 years was a jump in the number of households headed by women without husbands––up 18% in just one decade.
This is a complicated subject. For one thing, in the lower strata of the American socioeconomic ladder, far more men of working age are not working than women. According to the basic data, it's something like 1/5, which by historical standards is huge for the United States. This ramifies into marriage statistics because, as the article points out and as many other studies have indicated, single women can sometimes get by supporting themselves and their children, but it is much harder to also support a nonworking spouse. Solution? Don't get married or stay married, and so don't get yourself obligated to a nonworking spouse in the first place. This means that changes in the American political economy in the context of globalization, with so many lower-level manufacturing jobs having been exported over the past 30 years, have a direct effect on the marriage rate.
But whatever the reasons are for the decline of marriage, the impact on society ought not to be uncontroversial: It's bad for kids. It is much more difficult to convey basic values and provide the building blocks of integrity for adult personalities in the context of broken and stressed families. A fellow named W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has it about right, it seems to me: "It's troubling because those kids are much more likely to be exposed to instability, complex family relations and poverty."
But, of course, this basic point remains controversial. It has been controversial for many years. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan made this same point back in the 1960s in the context of trying to understand poverty among blacks, he was ridiculed for it. Since then we have had a whole host of people telling us that the nuclear family has no effect at all on the building of character and consequently in the cumulative quotient of right and wrong behavior in society. The nuclear family has been pillaged for inculcating the horrors of patriarchy. Indeed, a lot of the trashing of the nuclear family has had to do with the frantic efforts of feminists to show that their supposed liberation could not possibly have any downside for society as a whole.
(One must be careful here; the nuclear family is not an ideal institution within which to raise children either. In modern society, the nuclear family is a vulnerable and more often than it should be a dysfunctional institution. A good case can be made that a proper interpretation of the phrase "it takes a village" actually makes a whole lot of sense if by it one means that just a mother and a father require help to raise healthy children; except of course that the way that phrase was used was improper––namely, it was used as yet another battering ram against the nuclear family. All I am saying here is that the nuclear family is better for children than no family at all, and that imagining that the nontraditional sexual cohabitation patterns so ubiquitous in America today themselves somehow automatically produce the functional equivalent of a nurturing " village" is totally unwarranted. This is a little like saying that a drug-induced hallucination is the functional equivalent of normal dreaming.)
Unfortunately for the feminists of 30 years ago, life just does not work the way they hoped it would. Today, as Kay Hymowitz has argued, many young women look around and ask themselves, where are all the real men? And they honestly don't have a clue as to the answer, which is that post-feminist political correctness has wussified the vast majority of them. We cannot escape the basics: Reality is a synonym for trade-offs. You get something valuable, you invariably risk losing something valuable. Over the years a mountain of irrefutable social science research has shown exactly the opposite of the feminist claim. Liberals just don't want to hear it, so they don't. Indeed, some liberals go so far as to claim, in a closely related subject area, that the environment of the home has no impact on early childhood education, a contention that only an intellectual or a partisan moron could believe.
In this case, I would suggest that the evidence seems to show that even obesity is related to the breakdown of the family. That is how I combine these two articles from today's paper. In addition to the factors I noted above that lie behind the obesity epidemic, another very likely is stress. A lot of people eat more when they're stressed out. A lot of people eat more when they eat alone, too; constant snacking is a sign of stress and loneliness is notorious for producing stress or adding to its other sources. And obviously, people, especially of modest economic means and not too much education about nutrition, are far more likely to eat fast-food garbage, which is extremely fattening, if they don't have a family to go home to, especially one where someone takes the time to prepare a home-cooked meal. Taking time to prepare and share a meal with the family amid conversation reduces stress and you eat less, too, because you are more psychologically as well as nutritionally satisfied––especially if you right-size your plates, as well. You can't avoid the basics.
My wife has wisely warned me not to become a curmudgeon in my older age. I try. I even created a sign that I post in my office to help me remember.
But when I think about these two articles together, it makes me sad. I can't help feeling that things have changed in the United States largely for the worse in my lifetime. Not only are we a fatter nation and one less able to raise honest successor generations, but our political system is also broken. It is broken for many reasons, but the one that stands out most has a very simple name: corruption. Our political class (read: Congress) and our high business class (read: Wall Street) are made up increasingly of people who do not know right from wrong, or if they do know right from wrong somehow manage to persuade themselves that it doesn't apply to them. We have driven the social power of religion from public space, and just like the feminists who promised us no harm possible in all they sought, the secularists who promised us no harm from all they sought have also been proven deeply and deadly wrong. Into this void an old menace has slowly but ineluctably crept, and it is the menace of plutocracy. Our laws are up for auction to the highest bidder, and so is their enforcement. We no longer take seriously the wisdom in the motto of my alma mater: "Leges sine moribus vanae."
Tax law is a very good example. It is bought by the rich, for the rich. And what money can't buy in terms of law proper, money can buy in terms of shady lawyers and accountants who create the filthy space that should not exist between mere tax avoidance and tax evasion. An elite that cannot tax itself is an elite in very serious trouble in the long and not-so-long run. At a certain point even a bread-and-circus distracted population will notice and get tired of subsidizing the decadence of their social "betters." Remember the French Revolution? A word to the would-be wise.
Am I really trying to draw a link between the decline of marriage and the decay of our political system? You're damned right I am. You can't escape the basics. A governmental system is only as good as the people who make it up. That is why very many years ago Thomas Carlyle was able to conclude that "no reform save a moral one will avail." He was right then, and he's still right now. That is why, to take a contemporary example, a society composed of basically honest people polices itself, and there is no need for draconian regulation of the market. But a society that is composed of basically dishonest people cannot be saved even by draconian regulation. That is the simple truth that, unfortunately, the current debate over regulating the financial system in the wake of the 2008 collapse never addresses.
As long as very large and even growing numbers of Americans respect no social norms beyond what their individual ambition chooses to abide, as long as so many of us lack the self-restraint that flows from the mutual obligations of a stable family, we will have a society, and that society will have a government, that is decadent and dysfunctional. There is no gimmick that can save us. There is no man promising hope and change that can really make a difference. There is no escaping the basics.
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