Quotulatiousness

November 17, 2012

The argument for a guaranteed annual income program

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:16

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne lays out the benefits of instituting a GAI to replace existing poverty programs:

The basic idea behind the GAI is sound: to consolidate a number of federal and provincial programs, some in cash and some in kind, into a single, universal, unconditional cash benefit, delivered through the tax system. The base amount would be modest: perhaps $10,000-$12,000 per person. Critically, it would be taxed back only gradually, say at 25 cents on the dollar, as earned income rises. Compare that to current practice, where benefits are often withdrawn dollar-for-dollar, or in the case of benefits in kind like free dental care or prescription drugs, are denied altogether to those who leave social assistance: an effective marginal tax rate of 100% or more.

You can see why the people who design and administer these systems do this. They’re trying to save money; they want to target assistance only to those who “need” it; they worry what people would do if given the cash to buy what they want, rather than the services government thinks they should have. But the result of all this careful selection and monitoring is not just condescending and intrusive: it effectively punishes people for taking a job, or working longer hours. This is the key insight of the GAI: dependence is created not so much by giving people money when they don’t work — certainly not at $10,000 a year — as by taking it away from them when they do.

So if all of this makes sense, why hasn’t it been done? One barrier is cost. The more gradually you reduce the transfer as income rises, the more paltry the base amount must be to stay within a given limit; conversely, set a more generous minimum, and you have to impose a steeper clawback. Of course, the arithmetic becomes less stark if you include the revenues saved from the programs the GAI would replace. But here you run into other obstacles.

November 10, 2012

Minimum wage and “living wage”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

Tim Harford discusses the image and reality of Britain’s campaign for “living wages”:

Living wage?

The minimum wage, £6.19 an hour for those 21 and over, is a legal obligation. The living wage, £8.55 an hour in London and £7.45 an hour elsewhere, is the result of a very successful publicity campaign and can count Ed Miliband and Boris Johnson among its advocates. There are no legal sanctions for paying less than the living wage, although Mr Miliband did announce plans to “name and shame” those companies who didn’t. Apparently that is helpful, because “name” rhymes with “shame”.

Why do campaigners say that you can’t live on the minimum wage?

Try living on £6.19 an hour and see how you get on.

For an economist you’re getting very high-minded all of a sudden.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that £6.19 an hour isn’t a lot of money. £8.55 an hour isn’t a lot of money, either, but a lot of people have to get by on less. Unfortunately we economists have to ask awkward questions — for instance, whether these campaigns are likely to help people without much income.

[. . .]

Perhaps we should just raise the legal minimum wage to the same level as the living wage.

Perhaps. Perhaps we should raise the legal minimum wage to a £100m an hour. I think if we did we’d find unemployment might rise. A minimum wage does two things. It will shift money from employers in an imperfectly competitive market to low-paid workers and it will induce some employers to sack workers, even if both employer and employee would prefer a deal struck at an illegally-low wage rate. There’s a case that for the good of low-paid workers, there should be no minimum wage at all. There should be one but it needs to be modest if it isn’t to cause too much unemployment.

Is there any evidence on the right level?

There’s lots, and it is mixed, but on balance it’s in favour of the idea that if you raise the cost of employing people, fewer people will be employed. It is worth bearing in mind that, for a lowly paid worker shifting from job to job, having less work available but at a high hourly rate, isn’t a bad deal. The concern has to be that certain types of people — especially young unskilled workers — will be shut out completely and denied the chance to learn on the job.

October 26, 2012

QotD: Supporting the “undeserving” poor

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

Two of the great and correct insights of libertarianism are that the state has very limited knowledge, and that its interventions often lead to people gaming the system. This is true of welfare spending as of anything else. The government doesn’t have the knowhow to distinguish well between the deserving and undeserving poor. And its efforts to do so are not only expensive — in terms of paying bureaucrats and corporate scroungers and fraudsters — but also bear heavily upon the honest and naive deserving poor whilst the undeserving, who know how to game the system, get off.

Chris Dillow, “Support the undeserving poor”, Stumbling and Mumbling, 2012-10-25

October 11, 2012

Venezuela’s man on a white horse

Filed under: Americas, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill says that the western leftist affection for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez illustrates its intellectual disarray:

For an insight into the collapsed standards, declining intellectual rigour and desperate opportunism of the modern Western left, look no further than its fawning over Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In the past, much of the left — both the radical sections and even some of the stuffy Stalinist crowd — was highly critical of the Bonapartist antics of populist Latin American leaders. They critiqued the way these leaders mobilised the masses to give their narrow, bourgeois, largely state-orientated policies a gloss of legitimacy or the appearance of revolutionism. But now, so isolated is the Western left, so bereft is it of a domestic constituency or anything approaching a political plan, that it sees in Chavez’s twenty-first-century Bonapartism something ‘genuinely progressive’.

This week, Chavez won a fourth term as president of Venezuela. He did not repeat his landslide victory of 2006, instead winning a safe but not-especially-astounding 54 per cent of the vote (on a turnout of 81 per cent). His supporters among Western radicals immediately went into hyperbolic hyperdrive, talking about the ‘revolution’ that Chavez has led in Venezuela and commending him for ‘challenging imperial domination’. Chavez’s posturing against US influence in Latin America and his implementation of social-assistance programmes for the Venezuelan poor are variously described as ‘radical’, ‘progressive’ and part of his broader ‘profoundly revolutionary struggle’. He is compared to Simon Bolivar, the nineteenth-century political leader who liberated much of the Latin American continent from Spanish rule, or to Che Guevara, the more recent Argentine radical beloved of t-shirt sellers in hipster communities across the West.

Yet these accolades for Chavez tell us far more about the state of mind, and deep, existential needs, of the disarrayed left than they do about any revolution taking place in Venezuela. Because in truth, Chavez has far more in common with the populist style of the nationalist leadership pioneered in Latin America by Juan Peron, whom the left castigated for his exploitation of the masses, than he does with yesteryear’s revolutionaries. Juan Peron was an Argentine military leader who, after playing a role in the army’s 1943 seizing of power from the corrupt regime of Ramon Castillo, was elected president of Argentina in 1946, 1951 and briefly again in the 1970s. His rule — which came to be known as Peronism and was influential among populist left-wing leaders in Latin America — consisted of a combination of anti-Western actions, concessions to the working classes and the poor in the form of higher wages and trade union recognition, and populist demagogy. Through this process, Peron was able to build up an impressive mass base of support for his pursuit of nationalist capitalist development in Argentina.

September 22, 2012

Mismeasuring inequality

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

If you haven’t encountered a journalist or an activist going on about the Gini Coefficient, you certainly will soon, as it’s become a common tool to promote certain kinds of political or economic action. It is also useful for pushing certain agendas because while the numbers appear to show one thing clearly (the relative income inequality of a population), it hides nearly as much as it reveals:

The figures they use for a comparison are here. Looking at those you might think, well, if the US is at 0.475, Sweden is at 0.23 (yes, the number of 23.0 for Sweden is the same as 0.23 in this sense) then given that a lower number indicates less inequality then Sweden is a less unequal place than the US. You would of course be correct in your assumption: but not because of these numbers.

For the US number is before taxes and before benefits. The Swedish number is after all taxes and all benefits. So, the US number is what we call “market income”, or before all the things we do to shift money around from rich to poor and the Swedish number (in, fact, the numbers for all other countries) are after all the things we do to reduce inequality.

[. . .]

The US is reporting market inequality, before the effects of taxes and benefits, the Europeans are reporting the inequality after the effect of taxes and benefits.

[. . .]

Which brings us to the 300 million people in the US. Is it really fair to be comparing income inequality among 300 million people with inequality among the 9 million of Sweden? Quite possibly a more interesting comparison would be between the 300 million of the US and the 500 million of the European Union. Or the smaller number in the EU 15, thus leaving out the ex-communist states with their own special problems. Not that it matters all that much as the two numbers for the Gini are the same: 0.3*. Note again that this is post tax and post benefit. On this measure the US is at 0.38. So, yes, the US is indeed more unequal than Europe. But by a lot smaller margin than people generally recognise: or than by he numbers that are generally bandied about.

Which brings us to the second point. Even here the US number is (marginally) over-stated. For even in the post-tax and post-benefit numbers the US is still an outlier in the statistical methods used. In looking at inequality, poverty, in the US we include the cash that poor people are given to alleviate their poverty. But we do not include the things that people are given in kind: the Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8 and so on. It’s possible (I’m not sure I’m afraid) that we don’t include the EITC either. We certainly don’t in the poverty statistics but might in the inequality. All of the other countries do include the effects of such policies. Largely because they don’t offer benefits in kind they just give the poor more money and tell them to buy it themselves. This obviously turns up in figures of how much money the poor have.

September 17, 2012

Harming the poorest during a food price hike

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

The Economist on the least effective ways of dealing with rising food prices:

Although the weather is the proximate cause of the price rises, governments are making matters worse. Look at America’s biofuels policy. By ensuring that a third of the country’s maize is turned into ethanol and fed to cars, it has driven up grain prices and made them more volatile by reducing stocks. At the start of this year America scrapped the subsidy for ethanol, and abolished the tariff on imports of the stuff — steps in the right direction. But a certain amount of ethanol still has to be blended with petrol by law. That keeps prices high.

Bad policies in America are encouraging bad policies elsewhere. Higher prices have spooked importing and exporting countries alike, causing them to turn away from volatile world markets and seek to insulate themselves. Between 2007 and 2011, 33 countries imposed export restrictions on food. Agriculture accounts for less than 10% of world trade, but more than two-thirds of the cost of all border distortions.

[. . .]

Farm protection is like a weed: it grows everywhere and seems impossible to eradicate. This newspaper has been making the case against it since 1843, when we were founded to oppose Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws. Sadly we seem to have made too little progress. At the moment governments are making farming less efficient than it should be. They are increasing poverty. Their policies are otiose, since there are better ways to help the poor, such as direct cash transfers. And they are counterproductive, because they exacerbate the problems they seek to solve.

September 5, 2012

The positive side to rising food prices

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:06

Tim Worstall responds to an article by Michael Hanlon:

    The storm is coming. One of the great dependables of modern life — cheap food — may be about to disappear. If a growing number of economists and scientists are to be believed, we are witnessing a historic transition: from an era when the basics of life have been getting ever more affordable, to a new period when they are ever more expensive.

Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ve not understood the projections. Yes, food is expected to become more expensive. But also more affordable at the same time.

For the driving force of the rise in food prices is expected to be that people are getting richer. Thus able to afford three squares a day, some of them even containing meat. The rise in incomes is expected to be greater than the rise in food prices: thus food becoming both more expensive and more affordable as a portion of incomes.

BTW, if you think that’s not how the word affordable is used in such contexts then do speak to the booze puritans. They say exactly this: booze has become more expensive but cheaper as a portion of incomes: more affordable.

And if incomes do not rise as predicted we don’t expect to see the food price rises. For it is not the idea of 10 billion people that is predicted to raise the prices. It’s the idea of billions currently on $2 a day becoming billions on $20 that is.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, a significant part of the rise in global food prices is driven by particularly stupid government policies on ethanol production.

September 3, 2012

A bit of common sense in food news

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:

Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.

Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.

[. . .]

Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.

Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:

While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.

[. . .]

The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).

Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.

August 24, 2012

The new Malthusian miserabilism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Brendan O’Neill on the once-again popular theories of Reverend Thomas Malthus:

Malthusianism is back in vogue. Not only in theatres in Sloane Square, but across the opinion-forming spectrum. Last year, the human population hit seven billion, giving rise to a boom in handwringing commentary. BBC reporters tell us that ‘uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet’. The Guardian’s environment reporters are forever warning of the dangers of our ‘rapidly growing global population’. Then there’s much-loved celebs like David Attenborough, who recently signed up to the population-panic group the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) and frequently declares: ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.’

The New Malthusians are getting cockier. At the UN Rio+20 Earth summit earlier this year, 105 respectable institutions, including Britain’s increasingly Malthusian Royal Society, urged the international powers-that-be to look beyond the ‘ethical sensitivities’ around the population issue and ‘confront rising global population’. All those wailing babies mean we are now ‘living beyond the planet’s means’, they declared. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping millions of dollars into the distribution of birth-control tools in the developing world. Well-off westerners can now even offset their carbon emissions by helping to prevent the birth of babies in less fortunate places. A website called Pop Offsets, launched by the OPT, allows you to work out how much carbon you emit in your daily life and then tells you how many births you must help to prevent in order to offset that carbon. You make a financial contribution to a reproductive charity; that charity encourages a woman somewhere not to have more kids; and, hey presto, your personal emissions are cancelled out by your contribution to the non-creation of resource-demanding babies. The Guardian’s report on this initiative was illustrated with a photo of babies, 12 of them, just lying there like the problematic drains on nature.

Malthusianism is so ingrained in the outlook of greens and other trendies that people can fantasise about loads of human beings dying off without anyone batting an eyelid. Population panic-merchants often claim that the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet is two billion human beings, so at least five billion less than at present. In a discussion on Radio 3’s super-respectable Nightwaves a couple of years ago, the psychologist and writer Sue Blackmore declared: ‘For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.’ There were no complaints to the BBC: the idea that humans are a problem in need of a solution is widespread in respectable ­circles.

August 23, 2012

The historical “locavore” diet: seasonal gruel and mush

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

sp!ked has an article by authors Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, on the disadvantages of the true locavore diet:

Perhaps the most ludicrous claim made by some ‘locavores’ — activists who argue that food produced near final consumers is superior in a myriad of ways to distant imports — is that the globalised food-supply chain is guilty of crimes against seasonality. Limiting our intake of fresh produce to whatever can be obtained locally at certain times of the year (and preserving the surplus for the remainder), we are told, will not only help atone for agri-business’ fossil fuel-driven ways and constrain us to live within regional ecological limits, but it will also make fresh local food more enjoyable when it is available. As one locavore puts it, ‘deprivation leads to greater appreciation’.

The emphasis on local seasonality by food activists, however, is problematic on several counts. For instance, why do militant locavores limit themselves to local seasonality when they could further insist on truly ‘native’ produce and livestock? Seen in this light, North American agriculture should be essentially limited to turkeys, farmed salmon and a few other fish and shellfish, sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes and some varieties of squashes. (Though the really hardcore North American locavore could go even further by reverting to problematic native crops such as sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, maygrass and little barley that were replaced about one thousand years ago by Mexican imports such as corn and beans.)

Basic logic aside, limiting our food intake to local productions is a one-way ticket to chronic famines and malnutrition. Having in most cases no direct experience with massive crop failures, locavores typically ignore the historical and contemporary toll taken by factors ranging from droughts, floods, heavy rains and frost to hail, windstorms, earthquakes and tsunamis, to say nothing of insect pests, rodents, soil erosion and plant and animal diseases. Yet, the historical evidence on the issue is unequivocal. It was only the development of cost-effective long-distance transportation (primarily the railroad and the steamship) that finally eradicated famines through the large-scale movement of foodstuff from regions that had experienced good harvests to those that had struggled with mediocre ones.

August 14, 2012

Ethanol: starving the third world, by government policy

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

Jeffrey Tucker on the absurd and cruel implications of a government mandate:

Corn prices are officially through the roof, spiking to record highs. It’s been headed this way through six years of crazy volatility. Now the spike is undeniable. At the same time, crop yields are lower they have been since 1995.

Everyone blames the drought, as if the market can’t normally handle a supply change. The real problem is that the corn market is fundamentally misshaped by government interventions that have made a mess of this and many more markets. The distortions are never contained, but spread and spread.

[. . .]

“Corn is the single most important commodity for retail food,” Richard Volpe, an economist for the USDA told the Los Angeles Times. “Corn is either directly or indirectly in about three-quarters of all food consumers buy.”

Fine, then, answer me this, Mr. Government Economist Man: Why is 40% of the corn crop being burned up in our gas tanks? The answer is a Soviet-like, fascist-like, stupid-like government mandate. It is actually relatively new. It came about in 2005 and 2007. It mixes nearly all the gas we can buy with a sticky product now in rather short supply.

Of all the government regulations I’ve looked at in detail over the last 10 years, the ethanol mandate is, by far, the worst. There are no grounds on which it is defensible. None!

Like so many government initiatives, this was supposed to do something good: reduce the consumption of fossil fuel for gasoline production by substituting a proportion of ethanol. While gas was expensive and ethanol was cheap this might make sense — but when ethanol becomes more expensive, and the raw material used to produce the ethanol would be far better used for food and feedstock, the whole policy becomes an act in the theatre of the absurd.

August 12, 2012

Relative poverty is not a very useful measurement

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:37

At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Tim Worstall explains why measuring relative poverty isn’t helpful:

Here actually is the problem with using relative poverty as a measure:

    Compared to the 1960s, China today has higher income inequality, but also incomparably lower levels of material poverty. By Brady’s definition, China was less impoverished in the near-starvation years of the 1960s than it is as an economic superpower today. According to the OECD, during the last three decades the share of Chinese living in absolute poverty dramatically declined from eight in ten to one in ten (Garroway and de Laiglesia 2011). During the same period, relative poverty, measured exactly as Brady measures it, roughly doubled. Although inequality and relative poverty are not irrelevant for measuring the well-being of a society, we should be apprehensive about a measure of poverty that is incapable of detecting the largest decline in material poverty in human history.

As pointed out, a measure of poverty that not just ignores, but actually gets the sign wrong on, the largest reduction in poverty in the history of our species is of limited value.

[. . .]

Which leads us to something of a conclusion: it’s fine to consider the distribution of incomes within a society. But we do it rather too much with the constant political obsession over relative poverty. We need to be paying a lot more attention to absolute standards of living: most especially how these change over time. Most specifically I’m thinking about the effects attempts to reduce relative poverty might affect our ability to increase absolute standards of living in the future.

August 9, 2012

Individual property rights for First Nations people

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Canada’s treatment of First Nations people has been a disgrace for decades. After locating them (for the most part) on out-of-the-way reserves, they are mostly forgotten by the media and the politicians until something truly awful happens (like the situation on the Attawapiskat reserve) and then TV crews are dispatched, speeches are made and … usually the amnesia kicks in and all is forgotten.

In the National Post, Tasha Kheiriddin suggests that the time is finally ripe to address one of the root causes of poverty among First Nations people on Canadian reserves: their inability to own property. Band councils hold the land “in trust” for their people, which means there are lots of opportunities for those close to the band council to benefit from the administration of the shared resources. Not all bands suffer from this kind of corruption, but many do. Allocating the land to private ownership by individuals would have many beneficial effects:

This week, the federal government confirmed that it is working on legislation to allow the ownership of private property on First Nations reserves. Some aboriginal leaders, such as former chief Manny Jules, who heads the First Nations Tax Commission, applauded the move. But others see ulterior, sinister motivations at work, as Dr. Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw professor in the Indigenous Studies department at Ryerson University in Toronto, told Postmedia News’ Teresa Smith. “The quickest way to get that Enbridge pipeline through our territory would be to divide up those lands into individual parcels because it would be a lot quicker to pick off individuals — especially the impoverished ones. And then, if one neighbour sees that an individual gets $100,000 for his property, then what’s someone else, a single mom, with three kids, living on welfare gonna do?”

It’s easy to imagine situations on reserves that are currently governed by band councils that are less than scrupulous where the best land will somehow end up in the hands of the very people who currently benefit from the council’s favour. That is certainly one of the challenges that any such legislation will have to attempt to curtail (even assuming they can get enough support from existing First Nations representatives and groups to move forward with any privatization laws at all).

There is also no doubt that granting First Nations people full property rights – the right to buy, sell, mortgage, use and develop land – is a worthy cause. It would create an ownership culture, instead of the current system (in which reserve land is owned by the federal government, in trust for its Indian residents), which fosters dependency. It would free individual aboriginals from the too-often self-serving grip of band councils. At the same time, it would create responsible government, should those bands seek to tax property, by making them accountable to the property taxpayers they would then serve.

July 19, 2012

Walter Olson: more red flags in the Regnerus study

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Some studies provide results that challenge common beliefs and understandings. Others reinforce them. But some studies are designed from the desired results backwards. The Regnerus study on gay parents’ influence on their children appears to be one of the latter. Walter Olson points out that even in its own terms, the study shows something different from what it is intended to:

By now almost everyone has had a whack at the recent Mark Regnerus (University of Texas) study claiming that young adults who report having a gay parent score worse on a range of life-success indicators than children from intact biological families. According to the study, these kids as young adults have lower educational attainment, are arrested more often, and have more trouble in their own relationships, among other problems. Critics have pointed out that the story is mostly one of collapsed heterosexual families, not “same-sex parenting”: The great majority of the kids were born to male-female couples, most of the presumedly gay dads and many of the moms didn’t get custody of their kids after their relationships dissolved, and few of the kids were actually raised through long periods by gay couples. LGBT advocates point out that sociologist Mark Regnerus accepted $695,000 from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute to carry out the study.

But many critics have missed one of Regnerus’ most unexpected findings, one that may illuminate his study’s shortcomings. Specifically, and feeding into pretty much all the other problems, the study diagnoses children of gay parents as having a huge problem with poverty. Here’s Regnerus:

    Sixty-nine (69) percent of LMs [respondents with lesbian mothers] and 57% of GFs [those with gay fathers] reported that their family received public assistance at some point while growing up, compared with 17% of IBFs [those with intact two-parent biological families]; 38% of LMs said they are currently receiving some form of public assistance, compared with 10% of IBFs. Just under half of all IBFs reported being employed full-time at present, compared with 26% of LMs.

Those are big gaps. And of course they’re much at odds with the affluent image of gay families presented in both pro- and anti-gay-parenting literature as well as Modern Family-style popular entertainment. What do they signify?

Probably the biggest single reason is the one cited at the outset: This is mostly a survey of what happens when heterosexual families crack up. (Interestingly, if a married couple stayed together, they were counted as an “IBF,” no matter whether one or both partners pursued same-sex liaisons.) Decades of data indicate that children of family breakup do worse than children whose parents stay together, on many variables related to adult success. One reason, though not the only reason, is that they grow up significantly poorer.

June 1, 2012

QotD: Debunking the notion that today’s students face “unprecedented” challenges

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Far from being penalized, this generation may be the most privileged ever. Every generation lives through challenges. Our grandparents or great-grandparents lived in a society of gross social inequality and endured a world war that consumed 35 million lives. Their children came of age in the Great Depression, followed by six years of war in which another 60 million died. Their own children, the Baby Boomers, were without question a pampered generation, yet even they lived through long stretches of high unemployment and deep economic uncertainty. The oil shock of the 1970s ushered in a decade of stagflation — high inflation accompanied by stagnant growth and high unemployment — that made decent jobs no easier to nail down than they are today. The 20 years since the end of the 1980s has been a cycle of boom and bust that has seen millions of people lose homes, careers and life savings they spent decades building, often watching them vanish overnight through circumstances far beyond their control.

The notion that there was a time when anyone could coast through high school and land a nice secure career with minimal effort is sheer fantasy. Yes, a university degree carried more weight, because there were fewer of them, but that same scarcity limited the advantage to a relatively small group. The majority scratched out positions in competition with one another just as they do today. There was never, in my recollection, a bull market in sociologists, psych specialists or arts majors. A BA didn’t help you sell anything, build anything or invent anything. Entrepreneurs and self-starters never needed a university degree, and they don’t now.

[. . .]

If the 1960s and 1970s was a golden age of easy work and high pay, I missed it. If people skipped from school directly into secure jobs, happy families and a home of their own, it’s news to me. The challenges faced by youth are daunting, but no more daunting than they ever were. If Montreal’s graduates have been deprived of anything, it would appear to be lessons in history. Because they seem to have no clue how much tougher they’d have had it in almost any earlier generation they would care to choose.

Kelly McParland, “Quebec students are big on delusion, short on history”, National Post, 2012-05-31

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