A Liberal and Conservative Mash-up

David Brooks has a good column in today’s NYT on the way social breakdowns—in marriage and family and education—interact with global economic change. He shares the story of a young woman who, though tough and hard-working, loses out on a good education because of her family problems and an early pregnancy. She’s stuck, unable to advance because she doesn’t have the education she needs. Raising a child alone holds her back. Taxing the rich won’t help her; neither will cutting taxes on the rich and deregulating the economy. Both Democratic and Republican policy prescriptions seem to miss her situation, and to miss the American economy and its actual issues.

Brooks says we need bold action to strengthen families and support education, so that the whole population—not just an educated elite—can compete in a globalized economy. He says we also need a revamped, lean tax-and-regulatory system so that business can compete globally. “This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector.”

Two caveats. First, taxes aren’t about punishment, but about allocating resources. We’ve cut taxes for the rich so that they pay at the lowest rates in modern history. Nudging that back a bit isn’t the second coming of Robespierre. It can help provide some of those family and educational supports that people need. The money has to come from somewhere.

And second, it’s not clear that American business is in trouble because of excessive taxes and regulation. There are problems, certainly, but right now we’re digging out of a hole enabled by under-regulation. “Libertarian in the capitalist sector” sometimes produces disaster—just as often, I would say, as does “activism in the human capital sector.” Deregulation and simplification of taxes have to be done right—and there are plenty of capitalist forces, throwing lots of bribes in Washington, who want to bend the rules in their favor.

That said, I agree with the thrust of Brooks’ piece. I doubt the government is ever very good at industrial policy, advancing “green jobs” or whatever. I want the government to set the rules—including a carbon tax—and let the forces of capitalism find the preferred way.

The government is really the only way, however, to provide good social services including education for the less-than-elite. This is not just do-gooding; it helps bring economic opportunity to people who will work hard and play by the rules. This too has to be done right. But when it is, that is good for us all.

Optimists vs. Pessimists

Chris Blattman, who teaches poli sci and econ at Yale, has a good post on his blog today. He quotes a writer from The Guardian saying that the development paradigm of the 20th century has run out of steam, then refutes him. It’s a good summary of the argument development optimists (mostly economists) make against development pessimists (mostly ecologists or humanitarians). What stands out in this argument, as usual, is that pessimists aren’t familiar with what’s happening from the point of view of macro-economics. The world economy is growing fast, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. The percentage, if not the absolute number, of people who go poor and hungry is down. Of course, this could be the giddy feeling one has halfway down from a plunge off a cliff. Pessimists can argue that, especially with the specter of global warming haunting everything. But at least give the optimists their due: life has become better for a lot of people.

The Blind Side

I want to tardily commend The Blind Side, Michael Lewis’ book about a poor black kid and a rich white family, now a major motion picture. I liked the movie, which is mainly faithful to the book, but I liked the book better.

Michael Lewis is a great storyteller. He made me laugh out loud at least half a dozen times, and choke up occasionally too. A lot of the book is focused on the game of football—only moderately interesting to me—but the book’s core is a human drama of a kid redeemed from awful circumstances. Michael Oher never met his father, and his addicted mother had 13 kids whom she made no attempt to raise. Michael and his siblings had to scrounge for food on the Memphis streets from the time he was a little boy. He always ran from foster homes, and hardly attended school except to get the free lunches. When we first meet him he seems more animal than human. By sheer chance he was enrolled in a white suburban Christian school when he was 16, and he ended up taken in by a rich white family. The book is about how Michael managed to graduate from high school and get courted by football coaches all over America.

It took a massive effort. His adoptive parents invested time and emotion and huge amounts of cash. His senior year they hired a full-time tutor. He really didn’t know anything, not even how to ask a question. Several times the project seemed to crash. But the family kept trying, and Michael kept trying, and they succeeded.

“Of course, he wasn’t the first black kid to rise from poverty and make it in the white world. But Michael was different, because the white world had so unusually aided and abetted his rise. The white world had watched Michael Oher happen, or thought they had, and so could imagine how he might be replicated. He haunted that world.”

He haunted the Christian school, for instance, that had bent over backwards to help a kid with zero academic ability. After his success, a lot of other poor black kids applied to the school. The school decided they couldn’t absorb them, even though Michael Oher’s adoptive family volunteered to pay their tuition.

“He haunted that world” because, on the one hand, he proved that it could be done, if people were willing to give a lot. On the other hand, it took a lot. The Blind Side chronicles how much in considerable detail. It’s hard to imagine giving as much as Michael’s adoptive family did. And most people have a lot less disposable money and time than they did.

The family comes off as tough and street-smart, with a sentimental core. For several years, Michael Oher dominated their lives (and they had kids of their own, about Michael’s age). At one point, when Michael ran away and disappeared, it all seemed likely to go down the drain. “’You think this is it?’ Leigh Anne [the mother] had asked. And the truth was, Sean [the father] didn’t know. ‘Your mind does funny things when it’s idle,’ said Sean. ‘But that’s when I decided that the downside was that we’d helped some kid—so even if he’d been playing us all along there really was no downside.’”

But there is a downside, and that’s why The Blind Side is haunting. We could make a difference in the millions of lives decimated by the pathologies of urban poverty. Michael Oher’s case shows how. In order to truly help, though, we’d have to give a lot more than charity.

Dickens and the Poor

My wife Popie and I just finished watching the 8-part BBC series of Bleak House. Both of us had recently re-read the novel, and watching the BBC’s dramatization brought back and solidified in our minds the whole magnificent array of characters. Some of Dickens’ novels tell a better story—David Copperfield, for example, or Tale of Two Cities. But none, I think, assembles a greater cast of monsters and gargoyles.

Dickens uses the whole range of society, high and low. The poor always exist in his world, and not just as an abstract reality but as specific individuals. You cannot read Dickens without feeling uncomfortably aware of poor people, not as a social phenomenon, but as people. Contrast that with modern novels, in which I think it’s fair to say poor people hardly exist at all. George Orwell wrote in 1940: “The typical modern novel is a novel about a novelist.”

Orwell also wrote that while Dickens was not particularly religious, he was “Christian.” “Where he is Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.” That fighting sense, along with the constant presence of the poor, awakens the moral sense when one reads Dickens.

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Orwell’s magnificent essay on Dickens is worth reading and re-reading. (http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd).  Here are a few quotations:

“His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”

“It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s school being as different from Creakle’s ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different.”

“That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong. All he can finally say is, ‘Behave decently’, which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.”

“The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”

“Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details — rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles — and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.”

“Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture.”

The Limitations of Microfinance

If you pay any attention to economic development in the third world, you have heard about microfinance. It’s the hottest thing going. Development organizations announce their involvement in microfinance with a kind of sacred hum. People are appropriately fascinated by the rise of Kiva.org, a website that enables you to engage in microcredit from the comfort of your computer chair.
Microfinance organizations offer financial services to people too poor to attract the services of traditional banks. They offer small loans—microcredit—and may also offer savings accounts, insurance, and fund transfer services. For example, I wrote a forthcoming article for Christianity Today Magazine about a wonderful Filipino group called CCT. The article features a woman named Cindy Caro who first borrowed $85, which she put into a processed meat business, selling hotdogs, sweetened beef and pork, ham and spiced beef door to door. Now she operates a small store.
Some microcredit organizations place borrowers in small groups that meet together and guarantee each other, so that nobody can get a second loan until everybody in the group has repaid their first loan. Peer pressure and peer encouragement help borrowers stay on task. They are less isolated and less prone to discouragement.
I’ve been amazed how many organizations have taken up microfinance. They all offer stories of families transformed by small businesses made possible through small loans—usually less than $100, at least to begin. Women buy supplies or equipment with these loans and (typically) make and sell food, leather goods, or clothing. Their profits enable them to send children to school, provide food for the family, improve their homes, and build an expanding business.
Without question, microfinance is a wonderful development. Still, its quick rise to prominence, and its adoption by practically every last development agency, says a lot about how tough development is. They must not have had very effective tools, if they are all so eager to adopt this new one.
Microfinance promises to be something different—an approach that really does transform lives and communities. Here’s a short list of the benefits of microfinance:

• –Taking out loans, buying insurance, and saving money all teach people how to be future oriented. Instead of living day to day, they have to think about their lives into the future, plan for the future, make sacrifices in anticipation of a better future, and work toward improved lives. This is the essence of capitalism. It is worth noting that development agencies that have historically had mixed feelings about capitalism are devoted to teaching small-scale capitalism through microfinance.
• –Microfinance helps women. Almost all micro-borrowers are women, who develop home businesses. Women are generally more responsible than men, as any development worker will tell you. They use their profits to feed and educate their children, instead of blowing it on booze and gambling. In many patriarchal societies men control all the resources, and waste them. Microfinance gives women some power over their own lives, which they often use for the benefit of their families.
• –Because many microfinance programs rely on peer pressure and peer support, they promote community building and mutual accountability. A culture of responsibility and encouragement can be built up.
• –Microfinance programs can be self-funding. Some microfinance organizations even operate successfully as for-profit banks. For charities, there’s the prospect of investing once and moving on, rather than continually pouring resources into a bottomless pit.

However, microfinance has its limitations. This you won’t probably learn from the websites of development organizations.

• –Microfinance helps women. That’s good, but not good enough to transform communities. Communities are formed of equal parts of men and women, who have a strong affinity for forming bonds with each other. Development that helps women but doesn’t involve men has a natural self-limitation. You can’t have transformational community development without transforming men and women. (For more on this, see my article “Where are the Men?” http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/august/23.41.html)
• –Microfinance is small scale. True, small businesses become large businesses sometimes. But more often they don’t. A family may be greatly helped by the extra income from selling sandals at the market. Creating something larger, something that fully supports the family and creates jobs, is rare. (This is probably one reason men don’t participate. They are attracted to larger enterprises outside the home.)
• –Microcredit loans are expensive. Interest rates charged by microfinance programs are often over 20%. They have to be, because overhead is high for administering tiny loans. That means it’s hard for borrowers to make enough profit to really get ahead, after they pay loan costs. My friend Wachira counsels poor people to start with what resources they have or can borrow interest-free from family members.

Certainly all microfinance organizations tell amazing stories of family transformation—and sometimes even of community transformation. When you hear those stories, though, keep in mind what I call developmental cherry picking.
In every community, whether rich or poor, there are a few people who are naturally curious, adventurous, and adaptive. Their lives may be indistinguishable from their neighbors’ because there have been so few opportunities in their community. But as soon as some outside force comes into the neighborhood, they see opportunities and take them.
If you read missionary stories from earlier times you will often learn of such people. When missionaries came into their community the early adopters sent their children to the missionary school, they tried missionary medicine instead of traditional remedies (sometimes violating their own community’s strongly-held customs), and they adopted European agricultural methods. In these missionary stories a common plot development has to do with the difficulty of getting the rest of the community to stop persecuting these early adopters, but to follow their example.
Similarly, when microfinance programs go into an Indian slum, they will unfailingly find people who seem to be waiting for just such help. They not only take loans, they build businesses. Their transformed lives make great stories, and since they appear just like other slum dwellers, it seems as though microfinance will transform other lives too, as it spreads.
It’s not necessarily so. Others will take loans, which will help them augment their incomes, but microcredit won’t necessarily change their lives. As I understand it, research studies have yet to demonstrate the power of microfinance to alleviate poverty. There’s a big difference between transforming early adopters and transforming everybody else.
Which brings me back to an earlier point: development is tough. Where it happens on a large scale—in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam in recent decades, in Europe and America many generations ago—it is not brought about by agencies. There is some combination of opportunity (usually brought about by a decent government) and a widespread cultural mindset and mood. We don’t know how to develop those. Microfinance helps teach future thinking and planning, and that may contribute to a large-scale cultural shift. But nowhere is it written that alleviating poverty on a small scale naturally leads to community transformation.
Our job is to help people in need. Microfinance is a good way to do it. But don’t think it’s the final solution. We’re still looking for that.

The Champions of Marriage–Part 1

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of short posts on marriage.

After thousands of scientific studies of marriage, the one number everybody knows is 50%. Fifty percent of American marriages end in divorce, more or less. It’s a statistic made for pessimism and fatalism, as in “fifty percent of the people in this room will get a divorce.”

Another fact is less well known. As researchers have sliced and diced the data on marriage, they have found one group of Americans for whom marriage does not appear threatened. This group—about 25% of the population–has a low divorce rate that has dropped by half in the last decade. People in this group rarely have babies out of wedlock. They tend to marry and stay married.

As a reader of this blog, you are probably a member of this important subgroup. It is not defined by faith or pro-family beliefs. It is defined by a college education.

Approximately 25% of adult Americans have graduated from college—a number that seems to be fairly stable. Their divorce rate after ten years of marriage, as reported by The Economist in a May 24, 2007 article, has plummeted to 16.5%, just over half what it was a decade before. Only 4% of college-educated women have children out of wedlock. They tend to be pro-marriage. Whereas once college-educated women were less likely to marry than those with less education, now they are more likely.

On the other end of the scale, women who dropped out of high school have seen their ten-year divorce rate rise in the past decade, from 38% to 46%. For those who completed high school the ten-year divorce rate is also rising, though not as fast, to 38%.

How can this be, that the college educated are the champions of marriage?  Their faithfulness to marriage seems counterintuitive, since higher education tends to be a secularizing force, and the college-educated generally voice support for alternative lifestyles like gay marriage or single childbearing.

My son Silas related a startling experience at Stanford. His dorm of about 100 residents had a “get to know you” session. At one point they asked students to divide themselves according to a series of questions—how many played a musical instrument, how many had acted in a play, how many had three or more siblings, that sort of thing. One question was whether their parents were divorced. Almost everybody in the room—all but a handful—rushed to the side of “intact family.” Silas was amazed. He expected a very high divorce rate among the families of these liberal-minded students.

College graduates may think and talk very liberally, but they don’t act like all choices are equal. Most college educated people are quite careful and determined when it comes to marriage, as with most things in life.

These statistics help explain, by the way, why the intelligentsia don’t treat divorce like the plague it is. Intellectually they may know that divorce is a very common thing and a very bad thing. But in their daily experience, among their friends and colleagues, the problem is not severe. It involves significant failures and deep wounds, but only among less than one fifth of the families they know well. College-educated opinion leaders are like people who read about bad traffic, but who find that whenever they get on the freeway, traffic is light.

By all the socioeconomic indicators, America’s loss of faith in marriage has proven disastrous—bad for the people who cohabit, have babies solo, or marry only to divorce, and terrible for the children who grow up with only one biological parent. There is really little room for discussion on this point. Literally thousands of studies have been done by people who don’t necessarily start out favorable to marriage. Their findings are all but unanimous and overwhelming. Marriage good. Everything else, bad. That’s the subject of another blog post.

The question I want to address is: why do the college-educated get this so much better than the rest of us?

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Statistics don’t reveal why college supports marriage. Surely it has little or nothing to do with what people learn in the classroom. The body of knowledge that a student gains in four years of college—whether in international relations or in electrical engineering–has little to do with keeping a marriage alive in the 21st century.

One thing does reliably happen in college, however: the student gets four years older. Statistically, those who marry at 22 are more likely to stay married than those who marry at 18. Four years make a difference in brain development and personal maturity. Just putting off marriage for college is a plus.

Also, college graduates make more money than high school graduates. Money is a major stress factor in marriages, so it makes sense that better incomes will lead to less stressful marriages.

However, this relationship with money is complex. Much of the data actually suggest that causation goes in the other direction—that successful marriages lead to better incomes. Single-parent families (those that either never married or that divorced, from all income levels) have a poverty rate five times that of two-parent biological families. Of course, this is partly explained by the fact that two adults can earn more than one. But step-families—where you do have two adults—experience poverty at almost double the rate of intact marriages.

Economist Robert Lerman looked at women from the very poorest, uneducated and unemployed backgrounds who got pregnant out of wedlock. Following them for an average of twelve years, he found that 33% would live below the poverty level at least four years out of the twelve. Some, however, got married before giving birth–a “shotgun marriage.” They subsequently had a 38% higher standard of living than those who did not marry. Twenty percent would still experience at least four years of poverty, but compared to a whopping 47% of those who did not marry, their fortunes greatly improved.

According to studies cited in The Economist, married men drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder. They earn substantially more than single men with similar education and job experience. A case can be made that marriage is the best financial tool we know—more potent even than education for helping people succeed.

Ultimately it’s a fool’s game to argue about whether education, marriage or good jobs has the greatest effect in helping people. College, marriage and higher incomes all tend to go hand in hand, and it’s hard to say what causes what.

I would suggest that you’re really looking at an aspect of character. People with certain character traits tend to stick at school, they tend to stick at marriage, they tend to do better in their jobs. By character I do not necessarily mean altruism. There are other qualities that other generations have counted important. Think of the Romans, more interested in fortitude and courage than in kindness.

What character qualities are we talking about? At least this: College graduates can defer gratification (they do their homework) because they have been taught the value of self-discipline (usually by their married parents). This makes them successful in their careers, and it makes them successful in their marriages. A college education may make college graduates less moralistic about marriage, but it doesn’t make them less practical. It doesn’t keep them from seeing that marriage pays. So they invest in it. And they know how to invest.

Kay Hymowitz makes the case that every young person needs a personal life map. The old one was simple and memorable: “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Mary with a baby carriage.” Hymowitz says that the college-educated fiercely hold on to that map. They exert phenomenal energy in finding and securing the ideal partner, they put off marriage and children (if not sex) until they finish their education; they then marry and have children, whom they in turn supervise and train very carefully for success—education, homework, discipline, a wide understanding of the world, good relationships, a solid marriage.

Those with less education may be less pragmatic. They may not be as well equipped to act in a disciplined way. Perhaps they never learned to get their homework done. They are less likely to plan ahead, and more prone to act based on emotion.

These are generalizations, of course, with many exceptions on both sides. I give them to remind you that education is more than a matter of sitting in class. Graduates succeed not merely because they have mastered a body of knowledge, but because they have mastered themselves.

School is not the only place where self-control and forward thinking is learned, however. It is learned in families. (Some immigrant cultures, Jewish and Chinese for example, excel at it.) Sometimes it is learned in church—see the histories of Methodism and Pentecostalism for examples.

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I have been struck by the relationship between college and marriage, because it works to correct a blind spot—my blind spot. When facing social problems, Christians tend to emphasize morality and spirituality. Regarding marriage, we emphasize what is morally right—to love each other sacrificially, to not divorce. We also emphasize the spiritual transformations that enable us to do what is right—the “come to Jesus” that can change marriage from an onerous burden to a joyful freedom.

Not to take anything away from these emphases, but we need more. Demographic studies show that American evangelicals are, on the whole, less educated than the general population. Not surprisingly, they have a high divorce rate, even though they are on average quite committed to the institution of marriage and to spiritual growth.

Faith and morality do matter, everything else being equal. A college graduate with an active faith is more likely to stay married than a non-believer or a nominal believer with a college education. An actively Christian high school dropout is more likely to stay married than an agnostic high school dropout. However, education makes considerably more difference in the divorce rate than faith does.

And that makes theological sense. Marriage is not fundamentally an institution for Christians. It is a human institution, offered by God to the whole human race, and practiced by virtually every society on the globe. Christianity changed marriage for the better in many ways, such as by emphasizing love, and seeing wives as partners, not property. But the fundamentals of marriage pertain to those of all faiths and those without one. They are strikingly practical. We sometimes blanch at how materialistically earlier generations looked at matchmaking. Marriage was as much about inheritance as about love and romance. Today, not so much has changed. Marriage is still very much about our personal and family welfare. It very much involves passing on what we have to future generations—not just property, but also commitments and lifestyle.

Faith doesn’t substitute for qualities of character, maturity, responsibility, rationality, self-control, and deferral of gratification. If we excelled in these, we wouldn’t have a divorce rate near 50%.

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I would like to frame the challenge this way: can we teach non-college-graduates to think about marriage the way college graduates do? We can’t send everyone to college. Can we pass on discipline, forward-thinking and rational self-interest in other ways? John Wesley, they say, accidentally created a generation of shopkeepers—people with the internal structures, the methods, that made them successful at business. Can we create a generation of people who stick at marriage?

It might help if we began to talk about marriage in a more practical way. It might help if we began to emphasize what a vast practical difference marriage makes. Instead of talking about love, let’s talk about benefits. In a future post, I’ll discuss that.