I Hate to Say I Told You So, But, I told you so....

I've been saying for some time that the path of marriage law is to reduce marriage to a series of 5 year renewable term contracts. Most recently, I said it in my Witherspoon article, here.

Now, someone is actually proposing it, in Germany. See here:

OK, so I was off by 2 years.They're proposing 7 year contract. Please notice, the proposal is serious; the FOX hosts and their guest are taking it seriously.
A bit of data:
it takes about 20 years for 50% of marriages to end in divorce.
Cohabiting couples are more likely to break up, than married couples. When cohabiting couples do get married, they have a higher divorce rate than couples who didn't live together. So, the advice given in this clip is grotesquely irresponsible.
Treating marriage as a contract will make you miserable. My first book, Love and Economics explains why.

More Time of Grace

This is my first Mother's Day since my mother's death. I realize that I am the oldest living woman on either side of my family. My mother and mother-in-law are now both gone. All my aunts are deceased. I have a few female cousins who are older than I am. I guess that puts me at the top of the generational ladder. I feel slightly disoriented.

Shortly after returning home from my mother's funeral, I learned that friends of ours lost one of their sons. He had committed suicide in another state. They held a memorial service for him there, at exactly the time that our family was burying our mother. No one in our circle of friends realized what had happened until they returned to Southern California, and held a funeral here. By that time, almost 10 days had passed.

All of us swung into action, to bring them dinners, send cards and call on them. And I must say, looking out for them has made it much easier to deal my the loss of my own mother. Not only is their loss deeper and more difficult, but I feel better when I am not preoccupied with myself.

In the course of talking with people about bringing them dinner, I found out that another person in our circle of friends had lost her sister. Her sister died right around the time of the son's funeral in Southern California. She called up the mother to bring her a meatloaf dinner. And the mother replied that she had just made a shepherd's pie for her family. The Gift of the Magi.

This whole period has reminded me why we pray. (I realize that not all of my readers are religious: I ask your indulgence for a moment.) Prayer works at the natural levela and at the supernatural level. Set aside the supernatural for the moment, since we don't really know how that works. Sometimes non-believers ridicule prayer, thinking that we are indulging ourselves in wishful thinking to make ourselves more powerful than we really are, or avoiding responsibility for genuine action. At best, prayer is a harmless distraction. At worst, the distraction immobilizes us, by creating the impression of doing something, while actually doing nothing substantial.

I actually think the opposite is true: prayer helps us confront our limitations directly. Often, we pray precisely because we know we don't have the time, the money or the proximity to do anything to help. Prayer works at the natural level because it focuses our minds on the good of the person we pray for. Often, we can't do much for the other person. We feel powerless, and in fact we are powerless over the biggest and most important facts: I can't bring my friend's son back. We can't do anything for the typhoon victims in Burma.

But in the act of praying, sometimes it will come to our minds that we can do something. I can't bring my friend's son back, but I can bring dinner to her family. And in that act of doing what we can, we shape ourselves and our characters. We form the kinds of person we will be the next time some difficulty confronts us. That is most decidedly not nothing.

I talked about this in one of the later chapters of Love and Economics.

Dr J on the radio, for Mothers Day

I had the opportunity to talk with Denny Schaffer today, on motherhood and feminism. Click here, Scroll down to "Today's Rant," and click for the Windows Media Player to listen to the 15 minute interview that ranged from my new Institute, to adultery, feminist nagging and the paperback version of Love and Economics.

The Value of Motherhood, in Dollars and Cents

At least one company has calculated the value of the work that mothers do:

If a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she'd rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year.

That's according to a pre-Mother's Day study released Thursday by Salary.com, a Waltham, Mass.-based firm that studies workplace compensation.

The eighth annual survey calculated a mom's market value by studying pay levels for 10 job titles with duties that a typical mom performs, ranging from housekeeper and day care center teacher to van driver, psychologist and chief executive officer.

This year, the annual salary for a stay-at-home mom would be $116,805, while a working mom who also juggles an outside job would get $68,405 for her motherly duties.

Studies like these seem to be pro-motherhood. But in a way, they undermine the genuine value of motherhood, which is in building relationship. It is a serious mistake to view the family as a special case of a series of contracts or economic relationships. That was the whole point of Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

Jim Caviezel Shares the Fears and Joys of Adoption

Jim Caviezel, best known for his role as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ shared his story of adopting two children with serious medical conditions. He believed he was called by God to take these children, with all of their challenges.

Caviezel, 39, ...talked about overcoming fear to adopt two children suffering from brain tumors.

Caviezel and his wife, Kerri, adopted the children, a boy and a girl, from China. But the decision wasn't easy, the actor acknowledged.

"I was completely terrified and felt like, why; I felt like, 'Yes, I know you want me to take this child but I feel fear, great fear,'" Caviezel said. "But if I looked in my soul, which I was used to, at that point, I knew that God wanted me to do it. So I felt all the emotions of the negativity, of the burden it was going to … what it was going to do to me."...

"So my wife and I believe strongly in life, that all men are created equal. So it was time to put my money where my mouth was," Caviezel recalled.

A friend challenged him to prove the authenticity of his faith by adopting "not just any child, but a really disabled child."

Caviezel challenged back: "And I said, 'OK, so when I do, will you become pro-life?' So I adopted this child and I called him up.

"He didn't make good on his word, but it didn't matter to me because the joy that we had, have from this child -- he's like our own. I was there with him through the surgery with my wife and we did not know if he was going to live."

Caviezel explained a little of his son's history: "This little boy had nothing. He was left on a train. And he grew up in an orphanage. […] He lived there for five years in an orphanage. They were told that they came from the ground, that they had no mommy. That they didn't come from a stomach, but that they were born from the dirt."

Harder road

Adopting the little girl was another opportunity for Caviezel to act on his faith, he said: "We actually asked God for a girl and we got a newborn girl, […] but the following day, we got another girl -- she was a 5-year-old.

"And she had a brain tumor. We knew that girl would never get adopted and the little baby would. So we took the harder road. And we have chosen that. […] That's what faith is to me. It's action. It's Samaritan. It's not the one who says he is. It's the one who does."

I salute Caviezel and his wife for this decision. But I am concerned: The fact that both these kids were in orphanages for five years is a bright red flag for attachment disorder. I wrote about attachment disorder in Love and Economics. I pray that these children attach to Caviezel and his wife. Attachment disorder can be more difficult, and long lasting than medical conditions.
Let's pray for this family.

More on Family Issues as Fiscal Issues

see previous post: The Institute for American Values estimates that family fragmentation costs the state of California a minimum of $4.8 billion annually. Here is a story on education budget cuts in California:

Statewide, 14,000 teachers received pink slips in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed $4.4 billion reduction in education spending.

Read it and weep.
By the way, Love and Economics is up on Amazon. Both editions: the Collegiate Edition and the Streetfighter Edition.

Love and Economics in paperback

I had several students at Notre Dame tell me that they had read or were about to read Love and Economics for class projects. Now is a good time to let the whole world know what I recently revealed to my newsletter subscribers: the hard cover version of Love and Economics will be going out of print. But, not to worry: the rights to the book have reverted to me. I am going to bring out Love and Economics in paperback. Here is the new forward to the Paperback edition:

Forward to the Paperback Edition.

I wrote Love and Economics in the late 1990's. My experience of raising a badly neglected adopted orphan son together with a birth daughter taught me that we economists had been taking the family far too much for granted. I intended the book as a conversation-opener with my libertarian and free market friends. They appeared then, and still appear to be, uninterested. Perhaps the original subtitle, Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work, put them off.

In any case, I continue to be convinced that when families fall apart, the Hillary Clinton’s of the world are standing by, ready to promote ever larger and more intrusive government to pick up the pieces. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians simply can not be indifferent to the fate of the family. I believe we have a responsibility to inform the public about the public consequences of the private choices people make within their families. The reader will not find a single word in this book, or in any of my other writings, advocating government support programs or regulatory schemes to promote my views of the family. I believe we can change the world by changing our own values and actions.

When Love and Economics was published in 2001, I was in the labor force part-time. I had left my tenured position at George Mason University because I couldn’t in good conscience continue working full-time. We had one very needy child, one child of average neediness, and in 2001, my husband’s mother was dying. I could only promote the book by doing radio shows on the telephone from home.

I was extremely gratified by the response the book generated from the talk show audiences across the country. I discovered a whole new audience out there: the religious defenders of the family. These Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Mormon and traditional Jewish women and men appreciated the defense I offered of their private choices. Many of these families make significant sacrifices to keep the mother at home, at least part-time. They know in their hearts they are doing the right thing for their children, their families and their communities, but they feel beleaguered and battered by the culture around them. The media, academia, business and government are filled with career women. These professional women have a significant voice in shaping the tone of public policy and debate. No one speaks for the stay at home mothers. Often, they are too busy taking care of their families to speak for themselves. And many of the legions of stay at home mothers are not as educated or articulate as the typical “expert” women featured on the news as spokeswomen for our entire sex.

The stay at home mothers, their husbands and sometimes even their parents, came to see me as their champion. They were grateful to me for Love and Economics. I am grateful to them, too, for their contributions to creating a better world, one child at a time.

In late 2007, my dear friend and publisher Tom Spence informed me that he had made the decision to let Love and Economics go out of print. My subsequent book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World was selling much better. The paperback rights to Love and Economics reverted to me.

I had just started to get back into academic circulation around the same time. I learned that professors have been using Love and Economics in the classroom. Economics classes, psychology classes, even seminary ethics classes have used all or part of Love and Economics. My colleagues told me how much their students loved the book. I met some of those young people, who told me how much the book had meant to them. They were so thrilled to meet me, I felt like a minor celebrity.

I decided the book deserved a second chance. I devised a new subtitle: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village, as well as a new, more contemporary cover. This subtitle gives a better idea of the overall argument of the book.

I do not attack Mrs. Clinton by name. Nor do I offer arguments against specific policies under consideration in the current election cycle. We can spend all our time scampering around, responding to the latest intrusive proposal, claiming to be family-friendly. I believe instead, that we need to understand the general principles involved, so we have a framework for evaluating such proposals. In that spirit, Love and Economics makes a foundational argument that the family is an irreplaceable social institution. We can not replace the married couple family with a series of contracts among adults, as some libertarians and economists might argue. Nor can we replace the family with a series of government programs. Mrs. Clinton is a symbol of the view that we can. I do hope my libertarian friends will come to see the connection between their indifference to the family, and the progress of welfare state advocates such as Mrs. Clinton. And I hope that everyone who values the personal over the political and the family over the bureaucratic, will take the arguments of Love and Economics seriously.

I am pleased by how well the book has held up. I have not changed a word of the original text. I hope the next generation of readers continues to find Love and Economics as challenging and inspiring as their predecessors.

San Marcos, California
February 2008