Feministe Feedback: Feminist views on class and economic justice

121 thoughts on Feministe Feedback: Feminist views on class and economic justice

1. I’m not quite sure how to approach this problem, though I believe very strongly that low-income families have every right to a family, regardless of whether they can provide a life with all of the accouterments the middle-class sees as “necessary.”

   That’s absolutely true, and I don’t think anybody really disputes that. It’s a totally different question, however, whether low-income individuals have the right to have a large family they can’t afford, and then expect other people to pay for it. One of the common talking points surrounding the minimum wage is, “How can you support a family of four on a wage of per hour at forty hours per week?”… as if expecting to support one’s self and three dependents by flipping burgers is reasonable.

2. When someone has an answer to this, PLEASE let me know. I blog in the personal finance nook of the blogosphere. The “you’re-broke-because-you-want-to-be” idea runs rampant under the guise of “accountability.” While I agree that accountability is important, and that many people don’t take as much as they could, you can’t ignore the outside forces that make it difficult for people to achieve financial stability.

3. Weird, my comment vanished. Trying again: Phrasing the question as whether people have a “right” to big families misses the point. Obviously, there shouldn’t be government regulations prohibiting people from above number of children. Whether or not it’s a good idea to subsidize people who have big families they can’t afford is a much harder question. Obviously, the children themselves are innocent and it is inhumane to make them suffer because of their parent’s bad decisions. On the other hand, the world is already overpopulated, Americans have a disproportionate footprint, and when you subsidize a behavior you get more of it.

4. Gah, and as I posted the second time, my first comment reappeared. Jill, et al, I’m terribly sorry. Please feel free to delete this comment and my second comment.

   *hides in a corner in shame*.

5. I fully agree that it’s classist—not to mention awful—that people suggest poverty should limit the number of children someone is allowed to have. It’s heartless and reduces family to a luxury, making it yet another thing that the poor apparently “don’t deserve.” I think that anyone who is willing to work full-time should be compensated for that with the financial ability to support their family, however big it might be.

   A living wage ties into this. I think being able to live comfortably in exchange for forty hours of work a week is fair, regardless of what the work is—in fact, some (dare I say most?) minimum-wage and low-wage jobs are far more tedious and unpleasant than those with higher wages and benefits attached to them.

   If it’s worth paying somebody to scrub your toilets every day—if it’s worth the time and effort of another human being for X Corporation to have spotless floors every morning—then it’s worth paying for that person to have a life. For a company to say forty hours a week of a person’s labor is worth it for them to have, but not worth it to pay the person enough to live on in a reasonable degree of comfort (this includes any children they should have), is a devaluing of that person—that regardless of how hardworking they are, they do not deserve a full life, or that to be deserving of one, they must devote a ridiculous amount of time to being useful to the company; forty hours spent cleaning up after people or cooking French fries or restocking shelves only entitle them to bare survival.

   They are saying, in effect, “This job, which we want done, is not worth our effort, but it is worth yours. It’s worth enough to order it done, but not enough to properly compensate for.” It is, essentially, a case of companies deciding that something they want is worth someone else’s sacrifice, but not their own. It is one person deciding the price that another person should pay, with a healthy dose of “I’m not paying it, so price doesn’t matter.”

   A full week’s work should entitle anybody to full participation in, and enjoyment of, society. If it’s not worth it for a company to compensate the person who does a certain task with the ability to live well and support a family, then that job can bloody well go undone.

6. My mom had the first of us when she was 21, and her mom had her at 19 (so my grandmother was actually 39 when my oldest sister was born). Sometimes I bring that up to people taking potshots at young mothers.

   One thing that sort of came up on accident when I was talking to a conservative (where he was explaining why he wasn’t horrified at the prospect of paying people a couple of thousand to get sterilized) was that I mentioned that my family, a couple of generations back, probably would have fallen into the category who would be tempted. (I am the fourth of six kids, and while my parents had to struggle with money for about the first 20 years of their marriage and our lives, if not longer, now two of us have grad. degrees, four have undergrad. degrees, two are pilots, and two are still in school. But both sets of grandparents were blue-collar workers, as were their parents, with the exception of one great-grandfather who was a businessman, albeit with no college education.) He thought about it, and said his would too! And I think that sort of reframed it for him.

   The other point I made was that if we go back only 100 years (let alone 200 or more) people have been raising families with much fewer resources than we have now. Most people in the world were dirt poor, never saw doctors, were educated in the home if at all, had atrocious diets—In short, if we were to project our standards back, none of our great-grandparents should have had children!

   Another thing is that poverty =/= moral inferiority. There are some lousy rich parents, and some great poor parents. Although we like to believe in this country that wealth has something to do with merit, if we really believe that, there are some extremely troubling racial implications. So if your friend isn’t racist, point out that his preference would dramatically encourage people of certain ethnicities not to reproduce. (And it wasn’t so long ago that my Irish ancestors would be the ones encouraged not to reproduce, and for good or ill, there are now many Irish politicians, high-ranked military officers, and members of the judiciary. Social mobility takes time! And you cannot pass it on if you don’t have children. I think that racism takes longer to eradicate when it faces brown people, because it is easier to recognize them. Very few people are sharp enough to look at another euro-American and classify them by ethnicity. Esp. with intermarriage. The differences are subtle, and many of us aren’t used to looking for them.)

   Another example, my whip-smart fiance came from generations of, as he puts it “dirt poor sharecroppers.”

   So thats my however-many cents. 🙂

7. I come from a upper-middle-class family where it’s generally prescribed not to start having children until they can be supported. Usually when I see very young couples having families, I try to defend them by saying that “stuff happens and they’re making the best of it” (this works also for single mothers) and when others attack them for “not knowing better” and “why would they have sex anyway”, I say, “they have a right to have sex, and they have the right to have accessibility to education/contraceptives – one of which is obviously not being fulfilled, either by means of education or funds.” I mean, seriously, how are they supposed to know?

   “How did they plan on feeding you?” Like, seriously? By working and earning, just like everybody else. Sure, they may not do as good a job of it, but under the circumstances, what matters is that they’ve done it, and they tried to do a good job of it.

   “How did they plan on educating you?” Another snobby question: not everyone believes in formal education. I’ve seen people with the best education who couldn’t even take care of themselves.

   And not raising minimum wage? Most people who say that minimum wage shouldn’t be raised OBVIOUSLY has never lived hand-to-mouth and has never experienced how a price hike of even fifty cents can affect on some people. They’ve never experienced the worst of inflation because they’re already cushioned by steady funding. Even if I do come from one of these families where we’re so goddamn cushy, I just don’t understand how unfeeling people must be in order to deny another person the right to a good quality of life.

   Those are my arguments, anyway, coming from upper-middle-class. I don’t know if they help any, since they appeal more to emotional sensitivity than to economy, but I don’t trust many economical arguments anymore. Way too many of them can be skewered to the benefit of the rich.

8. Yes, the argument of “well just don’t have kids” does seem airtight, but it’s hard enough to live on a minimum wage salary with just one person. I’ve challenged people to do this experiment, and sometimes it makes a difference.

   Try living on a take home pay of under $900 a month (based on federal minimum wage of $6.55/hour, 40 hours a week, less taxes). Scrimp and save where you can (cheap toiletries, second hand everything, walking to wherever whenever possible, cheap food which is generally non-nutritious, no luxuries etc) and see how well you do. Sometimes it changes peoples mind, sometimes it doesn’t.

   Not to mention, the price of goods are rising practically every second. I remember my mom spending well under $100 a week on groceries and necessities (TP, toothpaste, ect) for 6 people in say, around 1982 or so. We ate well, because my mom stayed at home, and cooked everything from scratch, preserved food, heck, even bread was homemade. If I tried to do the same thing today, it would probably cost 4 times as much as that, and the minimum wage hasn’t increased 4 times in the same time frame.

9. I think the kids issue relates to religious differences, and that’s part of what makes people reluctant to talk about it.

   But I also don’t feel the need to give people additional public assistance for having really extreme numbers of kids, like 10 or 15. Everyone should be able to have a family, but “family” doesn’t have to mean as many kids as you want, no matter the expense.

10. The sentiments are certainly noble but in reality, raising the minimum wage does nothing. It neither helps nor hurts. There is a short, very short, transition period but when the increase in the minimum wage travels through the entire economy, everyone ends up exactly where they started. Like throwing a pebble in a pond. My problem with raising the minimum wage is this: It is a tool politicians use to fool people into thinking they are doing something and takes pressure off of them to actually solve problems.
    As to children: Financial responsibility is a good thing even in regard to deciding whether to have children. We as a society can teach and encourage financial responsibility without the personal attacks and insults that often accompany this position.

11. “A full week’s work should entitle anybody to full participation in, and enjoyment of, society. If it’s not worth it for a company to compensate the person who does a certain task with the ability to live well and support a family, then that job can bloody well go undone.”

    I agree. If costs must be cut, they can start with people who worry about buying their second vacation home. I don’t believe that there are people so ingenious or good at management to deserve to make fifty times the amount of money made by the person who cleans the floors, to have luxury on top of savings when the other can’t afford a car. And the money paid to the people at the top, this is probably also an economic disincentive. If only one innovation or a few years of high demand can create long-lasting luxury and continued income in interest and dividends, why will they continue to create and make business more efficient? Where is their motive?

    “Another snobby question: not everyone believes in formal education. I’ve seen people with the best education who couldn’t even take care of themselves.”

    Me, too! I’ve even met physicists and professors who can’t grow & harvest their own crops, raise & slaughter their own animals, shear sheep to make wool for their trousers, and mix the ink for their pens – and you’d think only food, clothes, and writing implements (without worrying about taking care of their own entertainment) would be a basic standard to uphold, wouldn’t you?

    So what if people “can’t even take care of themselves” whether or not they have an education? That also shouldn’t mean they’re wrong to have or want a family, right?

12. Saying a decision to have children (especially more than . . . two/three?) should come only after considering one’s ability to support them may very well be classist. But so what? This may be trivializing the issue, but how is it responsible to not consider such issues when/before having children? It simply seems like just one of many issues that people consider, including personal health, career options, the health of the baby (e.g., fatal and genetic defects), etc.

    Tossing this away by saying it disproportionately affects poorer people, and is thereby classist, doesn’t do very much except rely on a convenient label to decry . . . responsible decision-making? It seems there’s simply too much emphasis on the label than on what it actually implies.

13. I’m with Gruntled on the usefulness of raising the minimum wage. It just isn’t. And it also completely ignores the even larger segment of the population making not minimum wage but /below/ minimum wage– for whom a raise will not only not help, but effectively make worse off.

    And while I don’t think you’ll find any more than a bare handful of people who seriously want legal limits on how many children people can have (and wingnuts especially aren’t going to promote this, they wouldn’t want to punish people like the Duggars, would they?) there is nothing wrong with people believing it is a Bad Idea to have more children than you can afford. It /is/ a bad idea– children take up lots of resources, and having more than you can effectively handle puts you and the kids at disadvantage.

    I’m not denying there is very much a racist and sexist component to this; the criticisms and social condemnation fall disproportionately on marginalized segments of society. But the idea that “it is best to only have as many kids as you can care for” is just common sense.

14. There’s no question that having fewer children increases what you can give those children, and there’s also no question that having more money means you can give children better nutrition, better educational resources, and better access to paths of success in America. I don’t think any of these statements is controversial.

    But I also think that a lot of these things are higher priority to middle-and-higher class families. Part of the hidden question in criticism of large poor families is ‘don’t you want your kids to do better than you?’, and if the answer is ‘yes’, then the ‘rational’ thing to do is to have fewer kids, later, so you can give them the advantages that sustain class stagnation in America. If the answer is ‘no’, then there’s a kind of follow-up, of ‘why don’t you want your kids to do better?’, and if the answer is ‘yes’ but the family is still large, poor and young, then the follow-up is something along the lines of ‘why didn’t you take the effective route to your goal?’, and the middle class imagination supplies an answer that lies somewhere at a nexus of poor impulse control and bad planning.

    Did i get the flow-chart right?

    If you care about teaching your kids self-sufficiency and the importance of earning their place in the world, having a large family is not-so-bad. If you care about material success and changing your kids’ place in the American class system, having a big family when you’re young and poor is a bad idea, generally.

15. I don’t believe that there are people so ingenious or good at management to deserve to make fifty times the amount of money made by the person who cleans the floors

    Very generally I see 2 possibilities (w/shades of grey in between).
    1. Someone is willing to do a good job at low paying work for (eg) 7/hr, and so the person charging the least “wins” the job, and the job stays low paying. (Free market).
    2. Corportations have fixed prices and refuse to pay more than 7/hr, so even if you’re better than others, you’re not likely to get the job if you demand more. If you do a terrible job, they’ll just find someone else. (Price fixing/lack of choice)

    I’m sure it’s some of both.
    You pretty much have to have a job to support a family, so people are willing to be paid less just to get paid at all. On the flipside, the skills required for many lower wage jobs are low (how much training/school to clean hallways, flip burgers, dig holes, pick fruit) so companies can afford to set prices and risk some bad work in exchange for big savings. And those people who need a job, any job, cannot help but take a job, though it may pay shit.

    Whereas I have a wealthy white middle class brain that’s been told by everyone in my childhood “you can do anything” and “don’t settle”, and I have parents and other relatives that would support me till I found a job I wanted that paid enough for me. Even my worst most unbearable job post-college paid 16/hr and used skills I built up at college.
    
    So in repsonse to the Doozy of a Question:
    Ask your white middle class friends and family if they’ve ever been unemployed, and what happened when they were. Ask about part time work during college. Whether they had to work during high school to the detriment of their studies.
    Illustrate how poverty is a self-perpetuating problem by using them as an example. If they had to work during high school and college full time to make it through, where would they be? If they didn’t have the resources to get scholarships (computers, friends, guidance conselors) where would they be? If they didn’t have someone to support them while they were unemployed, where would they be?

    Now there’s a chance some people make it up from the bottom of the economic ladder on their own, and work 40 hours a week under the table during high school, support their siblings, make it through college with only their own money, and eat cat food during periods of unemployment, and they are still middle class today.
    If they can’t see how some people could possibly fail at doing what they did, then they’re very very lucky, because if you can’t see outside yourself after all that, you are very very stupid. So I’m guessing you won’t be dealing with this second type. Just the first.

16. Here’s the thing: if you are never, ever, ever going to have a middle class life, if you’re never going to be in an office (possibly not even a cube), if your job *maxes out* at $40K no matter how far you advance… then it is outright cruel to tell people they shouldn’t have kids. If there are jobs, held by many adult, responsible, hardworking Americans, that cannot pay for a family, that is a systemic problem.

    It is reasonable to tell middle class people “wait until you can responsibly raise a family” because the wait time isn’t infinite. People with a college education, generally speaking, *will* get a job that can support two kids. (Four kids is a straw man. Yes, there are poor people with four kids, but the minimum wage can’t support *two* kids. It can barely support one adult.) Working class people won’t, because working class wages have been depressed for years. You are never going to have enough money to buy a house large enough for two kids to have their own bedrooms, in a school district where kids don’t bring guns to school but there are also jobs available, and feed those two kids, as well as yourself, and put clothes on those two kids, and buy them the occasional book or toy… especially if you are a single mother, which can happen very easily if you married a guy who walked out on you. Child support is much more expensive than two people living together is, and even a decent guy who does the right thing by the kids but doesn’t make much money can’t afford to send you enough that, with your working class money, you can still buy a decent life for your kids.

    *That’s* the issue. Not poor families with four or more children. There’s an economy of scale with kids; have enough of them and you have built-in babysitting, you don’t have to buy more clothes or toys, you can buy food in bulk and pay only a little more, etc. *Two* kids, particularly of opposite sexes, are expensive. Four kids, not much more expensive than two, not if you’re not paying for private school and swimming lessons and restaurants and fun activities.

    (Disclosure: I have four kids. I am currently very well to do. We pay for all those things… well, not the private school, because we did sufficient research to find good public school, but we pay for very expensive educational summer camps. This is a nice-to-have, but it is totally unnecessary. However, I have also been, not poor exactly, but struggling, with the exact same kids… and the only additional expense from two kids was that we had bought a house to accommodate the larger family, and the timing was bad enough with the housing bubble that to buy a house we paid twice as much what our landlord’s house had been worth while we were living there. A house with 1800 sq ft because of a finished basement not suitable for children’s bedrooms and very little yard should not be twice as cheap as a house with 1900 sq ft in the two main floors and a decent-sized yard for a city.)

    So the first way you address this is, stop talking about four kids. A lot of people — nearly everyone on the left, it seems, and many of the economic righties — are a bit bothered by four kids. Talk about *two* kids. Only the most hardcore of the childfree would agree that it is right to tell people that because of their skills and level of education they are not permitted to have *two* kids, ever, in their entire lifetime. Most Americans think two kids is absolutely normal, kind of expected even. So talk about poor families trying to raise *two* kids on minimum wage. it is still goddamn near impossible to do and it will get a lot more sympathy than the discussion of four kids. Bring in the fact that it’s very hard to raise one kid, or even to be *single*, on minimum wage.

    Now some people will say, but raising the minimum wage just makes the prices of everything go up. Hmm. So why is it that the minimum wage used to be much higher in real dollars, yet the cost of everything was lower? try this on for size: when minimum wage is higher, spending on everything is higher and therefore business does better and productivity goes up. The poor spend *all* their money; therefore if you want to increase consumption to support business, giving the money to the poor makes sense. I already *have* a plasma screen TV, two of them in fact. I am not in the market for another television. But my daughter’s best friend, with the construction worker dad and the house cleaner mom… *they* would probably buy a newer TV if they had more money.

17. I think this is definitely a feminist issue since the vast majority of people in poverty are women and children; many are single mothers who are heads of the household. You can tie this to some very classic feminist issues such as:

    1) When a woman has a child, she is generally responsible for raising that child, even though both people were responsible in the kid’s creation, and

    2) Women don’t get paid as much as men.

18. I think that family planning is a decision best left to individual families and not commented on by anyone else. If a family decides to have 5 kids because they want and enjoy them, who am I to say? I hope for the children’s sake that they are fed, clothed, and housed, as these are basic necessities. I hope that their parents give some thought as to how they are goung to do this as they plan their families.

    I will say on a personal level that I am a child of a small family. My brother was 19 years old when I was born, so I was almost an only child. My family was VERY lower class–only 25K a year or less for 3 people. BUT I never knew we were poor because my parents budgeted, sacrificed and I always had great Christmases, B-days, etc. The only thing they DID NOT do for me was pay for my college education (They did pay for Catholic Grade school, and I went to a Magnet High School.) so I am drowning iin student loans right now. I do resent it a bit, but they did the best they could–as neither had even a HS education (My parents were older 45 (mom) and 57 (Dad) when I was born.) So I’m a personal advocate of smaller families, but that’s not right for everyone, you know?

    As far as wages go: I’m not an economist, so I don’t know all the ins and outs and nuances about raising the minimum wage. I do think it should be raised, but how much I can’t say. I also fully believe in the power of education. Even if it is learning a trade.

19. There also still seems to be social pressure to have more than one kid. Even today, there’s a big stigma about only children. Having been one myself, I can testify that almost every serious relationship I’ve had progressed from some guy telling me how awesome I am to the same guy telling me we could never just have one [hypothetical] kid because “I wouldn’t want them to be screwed up.” I see this kind of thing come up in magazine articles and advice columns as well.

    Throw this into the family planning and class mix how you will…

20. there is nothing wrong with people believing it is a Bad Idea to have more children than you can afford. It /is/ a bad idea– children take up lots of resources, and having more than you can effectively handle puts you and the kids at disadvantage.

    If we, as a society, want people to take “personal responsibility” for how many kids they are having, then we need to provide them with tools and resources to do so. With the prevalence of abstinence only education, we can hardly say that we are doing that.

    The writer asked for a feminist perspective on this issue, and here’s mine: If you think it’s a bad idea for people to have more kids than they can afford, then you should be working to make sure that everyone knows how to prevent pregnancy and has access to contraceptives. I would even add that you should fight for young women to have more personal agency, so that they can have more control over their reproductive choices.

    Acting like women are making the choice to have more children than they can afford rationally, with no outside pressures or influences, is pretending the patriarchy doesn’t exist.

21. Completely agreed, Melissa. Which is actually why I partially felt that the question was addressing something verging on a strawman– at least in my experience, I’ve run into very few anti-feminists who do criticize families with large numbers of children. I mean, it’s pretty much the Catholic ideal, after all, as well as for many evangelical Christians. They don’t want rampant use of birth control (and certainly not abortion) so large families tend to result.

    The biggest criticisms of large families that I’ve seen come from feminist and liberal websites– you know, the “Vagina: It’s not a clown car” meme, and the eye-rolling at quiverfull movements. Which is fine, the criticism there is justified, since those movements generally believe women have an obligation to have so many kids instead of just believing it’s an acceptable choice.

    I guess the awful commentary I’m most used to seeing is the “those stupid sluts should keep their legs together and not pop out babies with different dads, it’s their own fault” sort of social condemnation is directed not at families with half a dozen kids, but with unwed mothers who have one or two kids. And the sexism, racism, and classism seems a lot more obvious there and a lot more problematic– those sort of comments aren’t really based on whether it’s a “good idea” or not to be a single mother, but just on the moral indignation that they are not following the typical white middle-class life script.

22. Saying a decision to have children (especially more than . . . two/three?) should come only after considering one’s ability to support them may very well be classist. But so what? This may be trivializing the issue, but how is it responsible to not consider such issues when/before having children? It simply seems like just one of many issues that people consider, including personal health, career options, the health of the baby (e.g., fatal and genetic defects), etc.

    It is responsible to consider all this. The problems are that 1) society as it stands right now allows certain types of work to be compensated so poorly that no matter how hard people work, they can’t afford to live well, and 2) rather than do anything about a living wage, society suggests to these people that they give up one of the few happy, wonderful things that you don’t have to save money for and purchase.

    Tossing this away by saying it disproportionately affects poorer people, and is thereby classist, doesn’t do very much except rely on a convenient label to decry . . . responsible decision-making? It seems there’s simply too much emphasis on the label than on what it actually implies.

    You do responsibility no favor when you use it to be classist. Nobody here is decrying responsible decision-making itself, but rather the system which prevents it from being what you call a “responsible decision” for certain people to have children at all, and the use of a generally good concept as a front for discrimination.

    That being said, from a resource perspective, a lot more money and resources go into raising a rich kid than a poor kid, so maybe it’s the wealthy who ought to have fewer children—how many third-world orphans could be fed and clothed and educated on the money that some bigshot CEO spends on his own kids?

23. “I don’t believe that there are people so ingenious or good at management to deserve to make fifty times the amount of money made by the person who cleans the floors.”

    I’m sorry, I respectfully disagree. Although I believe in a raise to mimium wage, I also believe in a pay scale commensurate with skill-levels and education. There are jobs that people do in this country that well-deserve the shitload of money that people get paid to do them.

    I think that there are many schools of thought on this issue, maybe mine is the minority here but I worked hard for my education, climbed the corporate ladder for years and I expect to be compensated for it.

24. I’ve only ever read a tiny bit of Marxist theory, but I believe he describes low wages as theft of labor. When an employer hires a worker, they’re buying that worker’s time and energy. When the worker is underpaid, a portion of that time and energy is essentially stolen. Just like if the employer bought a car worth $10,000 and only paid $6,000 for it.

    You can get into arguments over the market value of labor, but I agree with other commenters that any labor is worth a wage high enough to live on. It doesn’t matter how big the picture gets.

    The classism becomes clear when you look at it on a more personal level. Say you buy one hour’s worth of a working-class person’s labor. (We’ll say you own a fast-food joint.) You watch them take orders, assemble meals, clean tables, and politely handle belligerent customers. At the end of the hour, you give them six dollars – a tiny fraction of the revenue they brought in for your restaurant.

    Meanwhile, your spouse, a middle-class receptionist, is given twelve dollars to distribute faxes and answer phones – a job that takes considerably less effort than the fast-food job. I’ve worked both jobs. Believe me, being a receptionist is much easier. So why is the receptionist’s labor worth more?

    Not sure if this directly answered your question, but those are my thoughts.

25. I whole heartedly agree, Melissa-The best feminist answer is to make sure that fertility control options are accessible for everyone. While I agree that it’s not really anyone’s choice how many children a couple has outside of the couple, if you give them tools and options, and don’t tell them sex is only the right of those who have children, many people (at least that I’ve talked to. and I know, the plural of anecdote, etc.) will limit their family size based on their comfort level in supporting the children-which admittedly may or may not be what is considered “middle class”. I’d use that argument, though I know it doesn’t really challenge the classism. But I think it does challenge the idea that limiting family size was looked at and rejected. Depends on your goals, really. I personally am for a more dramatic redistribution of wealth than just raising the minimum wage, since I’ve heard a lot of the arguments about inflation and lack of real change. sadly, I know that will probably never fly in the US. I can dream, I guess.

26. Yeah and I worked hard for my education, tried to climb the corporate ladder and got thrown down it again and again despite my best efforts, high IQ, great personal skills, and awesome education, and I expect to be compensated for it.
    /untruth to make a point

    Hard Work Does Not Always Pay Off. I feel very happy and lucky that it pays off for me. You are very lucky and should be happy it pays off for you. But it is not the reason you are where you are. It is a reason. But so are luck, networks, family support, mentoring (probably), and natural ability (another luck thing), which you have more of than some people, and less than others.

    Should we punish people and tell them not to have kids because they were unlucky, had no networks, don’t have much family support…? I saw your earlier post so obviously you don’t think that people who didn’t climb the ladder for years are undeserving of a higher minimum wage.

27. Funny, I was just thinking there isn’t enough talk of classism.

    When I was around 7, I asked my mom why parents don’t make more than childless people since parents have kids to support. At some point I understood how against that idea people would be (although there are child tax credits here for lower income families and mother’s allowance) because that would be giving people freedom to have kids and depend on others to support them. I’ve realized how much people hate the idea that women on welfare can get more money if they have more kids. But I say first of all, it would be punishing the kid to not give as much money for more kids. Second, have you tried living on welfare? Third, I read the average cost of an abortion in America is almost $500 (a month’s rent for some people). Birth control pill is not free either. Some women get into controlling relationships with men who don’t want to wear condoms.

    There are bad parents who are poor and bad parents who are rich but for some reason we notice the bad parents who are poor much more. I think we like to see money as a solution to all. Therefore, rich parents will be better. Or so people think.

28. when people say “don’t have kids until you can afford to give them X” it surely overlooks the fact that some people don’t know if they will ever escape poverty. basically, it’s saying, unless you find an escape route into the middle classes, no babies for YOU people, EVER. how is that a realistic way to expect people to live? (especially if you’ve seen relatives struggle all their lives long and end them still poor?) for all that i don’t want children of my own, it’s pretty clear to me that for a lot of people (male and female) it’s a central, vital, meaningful part of their lives. (btw, isn’t there a US constitutional right to family life? i know that doesn’t necessarily include children, but it surely covers not UN-including them because you’re broke and possibly going to stay that way?)

    conversely, it seems the height of wilful blindness on the part of the better off to assume that just because they have financial stability right now, that it can’t ever go away. perhaps while they’re raising the kids they had when they were better off. do they really believe that their families will cease to be socially legitimate if they lose everything? (if they’re the kind of middle class people who think poor people are feckless and irresponsible, presumably they would be Tragic Victims of the Economy, and you know. *deserving* poor. the victorians were keen on that one, yes?)

29. This may be off topic and also irrelavent when I am in the UK and this is clearly from a US perspective but I just wanted to make a couple of points. I am often on the side of the fence that says that if you can’t support your kids then you shouldn’t keep having more. I am in support of the minimum wage and I don’t think people should be penalised or told that they shouldn’t have kids- but I also don’t think that everyone else in society should be paying for them to be having more children than they can afford. If someone is having trouble affording one child then they shouldn’t have another one. If someone is having children AND refusing to work even for minimum wage, then why should tax payers be paying for that. And, in this country at least, I feel resentful that they get so many benefits: Child benefit. Council Tax benefit. Job Seekers Allowance. Milk tokens. Hardship funds. Subsidised housing.

    I’d like to reiterate that I am only critical of people who won’t work. I used to work for a company in the UK whose job it was to try and get people on Job Seekers Allowance into work by training them in basic computer skills or construction skills, helping them get further training, improving CVs, helping them job search, practicing interview techniques, etc. The main problem we faced was that a lot of them simply didn’t want to work, didn’t see why they should when they got plenty of money from the government, and were actually resentful that the Jobcentre made them come on our courses (at the risk of losing their JSA but not their other benefits for a short period of time). And many of them had children. After several years working with them I am afraid that my supportive, oh it’s all good people should do what they want/have as many kids as they want/get benefits and subsidies and help when they need it, attitude had evaporated.

    I apologise if this is irrelevant, which I’m fairly certain it is because America and the UK have very different set ups when it comes to welfare from what I can tell. Feel free to delete the comment if it is. *smile*

30. I can’t answer the minimum wage issue, but I can talk about the second one.

    First, saying that low-income families should not have more children ignores the fact that family planning is still very limited to the middle and upper class. Especially with “abstinence only” sex ed, it’s difficult for people with less education (high school dropouts are far more likely to be poor than graduates) to know about their options, and they certainly won’t have access to the pill, IUDs, vasectomies, etc.

    Second, it’s an example of what the philosopher Steven Toulmin called the “tyranny of principles”: applying a general rule to many different situations. Because the situation of each family is very unique, what might be unethical in one (I’m thinking of “quiverfull” families) is tolerable in another. One has to look at all circumstances before rendering a judgment.

31. As to the feminist angle…if our society valued women’s labor appropriately, and valued children as citizens instead of treating them like pets (nobody ever asks, for instance, if you can afford your grandparents), then having children would not be a barrier to education or professional development.

    In other developed countries women of young children are given long paid maternity leaves, partly just as a policy to encourage childbearing and partly as a recognition that raising children is work, work that benefits society as whole, and it should be facilitated.

32. I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, clearly there is an amount of luck that comes into financial prosperity. I am not where I am in life because of my skills, or at least they are a small part of it: I happened to be born in America, where I was entitled to free schooling up through high school. It happens to be a place where public sanitation is a priority. I was lucky to be born to parents that could afford to value my education. I was lucky to be relatively healthy most of my life. If I didn’t have those things that were merely an accident of my birth, I would not be where I am right this minute. Possibly I could have gotten to where I am, but it would be an uphill battle all the way.

    I work a job right now where I get paid more than my co-workers. I have a bit more responsibility, and I am more likely to stay, and I can’t pick my hours- but mostly, it is my college degree. My college degree does not mean I am necessarily smarter than other people, but that I was book-smart and in a situation where that was nurtured and I could afford to go to school. I don’t want to give up my extra pay, though, even though I wonder how my co-workers can afford things.

    I agree birth control (and all medicine, really) should be free, like in Europe. But I still feel that having children isn’t a right. I don’t know how to make it a right without violating someone else- If I have a right to have children, should adoption be free? Should I be able to pay a poor woman to gestate for me? Should I have my in vitro paid for by someone else? Not everyone can have kids naturally- does their infertility, sexual orientation, age, etc- mean that their rights are being violated by… nature, I suppose? Personally, I don’t want in vitro costs to raise my insurance premium higher (mine just went up this month, though I am not saying its in vitro that made it go).

    I don’t know at what point having children you can’t afford is selfish, given that no one should be under the delusion that the government is suddenly going to become generous If i know it is unlikely I will be able to count on the government for more than $X per month, can I justify having a child? Is there a point when it is cruel to have a child when you can only afford $Y to feed her? I don’t know. I struggle with this.

33. Intellectually, if I ignore the fact that I am thinking about human beings, I can kinda almost understand the rich person’s perspective on things. In an ideal world, a person on a low income would carefully consider their financial means and work out whether or not to have a child, then possibly wait until later in life and spend their time looking for better paying work and saving money.

    However, this ignores the fact that many people cannot earn enough to put any money away, do not actually earn a living wage, may not have very good promotion prospects etc. It also ignores the fact that, unless you are fortunate enough to live in an area where the healthcare system provides free contraception, the sort of precautions that more fortunate people see as a normal part of sex can become a considerable financial strain. Additionally, accidents happen. Then, of course, there is the fact that circumstances can change. My mum had me when she was married to my father, both of them working full time. Then he died, when I was about 6 months old, and suddenly we’re a single-parent family.

    In any case, how do you define quality of life?

    I think a lot of more financially well-off people get on about this whole “don’t you want your child to have a good life” thing because they don’t have their priorities right, or just haven’t really thought about the actual cost of living. My mum gave me a fantastic life as a single parent, by making sacrifices. We moved back in with her parents and her siblings, so there was always a babysitter. My mum didn’t buy herself new clothes or cosmetics. She started growing her own vegetables, cooked everything from scratch including home made bread and pasta. My mum worked full time during the day, cared for me in the evenings and studied to earn qualifications at night. By making these sacrifices I never had to go without anything- good food, new clothes, toys, love and encouragement, even a holiday once a year which I realise is a luxury. I had everything a child could ever want or need.

    Compare this to my in-laws, who both earn £50k+ annually, have a holiday home in France, send their youngest to private school and pay for extra fencing, ballet and piano and latin lessons, take skiing holidays, buy name-brand clothes and expensive cars, and purchase food from expensive stores. The one time they were a little strapped for cash, because of personal issues, they couldn’t figure out how easy it would be to reduce their outgoings by altering just a couple of these luxuries. Because they saw such items as essential expenses.

    Perhaps you could ask your friend what they see as the minimum requirements are for living, and then show them how much of that is totally unnecessary?

34. Oh, poop. Sorry for ranting!

35. JenLovesPonies — The way I see it, it’s not a matter of having the right to have kids. It’s a matter of having the right to make one’s own reproductive choices with full bodily autonomy. Kind of like — it’s not a right for someone to see things, but it’s a right for someone to use their own eyes in they way they want, which will result in seeing things, for most people.

    I agree with those that said that much of this has to do with education. In a group of people who have received life-long education on their bodies, pregnancy, sex, birth control, personal finance, and what it takes to raise a child, you will have some people who choose to wait to have kids until they are financially very comfortable, and you will have some who choose to have children despite possible financial instability. At least they were given the choice and all the relevant information. Another group that does not have all this information and access to methods of control over their own fertility will likely make different choices. It is at least a partial failure of the system in these cases, not simply a matter of the irresponsible poor purposely wreaking havoc on our welfare system.

36. Children are the most important economic resource we have. Childfree people don’t seem to understand that their retirement depends on other people having children who will work to produce goods and services when they are no longer working. And because the labour of raising children falls to women, it is massively economically undervalued. It really needs to be more understood that women who choose to raise children are doing us all a favour, and are massively financially underrewarded for it.

    Also, economic investment in children will make them more productive when they are older, allowing us all to have more affluent retirements. Because the benefits of healthy, productive adults accrue to more than just to the parents of those adults, (ie raising children has positive externalities) it makes absolute economic sense for the state to invest as much as possible in children. Expecting parents to bear the entire cost of raising children is economically inefficient and absurd.

    As for it being lower class women who have the most children– well, in other developed countries, labour policy which makes it difficult for women to combine careers and childrearing have led to very low birthrates and a crisis around that– see Germany, Italy, Japan. It’s not clear why this is not the case in the US, but I am willing to bet that a lot of it is due to economic disparity and lower income women– both because they have children themselves, and because they subsidise the careers of higher income women by providing cheap childcare. Your friend is benefiting from the underrewarded labour of the women he sneers at.

    I recommend reading Kathy G. on the issue of the minimum wage– google and lnks should turn up. She’s a feminist and an economist. I have no idea what your friend means by “the big picture” but he’s wrong, regardless.

37. Definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, having kids shouldn’t be tied to income. And lower-class people shouldn’t be blamed for being lower-income because they had kids.

    On the other, there is a responsibility to limit kids if one knows that resources will be stretched in a way that affects the kids’ interests in terms of basic needs. I agree with the various commenters above who said that people should not project their own ideas of what’s necessary to bring up a family. But at a certain point, there’s either enough for food, rudimentary education, clothing, shelter, or there isn’t.

    I do think that it’s a shared responsibility. Availability of birth control, outreach into poor communities to educate about it and pro bono organizations to make it viable, are all critical. As well as groups like Grameen who help poor families and individuals start businesses.

    But yeah — we know a (white) couple who live job to job (they are in the entertainment biz), they are stretched in terms of seeing, clothing and educating their current child, they are contemplating another child, and I don’t think it’s wrong to think (although wrong to say unless asked for an opinion) that this isn’t a great idea.

38. Regarding this topic, I feel the anger towards working-class/poor parents and especially mothers for having large families is not only misdirected and unjust, but also serves to deflect attention from poor parenting habits by the upper/upper-middle class that I would argue has a much more damaging effect on our society.

    From my vantage point, the upper/upper-middle class helicopter parenting phenomenon my friends and I have seen on the most privileged university campuses and the workplace is far more damaging not only for the children raised in such a micromanaging environment, but for everyone else who has to interact with those children and their overbearing parents. This overentitled mentality is corrosive to the fairness and just equity necessary for our society. It is not too far removed from how nepotistic consideration has been used to grant political patronage and good jobs for aristocrats, political favorites, favored friends, and their children…no matter how unqualified….or incompetent.

    If one is to condemn poor parents for their supposed “irresponsible choices”, then in the interest of just fairness, the condemnation for parents higher on the socio-economic ladder should be far greater due to their greater access to resources and social networks along with the greater impact such choices would arguably have on the rest of our society.

    “A full week’s work should entitle anybody to full participation in, and enjoyment of, society. If it’s not worth it for a company to compensate the person who does a certain task with the ability to live well and support a family, then that job can bloody well go undone.”

    This sounds quite similar to a quote I remembered from Karl Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

    While the ideals are good, I fear this is not practical if implemented in practice…especially judging by the results of such a mentality in many Communist countries, especially Communist China’s old State owned enterprises. From what I’ve heard from relatives and friends who lived during the heyday of such enterprises, the reality was such enterprises were overstaffed by workers whose incentives were limited to propagandistic exhortations and threats of punishment for failing to meet performance targets set by far removed party bureaucrats.

    Not surprisingly, most workers attempted to do as little work as they could get away with….especially when the reality was not a Marxist derived social equity, but the creation of a new class system where the Communist Party under Mao were the employers….and everyone else became the tyrannized peasant/working class with no chance to improve their lot beyond kissing up, joining the Communist Party, and hopefully gain a position within its bureaucracy. Did I just hear the long-standing voice of nepotistic favoritism again?

    Though there needs to be a solution to help working class/poor individuals and families, I do not think altering wage determination practices from supply/demand to a Marxist “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is the solution.

    “How did they plan on educating you?” Another snobby question: not everyone believes in formal education. I’ve seen people with the best education who couldn’t even take care of themselves.

    Though I agree with the underlying point, I am concerned the way you phrased it is playing into the very traditional American anti-intellectualism which denigrates intellectuals and intellectual work….one major factor why education in American society is so screwed up for the vast majority.

    This is a right-wing talking point I’ve heard from too many conservative undergrads at my current institution to justify legacy admissions and to deny higher education access to children of the working class…no matter how hard working and bright they may be. As someone who would not have had a college education if it was not for a near-full scholarship….I believe this reasoning is complete BS and actually serves to reinforce social-immobility and the further entrenching of a new aristocratic “legacy class” of upper/upper-middle class families.

39. I actually just went to a talk about this last night.

    One of the women involved talked about hos Canada has the 8th largest national economy in the world – and yet, we have this huge gap between The Rich and The Rest of Us. Folks under 30 are really struggling while folks over 45 are doing better (not counting seniors, especially women seniors), recent immigrants are doing much worse than comparitable immigrats of earlier times. We’re acting like we’re in a recession when we’re doing so good.

    Part of the problem is that we as a society tend to view “giving something up so others can be brought out of their circumstances” as being this horrible sacrifice – you see it a lot in discussions around feminism & racism because in order for women to be equal, men will have to give some of their privilidge up – same with white people versus people of colour. There’s an inbalance, and everyone on the upside of the equation seems to think that they’ve earned every bit of it, and that they have no responsibility to others in their society. Because heaven knows my boss would totally be fine and get to all of his meetings with all his paperwork and everything sorted for him if I wasn’t here. Oh no, wait – he gets where he is because of the work of people around him, and yet he gets paid signficiantly more. So, I go home and penny pinch and live in a one-room flat with my disabled partner while my boss and his three kids and his wife live in a beautiful home out in the country. And yet, if he would be paid the equivilent of 2$ an hour less and I would get that money instead, I’d be pulled over the poverty line in this country for the first time in my adult life.

    …

    But we wouldn’t want him to do that, I’m sure.

    The talk gave me a lot to think about, and touched repeatedly on the issue of a guaranteed minimum income. I’m going to be writing up everyting about it in a bit more detail (right now I’m still swooning that I went to a talk about poverty that really talked about the issues of povery and disability, poverty and race, poverty and health, and poverty and a lack of trust in our elected government). I’ll post a link here when I get it done.

40. I am actually stunned that so many commenters on this blog are hung up on the ethics of poor people having children.

    I mean, for serious? If the system you are in, fairly or unfairly, fails to compensate you so that you can keep up with the Joneses, you shouldn’t have children even though ALL OF OUR ANCESTORS raised children on much fewer resources, and a less steady food supply than 90% of Americans have today?

    The instinct for survival is powerful and important. Would you people think that slaves should have done their best not to have children because their child would be raped and beaten in slavery? Should people in war-torn nations not have children because their child may be murdered by guerillas, or forced to become one? Should we just give up on reproduction when times get tough?

    And also, think of the practical implications. Some people will NEVER have enough money to meet your minimum standards for childrearing. Should their genetic line come to an end? (And I’m talking should—about the moral judgments people are making, so please don’t trot out any ridiculous arguments about legality). I, for one, am damn glad that my great-grandparents chose to have children during the great depression. If they had waited, they would have been too old to be fertile, and not only would I and the people I love NOT EXIST, neither would they have ever had any children.

41. **Here is the question I would ask everyone who condemns parents for “having more children than they can afford”:

    How is any person supposed to be able to KNOW how much an 18-25 year process is going to cost, much less KNOW if they will be able to continuously afford it?

    Certainly college graduates twenty years ago could be reasonably assured of landing a middle-class wage with benefits, so it isn’t unreasonable for a college graduate of today to expect the same thing. But what if the economy turns, and that stops being true? Should they not have those babies until they’ve laid in enough capital to support them when unemployment hits hard?

    Should workers in Detroit, in Flint, in Kalamazoo have refrained from having children because they didn’t know for sure that their decent-paying, child-supporting jobs wouldn’t go to Mexico? Should the mother who thinks her husband is just a little moody not have had children because she didn’t know with absolute certainty that his moodiness was actually debilitating bipolar depression that would ultimately prevent him from working at all?

    Seriously — how can you expect any person to know what they will be able to afford over the next two decades? Blaming the poor for having children they “can’t afford” is basically blaming someone for not being clairvoyant.

42. **And here’s why it’s a feminist issue:

    If a mother has a kid at the age of 17 or 21 — or 25 and in grad school, or 27 and her husband is still in college, let’s say — everyone will say “Why didn’t she wait and have the kid when she could have afforded the baby?”

    If a mother tries to have a kid at 37 or 40, after having a successful career and becoming financially secure, everyone will say “Why didn’t she have them when she was young and fertile and God meant for her to have them?”

43. And here’s why the poor SHOULD have children they can’t afford:

    Because who else is going to look after all of us childless people, when we’re in the nursing home?

    Children aren’t pets — they’re part of what makes society work.

44. I like to look at this from the opposite side.

    A business that cannot afford to pay it’s employees a living wage is a failing business.Government should not prop up or give a pass to this. In the view of the government- business exists for one function only- the amount of taxes it pays into the system either directly or through income taxes its employees pay. So a business that pays poverty level wages not only fails in regards to the taxes it should be paying, but it also fails by adding an extra burden on the state with regards to social services (food stamps, health care, child care subsidies) that its employees then qualify for. If we really believe that competition makes economies run better, then we must raise the minimum wage so that all businesses are competing with fully paid employees. A race to the bottom as far as wages goes hurts both employees individually and governments on the whole and props up businesses that should be allowed to fail.

45. I still feel that having children isn’t a right.

    Then you don’t believe women have the right to control their reproductive choices? What, exactly, are you doing reading a feminist blog? Feminism isn’t just about preventing unwanted children. It’s also about producing wanted ones.

    And the “Vagina: It’s Not a Clown Car” meme is classist as hell. The well-educated upper and middle classes have favored smaller families for a while now, and when we mock lower-class people who have a lot of children, we’re judging the poor because their cultural practices differ from ours. It’s none of my business how many children other people choose to have, and I am happy that my taxes go toward helping those who are not making a living wage but are trying to raise the next generation despite adversity.

46. Ismone wrote:

    If the system you are in, fairly or unfairly, fails to compensate you so that you can keep up with the Joneses, you shouldn’t have children even though ALL OF OUR ANCESTORS raised children on much fewer resources, and a less steady food supply than 90% of Americans have today?

    Well our own standards should be a LITTLE bit higher than that, don’t you think?

    The instinct for survival is powerful and important. Would you people think that slaves should have done their best not to have children because their child would be raped and beaten in slavery? Should people in war-torn nations not have children because their child may be murdered by guerillas, or forced to become one? Should we just give up on reproduction when times get tough?

    Yes to all. Many animals do in fact (temporarily) give up reproduction when times get tough. Should we be dumber than animals?

    And also, think of the practical implications. Some people will NEVER have enough money to meet your minimum standards for childrearing. Should their genetic line come to an end?

    Sure, why not? What’s so damn important about some shitty genes? My own genes will probably die with me, and I’m perfectly cool with that.

    I, for one, am damn glad that my great-grandparents chose to have children during the great depression. If they had waited, they would have been too old to be fertile, and not only would I and the people I love NOT EXIST, neither would they have ever had any children.

    For the overwhelming majority of people alive today and in the past, it would have been better never to have been born. A life that’s little more than bare-bones survival (let alone outright abject misery) is not worth living, imo.

    Prefer not to say wrote:

    And here’s why the poor SHOULD have children they can’t afford:
    Because who else is going to look after all of us childless people, when we’re in the nursing home?

    Robots. Automation, not procreation or immigration.

    Anyway, only those who can comfortably afford it, and don’t have any major inheritable physical or mental defects, should seriously consider having children. That may not be peecee, but it sure as hell is common sense!

47. The “responsibility” arguments are classist because they assume poor people are dumb animals who breed, and only .then think, OMFG! How am I going to feed this new kid, I never thought of that before?

48. A stagnant minimum wage loses more of its purchasing power each year. Businesses complain that increasing the minimum wage puts an unnecessary burden on them, yet they deal with increased costs of oil, food, and other goods. Do we value the labor of people less than corn?

    Without a large increase, the minimum wage will not be a living wage in most places in the U.S., but indexing the minimum wage to inflation would at least lessen its use as a political football.

49. The argument that society shouldn’t provide assistance to poor mothers because we are driving overpopulation and hence wrecking the environment is ridiculous for a number of reasons, but here’s one in particular: poor people aren’t the ones over-consuming and driving most environmental destruction in the first place. That one falls on the shoulders of rich people and corporations. If anyone shouldn’t have kids for environmental reasons, it’s the wealthy.

    My earlier comment got hung up in moderation so long that I don’t think anyone saw it, so here is it again:

    I think this is definitely a feminist issue since the vast majority of people in poverty are women and children; many are single mothers who are heads of the household. You can tie this to some very classic feminist issues such as:

    1) When a woman has a child, she is generally responsible for raising that child, even though both people were responsible in the kid’s creation, and

    2) Women don’t get paid as much as men.

50. I came from a lower middle class family and I’m one of 5 kids. I can tell you right now I don’t think that you should have more then you can parent/afford. The days when we needed large families due to infant mortality and the need for cheap labor are over. My grandmother had 9 adult children, 2 deaths at a young age, and 4 miscarriages. They tried to get birth control but it was expensive/illegal. I know my grandmother loved her kids, but she would have preferred not to have so many. She wanted a better life for them, and the pregnancies took a toll on her health. I also don’t think that many women (like my Mom) are good parents for large families, and lets face it, the more kids you have, the more work and frustration you have. And stuff falls through the cracks. You don’t have the time to focus enough on each kid to make sure they’re getting all they need (unless you’re a very organized mom, and I know there are ones out there). My Mom didn’t have a clue what was going on with us. We were lucky if she didn’t call us by the boy’s names let alone know if we were taking drugs or thinking about suicide. I know that women/families have a right to have as many as they want, but I see nothing noble in it unless you ROCK as parent. I know some women who take parenting to a whole new level and I’m all for them having as many as they want because I know those kids are getting everything they need, even if they’re wearing hand-me-downs and sleeping 2 to a bed.

51. An argument I see is that if you raise the minimum wage, businesses can’t afford to have as many low-wage workers and more low-wage workers are out of work, making it a net loss for minimum-wage workers.

    However, Washington state has the highest minimum wage in the country, yet it’s unemployment rate is comparable to the national average, and we experienced only about a 2% drop in employment at the minimum wage level.

    So let the nay-sayers explain that away.

52. For the record, I’m redneck white trash. Raised dirt poor and the only reason we had dirt was because the farm was paid for and couldn’t be taken away from us. I’ve been lucky. I have a degree and because the farm is paid for and I don’t have outstanding expenses (like student loans or children) I am able to pursue a job I enjoy and hobbies that pay enough for that little bit of ‘extra’. I’ll never be rich or even middle class, but I will never again be dirt poor, which is enough for me.

    There’s a fine line between people who can never catch a ‘break’ and those who never look for that ‘break’. Call me uppity or arrogant or condescending or whatever, but I have no use for people who use any excuse they can find to remain poor. This includes people who have children they can’t afford and then whine about it. Yes, I know people like this and they are the minority, but they do exist.

    Effort should be rewarded. When I worked retail during college and now as a tutor and as substitute teacher, when someone makes an honest effort, even if it’s hopeless, I reward it. When they sit there and expect someone else to do the work for them or screw up repeatedly and never learn from their mistakes, I wash my hands of them and walk away.

    I have no use for people who think ‘this is as good as it gets’ and never try. An honest effort should reap honest rewards.

53. Children are one of the leading indicators a household will be below the poverty line.

    It’s also harder to stop being poor when you have small hostages to fortune. It’s harder to arrange work schedules. There are basic needs–even cloth diapers are an extra load at the laundromat–and someone is always getting sick.

    We are just now returning to the middle class life after 20 years of poverty. Our oldest is 16.

    I’m 100% behind offering long-term contraceptives to those who could not otherwise afford them. Five years without worrying about pregnancy or a baby can make a world of difference for a woman.

54. Kids are not a right that all of us should fund. It’s a choice. You aren’t owed a child. You aren’t. If you wait to have kids and then have difficulty, that’s life. Having them when you aren’t ready is also a crock, but writing a check on other people’s lives, including the kid is irresponsible.

    There is no greater love and respect of a child and their worth than to only have one when you are ready to have one. It’s called adult responsibility and care for the child. Society should bail you out of passing troubles, but if you are determined to have children when you aren’t responsible, don’t expect all expenses paid for your lifestyle choice.

    And I don’t think we are in danger of running out of kids, so all of you with your own personal fantasy of being a goddess repopulating the world, selflessly doing the duty of society, you don’t deserve a medal.

    Please. You selflessly had sex to save the world and to create workers for the elderly? Did your child already have a job before it was born? Please. We aren’t running out of people.

55. There is no greater love and respect of a child and their worth than to only have one when you are ready to have one.

    BWAAHAHAHAHA!!!

    Oh, I’m sorry, you were serious.

    *koff* hehehe

    As a mother, I can tell you honestly, that *no one* is “ready” to have a child. Seriously. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true.

56. To clarify: there is no line, no magic cut-off point between “ready and able” and “not ready or able.” Unless you are Paris Hilton’s father, there will always be something else.

    I mean, if you have enough to feed/clothe your children, there’s health insurance. Once you’ve got that down, there’s having enough money to have one parent stay at home or pay for day care.

    Once you have that covered, should you wait until you’re financially secure enough to, say, save for their college education? If so, then I shouldn’t have been born, that’s for sure.

    Unless you’re willing in enact some sort of income-based version of China’s One Child policy, any talk in this direction

    if you are determined to have children when you aren’t responsible, don’t expect all expenses paid for your lifestyle choice.

    is just ridiculous.

57. Like I said – I find the whole punish women with poverty for having children argument to be pretty damn close to the punish women who have sex with children argument.

    The classism in here is starting to reek.

58. Hi there.

    I haven’t had a chance to skim through all the comments on this post but it’s such an important topic and question that I didn’t want to miss throwing some thoughts into the mix. Selma James has some great perspectives on the first question you raise, about raising the minimum wage, from a perspective of women’s liberation. To sum up some of her thoughts briefly, she argues that a) wage labor in society already doubly-exploits women’s work, because women’s work in the home (raising kids, cleaning house, cooking, etc.) is unpaid and unvalued in capitalist society even though it’s the very backbone of the working class — in other words, without women’s reproductive or “caring” work in the home, waged labor wouldn’t even be possible because there could be no wage workers. We might think of this as similar to the straight up exploitation characterized by slavery — where someone’s labor is being completely exploited by another class of people, and then that relation is justified because it’s the “nature” of that person to do such work and not get rightly compensated for it.

    She also argues that b) increases in wages for wage workers can be a fleeting gain, because as soon as the family member comes home with the higher wage, the woman (who usually does the shopping, pays the bills, etc.) finds that when she next goes to the grocery store, food prices have increased; or utility bills have increased; or rent is going up; or any other array of costs that rob working people of a stable and healthy living. Selma is not arguing against increased wages (any wage that helps put food on the table is better, no doubt, even if only temporarily) but rather pointing to a fundamental contradiction in capitalism and reason why there really can be no “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” for working people under capitalism. The only way to overcome this problem of perpetual poverty — which Selma would argue is not working people’s “fault”, it’s the nature of the system — is for working folks to organize in our places of work and community to demand and build different social and economic relations. For women in particular, Selma defines a place of work as both “formal” workplaces and the home, which usually represents women’s 2nd or 3rd job.

    There’s so much more that can be said on the topic. If folks are interested in seeing more of what Selma James is saying, I’d recommend checking out some of her writing which is online:

    The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community
    Sex, Race, and Class
    Selma James and the Wages for Housework Campaign

59. Red Queen, the classism here doesn’t just reek, it stinks on ice! Just when I thought the acceptable occurance of naked sexism that’s been revealed in the liberal blogesphere was as low as it gets, I see this thread and know that even feminists can throw in a little classism, racism and even more sexism toward their poverty sticken “sisters.”

    And I have a newsflash for you all. You often talk as though there’s not a single person of color, and God forbid, working class people on the internets. You talk like you’re all in some private club where we’re not allowed.

    This is the internet, not your private club. We’re all out there. White working class women like me (who is childless by choice at 38, so don’t worry about your precious tax dollars supporting my huge brood of babies). My sister, who is a woman of color has two children and she’s 23. And yes, I bet 3 cents of your tax dollars are going towards health care for my beautiful nieces. How very sad that you’d rather they get sick and die lest they be a burden to you wonderful liberals. Personally, as a progressive woman, I worry a hell of a lot more about the massive amounts of my tax dollars that go toward the occupation of other peoples lands. I worry about the billions and billions of dollars going to the banks every single day. Banks that take our tax dollars and invest them against the dollar for their own short-term profit – a game that might lead us to a Great Depression that will make the last one look like childs play by comparison.

    There’s a lot to worry about. I don’t worry about being a nation that gives to much of its resources towards supporting the poor. This is not a nation that supports its poor. This is a nation that destroys its poor. I’d like to leave it to the Rethuglicans to whine about “Welfare Queens” not liberals. And you call yourselves liberals – what the hell kind of nation do you want us to be for Christ sake? An even more craven and uncaring one than this?

    This thread is made of fail.

60. I grew up working class and got a low-income government grant to attend a private college full of privileged kids. Then I married into an upper-middle class family. I am in the uncomfortable position of saying, based on my experience:

    1. The only people I’ve known who refuse to work are always upper-middle class grown children who also refuse to move out of their parents’ homes, stop eating their parents’ food, driving their cars, and using their credit cards. Lower class people start working at 14 and never stop. They don’t retire, either.

    2. I used to work full time in a restaurant kitchen and did not make enough money to even make the rent. I had a 4-year degree. So did all of my coworkers. When something goes wrong, like a lost job or medical emergency in the family, you take the work you can get. And then you get stuck there. I had savings and a safety net when I started that job, but by the time I got out (by marrying a guy who had enough money that I could quit my job and devote my time to finding a better one) I had nothing in my account and had been borrowing from friends to make ends meet. Don’t think the exact same thing won’t happen to you. Your degree and work experience won’t save you. Someday you’ll need that job, no matter how bad it is, and you’ll end up working your way into the poorhouse while someone else gets rich off your labor.

    3. Birth control is only for the privileged. Without a flexible schedule and a car, you will not be able to get to Planned Parenthood to begin with (and Planned Parenthood is a necessity, because it is the only place you can afford). If you get there, you will need to get an annual exam (pap smear and STD tests) before you can get a prescription. This will be at least $250, or slightly over a week’s wages. Then you can pay $40 a month for your prescription, but only if you can find a pharmacy in your neighborhood that is not opposed to filling your birth control prescription. I have not even begun to address the idiocy that says poor people shouldn’t have kids (i.e. poor people should cease to exist, or at least be hidden from the public). Work on making birth control accessible, and then we’ll talk about choice.

61. Regarding the minimum wage issue, I lean towards the opinion of your friend. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t really do much for low income people and can sometimes even be damaging. When the minimum wage is raised, the cost of that increase to employers is passed along in the retail cost of consumer goods (i.e groceries, clothing, etc.) which affects low income consumers much more than middle or high income wage consumers. For small business owners (including women business owners), a raise in the minimum wage means they sometimes can’t afford to keep all of their employees, which results in someone being let go or at the least, no new future jobs.

    The bigger picture view here is that though minimum wage jobs have a place in the economy (high school & college kids, 2nd income earners, etc.), minimum wage jobs are never going to be suitable primary income jobs. The real story here is that low income women who are attempting to support their families need different opportunities. They need the opportunity for training that will give them the skills to increase their value in the market place, or so that they can become entrepreneurs, so that they can earn a living wage for them & their families. I would much rather my tax dollars fund 2 years of training (manufacturing, culinary arts, college, entrepreneurial skills, etc.) for a low income woman (or man) than go for just about anything else I can think of. It’s your basic “teach a man to fish” philosophy, and it makes economic sense. I unfortunately live in the “you made your bed, now lie in it” portion of the country, and we can’t seem to get our collective heads around how this is the economically smartest choice. Unfortunately, as a state, we’d rather just judge people than than making smart economic (and compassionate) choices.

    Finally, I adamantly believe that children should be brought into the world only when a family can most likely care for them economically and emotionally. There are many people in the world with the economic means to have children, but nowhere near the emotional means, and those kids end up “burdens” on society just as much or even more often than the low income kids. It sounds as though the blog’s author’s family was quite big, but obviously taken care of. Just because you’re low income doesn’t mean you can’t make things work economically. Most of my family is working class, has made the choice to have several children, and made it work economically. Full disclosure – I’m the nearly 40, never married, no biological kids, pro-choice, foster parent of a beautiful 9 year old girl.

62. but I have no use for people who use any excuse they can find to remain poor

    My mom has a similar attitude to yours, and probably for the same reasons: one of the easiest ways to leave that horrible poverty behind, mentally speaking, is to sneer at anyone still in it who ever, ever makes the tiniest error trying to get out.

    Yes, there are poor people who are lazy and have a sense of entitlement. Those personality characteristics cut across all social classes. Turning that into “therefore, if you’re poor it’s your own damn fault” is bullshit.

63. “Raising the minimum wage doesn’t really do much for low income people and can sometimes even be damaging.”

    Minimum wage should AT LEAST keep up with inflation. Otherwise the gap between poor and rich will continue to widen. If more people had money to spend on things other than housing and food, more people could be customers of businesses whose costs go up because they have to pay employees more. At least that’s how I think of it. How does it benefit society/the economy to have a percentage of the population who can only buy housing and food and even needs government help for that? But I certainly agree that there should be focus on training as well.

64. It looks like this topic is more difficult than I expected. The arguments above hit a lot of important points, but there are so many issues that posters are frequently writing right past each other. So, as best I can tell, here are the major questions:

    1. Does personal income depend solely on the individual (bootstraps) or on a combination of the individual, community and family resources, and chance?

    2. Is there a difference between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor? This used to be a Victorian distinction made based on whether they drank, picked pockets, etc. Now it’s the distinction between those who are poor because they “choose to be” and those made poor by a death in the family, medical bankruptcy, special needs child, natural disaster obliterating your savings, in spite of full-time employment, etc. This argument rests on your answer to the first question.

    3. Do full-time workers have the right to a living wage? This partly depends on your answers to 1.

    4. Do people who don’t work have the right to support? Does that differ according to your answer to 2?

    5. Are children part of society or luxury goods? If the latter, we have no obligation to help parents any more than I have an obligation to subsidize roads for Porshe owners when I walk to work. If the former, we should be paying parents to raise them to be full, productive members of society. If that seems like a ridiculous question, consider members of our society that aren’t able to support themselves as adults. At what point does an adult with severe physical and/or mental impairments cease to be their parents’ responsibility? Is it fair to ask people to work into their eighties and live in a slum to pay those medical bills? Is it fair to refuse to provide care for that adult because the parents can’t pay? If you believe children are members of society, then the second shift becomes charity that women donate, and while you may think someone is biting off more than s/he can reasonably chew, it’s a question of health and good sense, rather than morality. Some might argue that, in certain cases, the parents view children as a luxury good and thus have them for the wrong reasons, but nobody complains if you donate to charity just to look good. That may be foolish, but it isn’t immoral.

    6. How much does it take to raise a child? Is it economic? And going back to question 5, who should pay those expenses? What about emotional and environmental costs?

    7. What is the difference between bodily autonomy and the right to have children?

    8. What about birth control?

    9. Do children have rights? If we penalize poor women for trying to do a social job without pay (ie, raise children), are we violating the rights of their children?

    10. Is it classist to expect that other people raise their children to your standard of living, or is that an expression of your belief that children have rights?

    11. What about children I don’t like? Can’t I save the “undeserving poor” category for the parents of children I don’t like?

    12. Even if I agree with all of the opinions embedded in the questions above (yes, I know they all have implied right answers), do I think raising the minimum wage will achieve our goals?

    Now, why are these feminist questions?
    1. Women have less family and community support, so their individual effort results in smaller salaries.

    2. Being a sexually active woman automatically makes you “undeserving” in the eyes of many. There are plenty of double-standards in the answers to this question.

    3. Living-wage is often predicated on two-income families. Most single-income family units are headed by women.

    4. Women pick up most of the unpaid social care responsibilities, which are not currently defined as work, so they’re the ones being penalized when you answer no to this question.

    5. This question impacts women in two ways: as the primary caregivers and the ones seen as the decisionmakers in questions of children. If a family has more children than they can support, it’s seen as the woman’s fault.

    6. By defining this in economic terms, rather than emotional or care terms, we privilege the traditionally male contribution over the traditionally female contribution. By eliding many of the costs of children, we penalize women, who are expected to provide all of those forms of support above and beyond their “job.”

    7. If you don’t see why bodily autonomy is a feminist issue, I can’t help you.

    8. Ditto.

    9. See the above statements for why this question affects women more than men. Also, a pre-feminist view of women treated them like children… and luxury good children at that.

    10. Is it sexist to expect that women behave like men in the workplace?

    11. “What about children I don’t like?” This is the scariest argument to me, because I think it underlies a lot of the other ones, but people don’t make it directly. Our decisions about questions 1-10 are strongly shaped by the racist, nativist (not including first peoples, of course!), ablist, and classist discourses saturating our lives. If you disagree, look at all of the issues WoC have been fighting to bring to the attention of the white feminist movement. Can you honestly say we aren’t shaped by our privileges?

    12. This affects small business owners, which are a disproportionate number of female entrepeneurs. It also affects women disproportionately for all of the reasons above.

    Sorry for the achingly long post, but I felt very unclear on this issue and I finally decided it was because there were too many different issues tied up in it. I’m sure I missed a bunch of other questions, but it’s sunny out and I’ve done enough thinking for the morning…

65. Classism prevents people from writing me checks to support me to: be an artist full time, to travel and surf full time, from having a stable of ponies like rich people, from quiting my job and staying at home to garden…

    And because I did not prepare for a career that could support me, gee..that’s not my problem. I’m owed a living. School was supposed to be funz. It’s classist to think I have to have a strategy for my career.

    If I want to stay at home and have five kids, well, gee, people should support me. I should be able to dissolve into that sweet maternal world and leave the mean world behind. I’m doing something noble, even. Selfless (although I ask you to support me).

    I cannot help becoming pregnant and have no concept of family planning. It is classist to practice family planning after all. Planned parenthood has always been for eugenics, afterall. It’s an evil plot to prevent poor people from having precious babies. I should be able to get knocked up accidently and not have to worry about my future at all. People who think otherwise just hate babies. I love my babies!

    Why can’t I have the right to do these things with full support? If rich people can do it, why do I get such a classist response when I ask to be supported. I mean, I should be able to write a check on other people’s account to support me in any way I chose to live. What? are you classist?

66. Now, now, Ricke, you’re starting to sound like a republican. Or worse, a libertarian.

    The problem with such philosophies is that they tend to rely on ethical absolutism, which is unrealistic. Sounds wonderful in theory, I understand, but it ignores the specifics of whatever situation, in this case,

    “And because I did not prepare for a career that could support me, gee..that’s not my problem. I’m owed a living. School was supposed to be funz. It’s classist to think I have to have a strategy for my career.”

    Well, if you grew up poor to begin with, you probably went to a public school system, which was supported by your community. If you grew up poor, chances are the rest of your town is poor, too. If you have two caregivers, they’re probably working full time and you never really see them. So much more if it’s just you and mom, or dad, or grandma, or whatever.

    Not only does your school suck, but it may also be dangerous. Gangs offer hope in their own way. You’re a kid, you may or may not get involved in one. You’re taught nothing about sex ed. You have a higher chance of depression. If you work hard and can actually afford to take the SATs, you’re more likely not to do is well since your education simply couldn’t prepare you. Banks aren’t interested in your community because it is poor, and even if there are some around, what are the chances you’ll be approved for a loan? It makes sense to work whatever you can get. You don’t have a car, so you look locally. Your town is poor so there aren’t exactly a lot of fancy businesses offering internships to help you move up. And then your girlfriend accidentally gets pregnant…

    Or let’s say you do take on debt and go to college. Your parent(s) can’t help you at all. It takes time to climb business before you’re making enough to live on and pay your bills.

    And so on, or whatever.

    There’s so much more to it than personal choice, although I do think it is important not to be too relativist and simply excuse anything different as different. There can be lines.

67. Yeah, I want to echo those who are saying the classism on this thread reeks. I knew that class was someting underdiscussed in many liberal circles, but damn.

    To those who have something to say on the actual topic, as opposed to “poor people shouldn’t have kids” or “you people are saying that the world owes me a living” I am listening, and learning.

    -Izzy

68. This bears repeating: Businesses complain that increasing the minimum wage puts an unnecessary burden on them, yet they deal with increased costs of oil, food, and other goods. Do we value the labor of people less than corn?

    Thank you, ChrisR.

    People are not poor because of children, or lack of education, or underemployment, or laziness, or pick-your-poison. People are poor because…drumroll please….lack of wealth. No one gives a hot steaming shit about the laziness or poor choices or whatever of the wealthy and their progeny. Meanwhile, while the same-old-same-old crap about “deserving” vs. “undeserving” poor rages on, the recent bankruptcy bill sure as hell make no such distinction. Translation? If you are poor, or become poor, you deserved it. Calvinism plus turbo-charged capitalism, on a bedrock of racism, with individualism layered thoroughly in the mix.

    For all the pearl-clutching types who are angry about the existence of poor women and their children—–besides a hearty “fuck you! and the pony you wish you had!”—-most poor women didn’t start out that way.

    Yes, you heard me. No one struggles to become poor. It’s what happens when life lands on you with both feet. The statistical evidence reveals that poor women became so primarily because of divorce, job loss and/or illness/injury or disability. Yet the example trotted out, even by people who delude themselves into thinking they are “feminist” or “liberal” or “responsible” or some other version or holier-than-thou, is that of the woman who refuses to work, refuses to use birth control and/or have an abortion, and thinks the world owes her a living.

    Please, please, just once—-show me a woman who thinks the world owes her a damn living. I’ll guarantee you she isn’t poor.

    For all the motherfuckers who think you can plan your way into The Good Life (and no, I don’t have to name you. If you think I’m talking about you, I probably am. Go with it for once)—I encourage you to read this post. It’s mine, from a guest blog stint here. It’s most notable in my eyes for what I left out. It’s a bare-bones description of what can happen when the best-laid plans fall through in a big way.

    And don’t think it can’t happen to you (I’m talking to the pearl-clutching moralizers present—the rest of you, my people, you already know from where I speak).

    K is right on as to why these are feminist questions. Meantime, I think I’m going to go follow L Boogie’s links before dinner. Ciao.

69. Wow, I really do think this boils down to “is procreation a right or a luxury?” And as someone who leans more towards the “right” interpretation, I’m finding it very difficult to read the posts of people who see children as a luxury.

    Frankly this is not all that different from the way conservatives talk about sex and intimacy. Birth control costs money. Abortion costs money. Children, of course, cost huge amounts of money. The idea that poor people should be expected to skip major parts of the ordinary human life cycle — it flabbergasts me, and it flabbergasts me no less with regard to childrearing than with regard to sex.

    (Please understand, I don’t mean this in any way as an attack on people who choose not to have children themselves. Or sex, for that matter.)

    And the “make birth control more available” comments — yeah, I absolutely agree that birth control and abortion need to be as accessible as we can possibly make them. Absolutely. But poor people are going to continue having children, because they are people, and having children is something people tend to do.

    And I don’t think we are in danger of running out of kids, so all of you with your own personal fantasy of being a goddess repopulating the world, selflessly doing the duty of society, you don’t deserve a medal.

    What an absolutely misogynistic and asshole-ish thing to say. Do you go up to random women wheeling baby carriages and say “bet you think you’re real special, don’t you, you bitch”?

    I hope you say similar things to people in SUVs, people with very large houses, and other people who consume more resources than they need (or “need”).

    And inasmuch as any woman demands special accolades for the mere act of having children, I think that’s much more the preserve of middle- and upper-class Stepford Wife types than it is of your average woman on welfare.

70. kelsey,
    Thats where I struggle too, where is the line. With people over the “line” is it a right to willfully bring a child into this world you cannot support and have no intention of supporting? Rights in my mind cant be parsed, we have them or we dont (obvious things such as yelling fire in a theatre aside) but its still hard for me to say having children should be a right, i feel it should be but too many counterarguments come up in my mind.

71. With people over the “line” is it a right to willfully bring a child into this world you cannot support and have no intention of supporting?

    Isn’t the focus on the unfitness of poor parents for lack of economic and other resources really a red herring to divert discussion from the inequities of the current system along with the unquestioned assumption that parental fitness is automatically assumed for those who pass a certain income/asset holding threshold?

    From experiences in school and at work, nearly all of the most maladjusted adolescents and young adults I’ve had the misfortune to deal with in school and at work tended to come overwhelmingly from the higher end of the socio-economic ladder. An environment of great privilege and overentitlement combined with the inability to acknowledge one has any shortcomings whatsoever is a nasty combination….especially to those who have the misfortune of interacting with those so afflicted.

    Abundant possession of economic resources does not necessarily constitute definitive proof one is an adequate parent…..much less a good one.

72. As someone from a large working class family I’m finding this comments section really difficult to read; you guys are going to make me cry soon. Apparently many of you think that I should not exist and have no right to be alive right now. In addition, someone mentioned that my life, which began as a ‘bare-bones survival’ is not worth living.

    Well, I beg to differ. I do like existing, I have managed to enjoy life greatly even though I had to start working at a very young age and continue working full time all through school, and I don’t believe that my mother should be chastised for having me. She once told me she had a child for every method of birth control she tried. What do you suggest be done to my mother? forced sterilization or abortions? if that’s what you think you should stop reading a feminist blog. Also, remember that birth control costs money.

    Right now I managed to work my way through high school and through college ONLY because I am blessed with a photographic memory, amazing test taking skills, an IQ that ranks in the genius category, and, most importantly, luck (what would I have done if I had been hurt, left without insurance and unable to work?). but I guess my worthless genes should have just died off.

    Anyway, having experienced poverty, I can say that the main defense I would give for raising minimum wage is that those poor people probably work harder than you. My father worked 2 jobs, my siblings all worked, I worked, and my mother worked in daycare so that she could take care of us at the same time. Everyone else I knew in poor families worked just as hard.

    I can honestly say that the higher up on the privilege ladder, the less I’ve had to work and the more I’ve gotten paid. My current job requires virtually no work, not many skills, and no degree (I don’t graduate until tomorrow). This job pays great in comparison to my old jobs, and I could have never gotten it without ‘knowing the right person’.

73. There’s some general misconceptions about the effects of a minimum wage here, or what contributes to what wage a person is paid (assuming a functioning labor market, with adequate information regarding productivity). For the sake of full disclosure, I majored in Political Economy at Berkeley.

    Here’s a few things to consider:
    1) A minimum wage (which is what a “living wage” would be) amounts to a price floor on labor. In general, a price floor or a change in the price floor will either have no effect (in this case, no one is actually working at or below the minimum wage where it is enforced) or it creates a surplus. A surplus of labor is called “unemployment”.
    2) Assuming that employers have sufficient information about worker productivity, the marginal revenue that will be created per added hour of labor, the wages that they will be willing to pay will be at or below that level. For someone to be paid $8 an hour, they have to contribute at least $8 an hour of marginal revenue by their labor to the employer in order to provide an incentive for the employer to hire them. Layoffs usually eventually result when an employer has too many workers with marginal productivity below their hourly wage (marginal revenue also tends to decline as more workers are hired relative to fixed capital, meaning that increased capital investments, for example, in plant space and machinery, will generally be necessary to maintain productivity and thus wages).
    3) The relative costs of labor and capital tend to affect the balance of those inputs used in production in any particular market. In Las Vegas, hotels are demolished by skilled demolitionists using specialized equipment (a capital-intensive mode of production). In Hong Kong, workers with sledgehammers and wheelbarrows do the job (a labor-intensive mode). Ergo, a rise in the relative cost of one input tends to shift production towards increased use of the other. If Hong Kong workers got more expensive, developers would start using skilled demolitionists. If Las Vegas witnessed a dramatic boom in labor supply, say from increased immigration, Las Vegas developers would eventually shift to hammers and wheelbarrows. To cite another example, if the wages of the fry-cooks in a fast-food restaurant suddenly went from $8 an hour to $16, it might make sense to invest in a more efficient fry-cooking machine that requires half as much labor and laying off half the fry-cooks, depending on the cost of the machine (purchase or rental and upkeep).
    4) It is NOT the case that rising wages, or minimum wages, necessarily leads to a 1-for-1 general increase in costs of all goods and services. It is generally the case that it does lead to an increase in the costs of labor-intensive goods and services. Since almost all goods and services rely to some extent on a combination of labor and capital, the rise in costs tends to affect more labor-intensive goods and services rather than capital-intensive ones.
    5) It is also NOT the case that a general increase in wages tends to increase consumption of all goods and services one-for-one, thus paying for itself in some sort of perpetual cycle. First, as noted above, production relies on a mix of labor and capital inputs. Some of increased revenue will be invested in capital, necessary to maintain the marginal returns on labor. Second, not all income will be invested in consumption, some will be saved (i.e.: invested in capital through banks or other savings vehicles). Some will be taxed as well by the government.
    6) Relative to the last point, if productivity does not increase relative to wages, the wage increase will lead to inflation. Not enough goods and services are being produced to pay for the wage increase, and thus too many dollars will be chasing too few goods. We can see today very clearly what the effects of inflation are on wages.

    Conclusions: Note that I mentioned twice above the relevance of productivity in justifying and “paying for” wage increases, and twice the role of capital in maintaining the marginal productivity of labor. Those are the big and usually ignored inputs that have a dramatic effect on long-term trends in wages. While it is often pointed out that wages have been stagnant for about 25 years, or that the middle class is disappearing, or that there has been a widening gap in rich and poor, the underlying trend that all of these facts describe is that there has been a dramatic increase in the returns on skilled and high-productivity labor, while un- and semi-skilled wages have been the ones that have stagnated or even declined.

    We can blame the effects of technology in increasing productivity for most of this, with globalization as a distant second. New technology usually requires new training, skills, and education for the workers to make use of it (that training and education counts as a capital investment, “human capital”, in its own right). Those without those skills get left behind.

    The lower-paid and more labor-intensive jobs, particularly in manufacturing, have tended to be offshored to places where labor costs are lower relative to productivity, such as China. This sounds like a raw deal for workers, at least until you consider that that’s why the computer you are reading this on costs $1000 as opposed to $3000, or that the costs of many other goods that workers and their families often need: cars, textiles, steel, and other basics have been falling for years.

    The answer to most of this would be an increased investment in human capital, which would raise productivity and thus wages. This generally means education and training. That’s the real issue here, is the mess that our education system is in this country. (Education isn’t cheap either these days. Want to talk about inflation? Look at college tuition.) Fix the education system (not necessarily synonymous either with simply pouring more money into it, nor necessarily trying to cram each and every student into a college-prep track), and you’d go some ways to sorting out a lot these issues.

    I didn’t talk about the inflation that we’re dealing with now, mostly in food and energy, which is a real pain on wages and prices. I could go at some lengths on that, but that would take up too much space here.

74. I guess my take on the matter is mostly environmental. The world’s ecology is groaning under the weight of the people it has to support. We desperately need to reduce the number of human beings in the world, and I naturally favor not having more in the first place over killing the ones we’ve got.

    So you should only have kids if you really *really* want kids, and then you should only have two. I don’t care if you’re rich, poor, or in between.

    That said, yes, I think the minimum wage should be raised to the point where you can support one adult and two kids on it–not at a salmon and asparagus level, but at least at a chicken and broccoli level.

75. Of course poor people should be “allowed” to have children. The problem lies, not in desire that many people have to procreate, but in a society that views children as a lifestyle choice, not as vulnerable people who need support.

    There are responsible limits. If you’ve got three kids and can’t feed them, it’s reasonable not to have a fourth. If you are incapable of giving your three children love and affection, don’t have another. (Regardless of income. I’ve seen some incredible shitty parents who make decent money. And vice-versa.) However, there is no way to “enforce” responsible reproduction, nor frankly would that be desirable. You can’t argue for bodily autonomy when it comes to birth control and then argue the opposite way when it comes to large families. (Though arguing with their reasons for having a large family is fair game, i.e., the Duggars.)

    So I guess in the long run, all I’d offer as a solution has already been said: Comprehensive sex ed, free and accessible birth control, a living wage, universal health care. You’ll always have “freeloaders;” the main difference between those who’d take advantage of such a system and some of the rich kids I went to high school with is an accident of birth that made one poor, and the other wealthy.

    (Disclosure: grew up middle class; have taken advantage of middle class connections to avoid falling into poverty; don’t particularly care for children or want them for myself.)

76. The world’s ecology is groaning under the weight of the people it has to support.

    Is it the number of people? Or is it the mismanagement and waste of the world’s resources that is the problem? And if so, who bears the most responsibility for that mismanagement and waste? Will fewer children result in less environmental degradation, or will overconsumption, waste and pollution continue? What role does capitalism play in ecological harm? How will a sustainable environment be created—by individual decisions, or by systemic change?

    Because from where I sit, I see a whole helluva lot of tut-tutting towards women who have children (especially poor women), and very little tut-tutting of materialism and overconsumption, not to mention the economic system upon which that level of waste depends. It is easier to point fingers at the people with the least power. Or as I put it in another thread that veered towards “those pesky mommies and their children”, transnational corporate empires and their client nations are helpless in the face of all these women bearing children.

    Right?

77. I guess my take on the matter is mostly environmental. The world’s ecology is groaning under the weight of the people it has to support. We desperately need to reduce the number of human beings in the world, and I naturally favor not having more in the first place over killing the ones we’ve got.

    So you should only have kids if you really *really* want kids, and then you should only have two. I don’t care if you’re rich, poor, or in between.

    Well, rich people use more resources and so will their kids. Shouldn’t they be the priority in convincing people not to have children? After all, it’s not just about the raw number, it’s about the amount of environmental destruction you carry out while you’re here, and rich people are far and away the most responsible for that.

78. However, there is no way to “enforce” responsible reproduction, nor frankly would that be desirable.

    Exactly. I really think we need to separate the question of what individual people ought to do from the question of what societies ought to do.

    I mean, it would be nice if nobody ever made personal decisions I didn’t agree with, but that’s never going to happen.

79. I read a scifi/mystery series where the parent that stays home with the kids gets a salary from the government. I know that will probably never happen, but it would be nice if some sort of money/tax break was given to stay-at-home parents. No one really respects a job when you’re not getting paid for it. I see parenting as a job… one with great benefits (kisses and hugs being the best) and I do wish we got more training for it in schools (when I went there was no flour baby class).

80. As far as I can tell, no one seems to have mentioned that it may actually be _smart_ for people in lower income brackets to have more children. It’s actually a common evolutionary strategy across the animal kingdom (although by no means in all circumstances or all animals). When resources are scarce and/or a particular animal is low on the social totem pole, parents may have more offspring but invest less in each individual. The same seems reasonable for humans. If you want a chance that some of your kids will have a happy life, and if you’re so dirt poor that you are already living in poverty when childless (and will be poor for the foreseeable future), why not have a lot of kids and hope that a few of them make it onto something better? You’ll only be marginally more poor per capita, but potentially much happier. In addition, you’ve also increased your potential network of support.

    Should the government subsidize it? Well, I think we have an interest in all of our citizens being healthy/happy. But in a sinister way, I think our society has also invested heavily in having high levels of inequality and exploitation in order to keep the top rungs in luxury. Overconsumption of cheap goods and services at the middle and top requires cheap labor at the bottom. And there are more shit-paying jobs than people to fill them, so it seems like our government wants at least some people to be so dirt poor that keep running on the poverty treadmill and can’t stop long enough to work their way off of it. Sinister, but I think true :(.

81. General comment: keep in mind that assuming that more kids of “rich” people are dysfunctional brats is, also (drum roll…) classist! Gosh!

    Being dumb defies income. I know plenty of kids who would have actually had better lives if their families had more money, and plenty of wealthy kids who could use a slap with reality. WHATEVER.

    Having to work hard =/= moral superiority. Not having to work hard =/= moral superiority. Geeze.

82. Also remember that we’ve had a very big shift over the last 100 years from an agriculturally based economy to a high-tech/service based economy. It used to be that having a lot of kids was considered “good” because the more kids, the more they could contribute to the production of the farm, even at a pretty young age. Now, kids are much more of a “drain” on the economy of a household, even leaving out the big bugaboo of college education.

    What no one wants to admit is although governments might be coaxed into providing more support for “decent” living wages, enough to raise a family on, what no government is interested in doing is subsidizing the births of what turn out to be “non-productive citizens” (i.e., those who don’t pay taxes.) Which means that if we did manage to improve support for parents, there’s going to be a lot of nosiness and finger-wagging as well.

    Yeah, there’s a lot of classism in the whole issue. Too bad. Once you get above small groups, classism always in existence. Anyone who thinks we can get rid of it from human culture is a naive romantic.

83. For those of you that care about information, rather than blaming the Other (for overpopulating the Earth), read this.

    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534

    Overpopulation as a global phenomenon is a strawman in the ecological debate. The Earth is fully capable of feeding 12 billion people, with more natural wild habitats and a functioning ecology and society. Do not underestimate the size of Earth relative to you. Do not, also, underestimate the size and inappropriateness of human demands beyond needs. Slice off 2 billion people, and if it ain’t the right two billion, the damage will still be ongoing, and even if the right two billion were to be elimated (most of us who are talking in here now), the other 5 billion would simply replace the consumption patterns, eventually. A change in thought and nature is needed, not fewer people who are rapacious. That misinterprets the whole point of rapaciousness.

84. Elinor says:
    May 17th, 2008 at 7:17 pm – Edit

    Wow, I really do think this boils down to “is procreation a right or a luxury?” And as someone who leans more towards the “right” interpretation, I’m finding it very difficult to read the posts of people who see children as a luxury.

    It’s not just a question of whether you have children, it’s a question of when, and how many.

    To put it differently: procreation, generally, may be a right. But procreation unlimited by constraints of scheduling or resources is surely a luxury. Isn’t it?

    It can make a pretty huge difference to wait 5 years. An example is that you can more easily work longer hours and save up money as a childless person, but you can’t easily do so if you’ve got to take care of kids. And because things like rent and food are fixed costs, a small increase in gross income can be an enormous percentage increase in income saved, or free cash, etc.

    (I’m not too insanely worried about a 40 hour/week limit, especially if people are doing it for a few years to save up dough. Who works 40 hours/week these days? I sure don’t. And if we’re going to look to our “Ancestors” who had all those kids, they sure as hell didn’t work 40 hour weeks.)

85. PG–Congratulations on graduating! I worked my way through college, too, so I can relate.

    La Lubu–You are always awesome.

    And as a take off on what shah8, Jasmine and La Lubu were saying about overconsumption—think about it in terms of clothes. Think of how many t-shirts (just t-shirts) you own. Compare that to the total number of clothing items that people in the 1900s owned. Think about all the electronics we throw out in 2-3 years, instead of repairing. (Ever heard of “engineered weakness”? My dad has one of the original sony cd players, and it STILL RUNS. He had to replace a spring once. The thing is about 20 years old.) We use so much hot water! Some people have grass lawns, even in ridiculous climates like NM and AZ! What the earth CANNOT support is US-levels of consumption of natural resources. We are so wasteful it is ridiculous. There is so much packaging (much of it uneccessary) so many grocery-bags, so many crops dependent on ridiculous amounts of synthetic fertilizer (which, as a Harper’s article pointed out a few years ago, is basically like pouring oil on the ground.) What we NEED to do is get our consumption under control. Like PG, I happen to like being alive, even though I am (gasp!) the fourth of six children and my parents had to charge their car repairs and were damn lucky that my dad was never laid off. (If he had been, that would have been the difference between being barely middle class and being really poor, perhaps even homeless, in about a month.)

    And amen to what Tom said about education. I’m not an economist, but I do recognize the forces of globalization, and I definitely think that our government should put a lot of thought into what sorts of trained and educated people we need going forward, and how to make that training and education accessible. It is a win-win.

86. And amen to what Tom said about education. I’m not an economist, but I do recognize the forces of globalization, and I definitely think that our government should put a lot of thought into what sorts of trained and educated people we need going forward, and how to make that training and education accessible. It is a win-win.

    Agreed. For this to be effectively implemented, however, our society needs to change its anti-intellectual attitudes which often denigrates and looks down upon those who value education and learning of any kind.

    One only needs to see how the most enthusiastic learners and the studious are often socially ostracized in most K-12 schools….sometimes to the point of physical violence.* If we’re to implement those changes, this commonplace social antipathy towards those who exhibit great aptitude and/or enthusiasm towards learning needs to be dealt with and stamped out. This is one form of self-sabotage our main economic competitors rarely worry about.

    * Personal experience along with stories from friends who teach in American public and private K-12 institutions.

87. It’s unclear to me whether or not Nerd Rights are a realistic thing, though. Combine immaturity with an inferiority complex and a get of muscles and you’ve got every school yard bully who will eventually grow up to be one of the many anti-intellectuals of which you speak.

    Mark Twain wrote, rather poetically, in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,

    “The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.”

88. *set of muscles, sorry

89. So true. I find the anti-intellectualism in this country very discouraging. Growing up, I was mostly friends with the immigrant kids (who in my community were mostly east asian and eastern european/soviet) because their parents were strict like mine. A lot (but not all) of the well-educated non-immigrant white parents whose kids I knew had a really lazy attitude towards their kids’ achievements and wanted them to just have fun.

    And to top it off, a lot of people will label themselves as “stupid” if they aren’t familiar with something.

    There was a great study about how much more children improve when they are taught that scholastic performance is based on effort, not natural talent.

90. wow, this has been, uh, educational.

    three things: i find it incredibly disingenuous for anyone, but especially so-called liberals, to blame poor women for having children in an economic system that relies not only upon said women having children, but also upon said women *remaining poor.* seriously, screw you guys.

    also: i agree with rose above; though this is certainly primarily a class issue, it is also very much a race issue. activists and writers like dorothy roberts (killing the black body) and other folks just plain paying attention have noted that mothers of color are targeted in particular for having children they “shouldn’t.” in a country that is trying to send primarily black addict mothers to jail for using while pregnant (though black mothers are no more likely than mothers of other races to use while pregnant), while talking heads in the msm urge white women to do their duty and have more white babies, this cannot be stressed enough.

    also: while some economists, and certainly businesses, will tell you that raising the minimum wage results in a rise in unemployment, empirical evidence does not necessarily indicate that this is the case. a minimum wage that keeps up with inflation would help, as would more investment in education. also: why is it that i always seem to hear about raises in productivity, but never about accompanying raises in pay?

    also: what la lubu said. again and again.

91. So if on purpose I go out and acquire ten of anything that requires big bucks to maintain (and if I fail to do the maintaining I go to jail and/or the state takes the things back), the government should subsidizie my decision (I’m making the huge assumption I control the acquisition process 100%, which in terms of reproductive justice, I realize is a leap)? Sorry, but you just can’t ingnore economic reality here. Children cost money. Having them is indeed a luxury item. One reason I don’t have them is my family 100% depends on me to pay the bills, and if I am fired for being pregnant (my mom was) or pushed out of my job, we lose our house. The idea that the goverment would or should keep this from happening is a silly silly pipe dream. And the minority women around me and my husband who are pulled well back from the ledge financially are also those who limited their family size. Once the kids are here I’ll do anything to help them have a decent life, but please get real and don’t blow smoke at women who are already at risk by telling them you should have as many kids as you want. It’s an 18 year sentence of limited time to go back to school, work the extra hours to get ahead in a job, or devote to a relationship with another person who has a job where the two of you can pay rent together. Tons of kids keeps women down unless you have big resources to handle it. We all know it. Why pretend?

92. So if on purpose I go out and acquire ten of anything that requires big bucks to maintain (and if I fail to do the maintaining I go to jail and/or the state takes the things back), the government should subsidizie my decision (I’m making the huge assumption I control the acquisition process 100%, which in terms of reproductive justice, I realize is a leap)?

    Except that children are not “things” that you “acquire.” And no, they are not luxury items, they are people.

    please get real and don’t blow smoke at women who are already at risk by telling them you should have as many kids as you want.

    Who said that women should have as many kids as they want? People have said that women should have the right to control the number and spacing of their children — that includes making the decision to give birth if they so choose, without interference from the government or judgmental assholes.

    Tons of kids keeps women down unless you have big resources to handle it. We all know it. Why pretend?

    Because, as others have said, the fact is that (a) the women who are “kept down” by kids are often kept down by a lot of other factors, and (b) if kids keep women down, that is a systematic problem. It is not solved by wagging our fingers at women and accusing them of being irresponsible or selfish.

    Kids are not luxury items. They are not accessories. They are people. They are family — just like your parents or your siblings. And yes, women should have the right to decide when and if to have them, and how many to have. Women need the tools to make those decisions (and usually, when women have those tools, they choose to have fewer kids, but that’s another issue). But kids aren’t just about expenses and opportunities; it’s about having love, about having kin. It’s about family. That brings intangible value to most peoples’ lives, and it is not something that only the middle-class or wealthy deserve.

93. And further: Children are people. They are people who are particularly vulnerable and who usually cannot fend for themselves. So this isn’t just about the government giving money/support to low-income people who have kids; it’s about the government supporting its own citizens who are too weak, for whatever reason, to support themselves. Many children have families who support them so that the government isn’t obligated to; but I do believe that when those family structures don’t exist, for whatever reason, society has an obligation to step in and support those who have less.

    In other words, I find it troubling that we’re talking about children as if they’re not individuals in their own rights.

94. It’s unclear to me whether or not Nerd Rights are a realistic thing, though. Combine immaturity with an inferiority complex and a get of muscles and you’ve got every school yard bully who will eventually grow up to be one of the many anti-intellectuals of which you speak.

    Kelsey Jarboe,

    This isn’t merely about “Nerd rights”, but about a systemic longstanding American cultural phenomenon which denigrates anyone with an enthusiasm and/or aptitude towards learning. Unlike the societies of our economic competitors where the most enthusiastic and capable learners are admired and lionized by their classmates and society, we have a society where it is more virtuous to be proud of one’s ignorance and mediocrity and to dump on our teachers, scholars, or anyone deemed “too intellectual”.

    This anti-intellectual attitude is one that should be cause for serious concern, not something to be blithely dismissed as a mere “schoolyard phenomenon”. One’s inferiority complex and immaturity should never be used as an excuse for self-sabotaging behavior which ends up screwing all of us.

95. Jill, with respect, I’m not sure whether the last comment was responsive. bmc90 and in fact the majority of commenters here appear to all agree about the legal right of women of any income to control number of children. Most everyone also seems to agree on the best approach — outreach to poor communities to educate about financial planning, job assistance, free and accessible birth control; a living wage; better participation in mentorship programs; universal health care.

    bmc90 said “Once the kids are here I’ll do anything to help them have a decent life,” which seems to me like she agrees with you that children have individual rights and deserve society’s assistance.

    She also says: “my family 100% depends on me to pay the bills, and if I am fired for being pregnant (my mom was) or pushed out of my job, we lose our house.”

    Vail, above, says: “I came from a lower middle class family and I’m one of 5 kids. I can tell you right now I don’t think that you should have more then you can parent/afford.”

    It seems like in a groundswelling of righteous anger at elitist women who would control the bodies of poor women — but most if not all of the comments seem to be rightfully against such measures. And meanwhile many of the poor or lower-income women on the thread, who are discussing their experiences, are being ignored or misquoted.

    The majority of people here get that this is about family and about children’s rights. That doesn’t seem to be the controversy. But there are a number of children here. The children to be born. But also, the children already born and the ones having the childen, as in: this book . In “Random Family,” journalist Nicole LeBlanc spent 10 years researching and interviewing one extended family in a poor Bronx neighborhood. The book goes through two generations of 13-14-year-old girls having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, and the implications for their own lives and those of their children.

    Nobody is arguing that these children should not be loved and treasured, or that there should not be a right to have them. But I think in not listening to stories of all women who talk about how this situation affects them, and jumping to vague 101 statements about family and societal obligation that are preaching to the choir, we are opting out of a real discussion of how to combat some of the issues discussed in “Random Family.”

96. # Jill says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 5:18 pm – Edit
    Except that children are not “things” that you “acquire.” And no, they are not luxury items, they are people.

    Well, we’re talking about children who do not exist yet. So no, they’re not people, unless you adhere to an unusual philosophy.

    That’s pretty important, dontcha think? An unborn child is just… not there. It doesn’t suffer any harm from not existing.

    Who said that women should have as many kids as they want? People have said that women should have the right to control the number and spacing of their children — that includes making the decision to give birth if they so choose, without interference from the government or judgmental assholes.

    Unless I am really missing your statement, didn’t YOU just say women should have as many kids as they want? I don’t know how else you expect us to interpret “…right to control the number [of kids]” and “…making the decision to give birth if they so choose.”

    Because, as others have said, the fact is that (a) the women who are “kept down” by kids are often kept down by a lot of other factors,

    Nobody is denying it. But I don’t see how it’s an operative excuse. We don’t need to think that 100% of the problem is attributable to a certain issue in order to focus on taht issue. Or at least we don’t for most thing–why do it here?

    and (b) if kids keep women down, that is a systematic problem. It is not solved by wagging our fingers at women and accusing them of being irresponsible or selfish.

    OK, is it solved by, say, educating people on the costs of children? By convincing people to have them later, or to be aware of their costs, or…? Because changing the behavior of people seems like a very normal way to cure a systemic issue, doesn’t it?

    Kids are not luxury items. They are not accessories. They are people. They are family — just like your parents or your siblings.

    No they’re not. They aren’t alive yet. These are not kids we’re talking about.

    And yes, women should have the right to decide when and if to have them, and how many to have.

    OK. But no fair saying we misinterpret you when you comment “Who said that women should have as many kids as they want?”

    Women need the tools to make those decisions (and usually, when women have those tools, they choose to have fewer kids, but that’s another issue). But kids aren’t just about expenses and opportunities; it’s about having love, about having kin. It’s about family. That brings intangible value to most peoples’ lives, and it is not something that only the middle-class or wealthy deserve.

    # Jill says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 5:20 pm – Edit

    And further: Children are people. They are people who are particularly vulnerable and who usually cannot fend for themselves. So this isn’t just about the government giving money/support to low-income people who have kids; it’s about the government supporting its own citizens who are too weak, for whatever reason, to support themselves. Many children have families who support them so that the government isn’t obligated to; but I do believe that when those family structures don’t exist, for whatever reason, society has an obligation to step in and support those who have less.

    In other words, I find it troubling that we’re talking about children as if they’re not individuals in their own rights.

    I find it equally troubling that you are conflating–deliberately–the rights of children with the right to have children. Nobody here, as far as I can tell (maybe I missed a troll) is suggesting that we ignore real, live, children. however, you are simply being ridiculous is you fail to acknowledge the immense ethical difference between “I don’t want to pay for that child’s needs” and “I don’t want to pay for future children’s needs; can we avoid that necessity?”

    It doesn’t help your argument any.

97. On the question of “nerd-rights” and anti-intellectualism, I could say a lot. One thing, however, is that I think there might be something of a bias in this country towards the norm of a four-year baccalaureate degree, with all the broad-based general education commonly associated with such a program, as the preferred educational goal for all students. I’d hardly be one to denigrate a university degree or liberal arts education in general as a valuable and worthwhile goal, having pursued it myself. But I don’t believe that it is necessarily an appropriate expected goal for every student. We have a problem in the US of deprecating and giving short-shrift to potential alternative courses of study. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, has tried to stream most or all students into college-prep courses geared towards matriculation to the UC or CSU state university systems. Not all students succeed in this track, and many of those who don’t tend to drop out (the LAUSD has, according to some measures, somewhere around a 50% drop out rate). You can also compare the state funding support (I’m speaking from the California experience) to the public college and university systems, as opposed to vocational ed through places like DeVry or ITT, which are very expensive. I suspect that part of the reason we do this is that many of the people setting education policy tend to be university graduates themselves, and suffer from a myopia regarding alternatives.

    Some other countries have a more well-rounded set of expectations. Germany, for example, tends to stream students into different tracks, sending university-bound students to Gymansium while putting other students into Hauptschule and Realschule programs geared towards vocational, practical, or apprentice-based goals. This system isn’t perfect. The Germans go too far in streaming students, often locking them into tracks and limiting mobility of students who want to and are prepared to change goals. They don’t have anything quite like our community college systems in many states, that offer nontraditional approaches to education. The Hauptschule (and, to a lesser extent, the Realschule) schools also tend to be stigmatized (like continuation schools here, but again, German students have less mobility and nontraditional options). But a more balanced and diverse approach towards educational goals and support for pursuing those goals, one that doesn’t compromise American expectations and values of social mobility and equal opportunity, would probably be of benefit.

98. Ummm, Sailorman, taken from the post:

    “lower class families are often blamed for their poverty on the grounds that they shouldn’t have had so many children”

    So the focus of the post was retrospective, not prospective. Yes, the comment threads have gone toward a prospective approach, but again, if someone (and I’m not saying you’re doing this, but some people on the thread clearly are) is saying that certain poor people are so poor they should never have children, this is somewhat morally problematic.

    And I think you’re misinterpreting Jill, I read her to be saying that there is a difference between saying people have the right to decide the number and spacing of their children, and saying they SHOULD have that number of children spaced in that manner. So she seems to be drawing a distinction between rights and their exercise.

    And also, I think that what La Lubu and Jill and others are pointing out is that it is disingenous to say children are the problem, when a lot of people would be poor anyways and our social/economic structure has more to do with that than the fact of procreation. As one of those who have harped upon our ancestors, my point is that life is hard, and not having it easy doesn’t mean you should become a genetic dead end if you don’t want to. As far as delaying children, you can’t always decide when you get pregnant, not all women want abortions, and some women (like me) are faced with the reality that if we do not have children young, we may not be able to have them at all. (And I am pro-adoption like crazy, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t have much money so it wouldn’t be very easy for us to do.) I would rather put off kids for 4-5 years, but based on family history, that might be a bad thing to do that could result in medical complications for me and potential-future child.

99. exholt–

    I agree with you, but I’m making a lighthearted analogy. Of course it’s not so simple, but even in places where intellectualism is championed, you’ll still find “don’t be such a smarty pants” attitudes. Some pretty smart and -otherwise- progressive people can be pretty crappy feminists, you know?

100. The idea that the goverment would or should keep this from happening is a silly silly pipe dream.

     Come again? Did you just say that the idea that the government should enforce antidiscrimination laws to keep you from being fired by your employer for being pregnant is silly? A pipe dream? Am I understanding you clearly when I take away the impression that you are either opposed to antidiscrimination laws, or think they are a waste of time?

     This issue—women having children (should they? when? how many? under what circumstances? what parenting practices should they follow? how should employers or educational institutions deal with mothers?, shouldn’t they be married first? shouldn’t they at least be heterosexual? how much money does it take to raise a child? etc. etc.) carries a heavy cargo of baggage right along with it. Cargo that quite frankly men don’t have to carry. It’s contentious because these aren’t abstract questions, and when, how, and to what extent the answers to these questions impact our lives varies according to our other identities. A truly productive conversation about strategies to combat poverty in women, especially mothers, can’t be a “general” conversation. It has to be specific. There are different causes of poverty, and different solutions for different women.

     Because the resources and assistance that Coco of “Random Family” needed is entirely different from the resources and assistance that bmc90’s mother needed. Which is different from what a mother impoverished due to disability or illness needs, or a survivor of domestic violence needs. Or—what I needed.

101. # Ismone says:
     May 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm – Edit

     Ummm, Sailorman, taken from the post:

     “lower class families are often blamed for their poverty on the grounds that they shouldn’t have had so many children”

     So the focus of the post was retrospective, not prospective. Yes, the comment threads have gone toward a prospective approach, but again, if someone (and I’m not saying you’re doing this, but some people on the thread clearly are) is saying that certain poor people are so poor they should never have children, this is somewhat morally problematic.

     Well, yes and no. I don’t think it’s morally problematic to think generally that there may be some distinctions between what rich and poor are able to do, or that there may be things which people need to do (or avoid) to transition from poor to rich.

     The choice of when to have had children (if it was a choice) is a choice, which has an effect. It has LESS effect than many people think–most people who are poor would in all likelihood still be poor whether or not they had kids early, late, or at all, and whether or not they had one or five. But it has an effect, mostly in the “closed door” category.**

     I also think that some are phrasing this as a very black and white issue: any commentary means one is trying to render poor women sterile. Well, no: but if I were to give advice (as I have done many times) to a young person of EITHER sex, who wanted to make and save money, it would be: work hard and don’t have kids yet. If you’re pregnant, consider an abortion.

     It’s the same advice for a 20 year old immigrant day laborer as it is for a 20 year old soon-to-be-college grad. It’s also, incidentally, the same advice that i applied to myself, as did most of my friends (goose, gander, and all that). Kids are expensive and time consuming, and it is an intelligent thing to plan for when you have them, if you can. I don’t see how it could possibly be classist to point that out in general.

     And I think you’re misinterpreting Jill, I read her to be saying that there is a difference between saying people have the right to decide the number and spacing of their children, and saying they SHOULD have that number of children spaced in that manner. So she seems to be drawing a distinction between rights and their exercise.

     It’s a distinction without a meaning. If she’s defending a right to have kids as you wish, and is arguing against putting limitations on that right at all, then she’s arguing for the right to have as many kids as you want. Sure, she’s not saying “hey everyone! have more kids!!” but that’s a bit of a straw man.

     And also, I think that what La Lubu and Jill and others are pointing out is that it is disingenous to say children are the problem, when a lot of people would be poor anyways and our social/economic structure has more to do with that than the fact of procreation.

     Again: “the” problem? Why can’t it be “a” problem? Yes, we have a variety of sociopolitical factors which combine to make it difficult to get out of poverty. That said, having lots of kids (or kids at an early age) seems to be one of them. I don’t see why it can’t or shouldn’t be addressed.

     Oddly enough, I don’t see many people saying that kids DON’T cost more. Instead, they say that they shouldn’t cost more, or that we should pay more, or that we should ignore the costs, or… I’m a bit straight forward about those things: If you want people to save money, you encourage them not to spend it. Kids are expensive.

     As one of those who have harped upon our ancestors, my point is that life is hard, and not having it easy doesn’t mean you should become a genetic dead end if you don’t want to.

     Huh. I’m not sure I totally agree: I think there’s a right not to be prevented from having children (note the double negative) but I’m not sure that there’s a right to be able to tag as many resources as you wish to have all the kids you want. In fact, I would argue against such a right.

     As far as delaying children, you can’t always decide when you get pregnant, not all women want abortions, and some women (like me) are faced with the reality that if we do not have children young, we may not be able to have them at all.

     Sure. Let me be the first to say that I’m fully in agreement with those exceptions. You face the same choice of course (everyone who waits risks fertility as they age, though you may have a condition that makes your risk higher) but there are always exceptions to a general rule.

     **If you DON’T have kids, it doesn’t mean that you will have an easy time making it out of poverty, or that you’ll make it out at all. But if you DO have kids and you have them at the “wrong” time or in the “wrong” number (whatever that is for your circumstances), it makes it that little bit harder. For some certain number of people, that will be the difference between being able to make it out of poverty, and not being able to do so. Obviously, it affects ability, not outcome; refraining from kids doesn’t imply that you will make it out of poverty, only that it will probably be easier to do so. It’s closing a door of opportunity.

102. Sina said: “also: while some economists, and certainly businesses, will tell you that raising the minimum wage results in a rise in unemployment, empirical evidence does not necessarily indicate that this is the case. a minimum wage that keeps up with inflation would help, as would more investment in education. also: why is it that i always seem to hear about raises in productivity, but never about accompanying raises in pay?”

     The impact of changes to minimum wages is mixed. I said above that changes in the minimum wage can have no effect as well as causing unemployment. It becomes a question as to whether people are actually working at the minimum wage, and also the enforceability and application of the wage (people may be working illegally, or off the books, below the minimum wage. Minimum wage laws also have exceptions. Tipping jobs in some states, I know that this was the case in Arizona when I lived there, allow hourly wages much lower than the normal minimum). When the minimum (really, the hourly cost of labor, which goes beyond just the wage) rises above the hourly productivity (the marginal revenue that a worker is generating for the employer per hour of labor) for some workers, an economically rational employer with adequate information regarding productivity will lay those workers off, or else refuse to hire them (they would otherwise be losing money every hour). Thus, the productivity question is highly important, to determine if any particular wage can and will be paid in the first place. Rising productivity, in fact, is one of the most crucial economic indicators there is, and accounts for rising wages and living standards in all economies as far back in history as you can go (the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions in economic history are at heart all stories of significant rises in productivity).

     The fact that the minimum wage hasn’t been adjusted upward to keep up with inflation is part of the reason that increases (to a point) probably wouldn’t result in significant unemployment (the minimum is still well below the productivity cut-off for most workers). Also, it is relevant who exactly is working at minimum wage. In the legal workforce (thus excepting underground cash work, and also illegal immigrants, most of whom are nonetheless still working above the legal minimum wage), a significant number, and a probable majority, of minimum wage earners have a second source of income or support. Many are teenagers, and thus often are still living at home and being supported by family. Thus, if minimum wage increases did push them out of the labor market, many of them would probably not be counted in unemployment statistics (unemployment figures only document those actively seeking work, and not those who stop looking and “drop out” of the workforce). This isn’t an argument for or against raising the minimum wage, but it demonstrates the importance of a closer look at data.

103. I suspect that part of the reason we do this is that many of the people setting education policy tend to be university graduates themselves, and suffer from a myopia regarding alternatives.

     Though you are correct, I believe the bigger reason is the widespread fear of the working and middle classes that the existence and implementation of such programs would effectively be used as a means by the upper/upper-middle class elite to curtail access to higher education to their children and thus, impair their hopes of upward social mobility.

     A fear that is not completely unjustified from stories friends’ parents, teachers, professors and older friends told me about how the vocational track was used by teachers and education officials as a “dumping ground” for working class and middle class children they felt were not “college material”…..evaluations that were highly subject to racist and classist biases….along with the evaluators’ arbitrary animus towards certain students. This fear may be the motivating reason why vocational schools are so stigmatized and why the “normalization” of the BA degree is so strong in the states.

     Moreover, I’ve known several undergrad classmates who came from countries with strong tracking systems like the German case you described. One of the reasons why they came to the states to attend undergrad was precisely because they were tracked into the vocational track at an early age and found the only way they could attend college was to come to the states.

     In one extreme case, a Japanese undergrad classmate got into a scuffle with a classmate at 11 years of age. Despite having an excellent academic record and no previous record of disciplinary problems, he was effectively barred from attending any academic or vocational high schools in Japan. After working a few years in various odd jobs, he fortunately found someone willing to sponsor him to come to the states to attend high school and college. If it wasn’t for that sponsor, he would have never had a high school education, much less a BA.

     Though it is good to have alternatives to higher ed as in other societies such as Germany, one downside many of them seem to have is that they force students to make nearly permanent choices on their future at a very young age and that there is little/no flexibility to allow them a second chance if they change their mind/want to challenge the educational establishment’s evaluation.

     If we’re to implement such a system of higher ed alternatives/tracking, we need to avoid the abuses of the past in our own society as well as the inflexibility common in the systems of our foreign counterparts.

     Of course it’s not so simple, but even in places where intellectualism is championed, you’ll still find “don’t be such a smarty pants” attitudes.

     While there may be so, it is nowhere to the level of denigration I’ve experienced/witnessed as a student. Moreover, this level of denigration is completely alien to the experience of classmates/co-workers of mine from abroad…..especially East/Southeast Asian societies. From their accounts, the most enthusiastic and capable students were highly regarded and socially popular.

104. La Lubu — good point about the need for specificity. That’s the grownup approach here. If this gets abstract, then it becomes about folks on one side talking about government not playing any role and arbitrary income-based rules, and folks on the other talking about family, love and kittens, and any guidance that operates differently based on income seeming just wrong lalalalala.

     Whereas those of us in the broad middle somewhere feeling that there should be no legal limits, but some attention paid both to (1) helping women and children in poor communities sustain and develop, and also to (2) helping women and children in poor communities make choices that best preserve both their individual freedom and their chances for a happy life according to their own standards.

     IMO it would be more useful to focus on the specifics of how (1) and (2) would apply in the different kinds of scenarios you enumerate, than to combat the extremes that don’t represent where most of us are or the places from where effective policy will ever be guided.

105. So you should only have kids if you really *really* want kids, and then you should only have two

     In other words, it’s OK to burden Mother Earth as long as you do so in a manner appropriate to those of the middle class.

     If there are too many people on the planet, everyone should have NO children (“until there are none, adopt one”) or ONE child. To put it bluntly, your ‘no more than two’ is finger-wagging at Those Classless People Who Breed, wrapped in a particularly cheap and transparent faux-environmentalism.

     If breeding makes Gaia cry, then get yourself sterilized and lead us all by your blameless example, rather than insisting that if everyone has the appropriate and moral two (2) kids, we’ll stop global warming.

106. Exholt said: “Though you are correct, I believe the bigger reason is the widespread fear of the working and middle classes that the existence and implementation of such programs would effectively be used as a means by the upper/upper-middle class elite to curtail access to higher education to their children and thus, impair their hopes of upward social mobility.

     A fear that is not completely unjustified from stories friends’ parents, teachers, professors and older friends told me about how the vocational track was used by teachers and education officials as a “dumping ground” for working class and middle class children they felt were not “college material”…..evaluations that were highly subject to racist and classist biases….along with the evaluators’ arbitrary animus towards certain students. This fear may be the motivating reason why vocational schools are so stigmatized and why the “normalization” of the BA degree is so strong in the states.
     …
     Moreover, I’ve known several undergrad classmates who came from countries with strong tracking systems like the German case you described. One of the reasons why they came to the states to attend undergrad was precisely because they were tracked into the vocational track at an early age and found the only way they could attend college was to come to the states.”

     Exholt, I agree entirely with what you said. Part of the solution would be to ensure that alternative or vocational tracks AREN’T just “dumping grounds” (this is a problem that they have in Germany. The Hauptschulen aren’t so well regarded). Also, we need to make sure that what we do well, with regards to the social/educational mobility that entices overseas students to come here, we keep doing and keep doing better. Our community college system is pretty good for giving students some mobility into the university track, students who may not have been ready for college-prep work at 15 or 16 often do better at 22 or 23 (I am a community college alum, and that was the case for me).

     The “comprehensive” focus we have in K-12 education, particularly along with all of this “testing” mania we have now (No Child Left Behind, and similar local and state measures), all ignores the diversity of experiences, potentials and educational development among students, and suffers from the Lake Wobegon bias (expecting the children to “all be above average”, at least with regard to the narrow focus being taught and tested). It’s also pushing students to drop out or get a deprecated “certificate of completion” or GED rather than a diploma. I’d rather give students more options in High School and a different track if appropriate, with the opportunity to do the college-prep work a few years later at a JC if they so choose.

107. I also think that some are phrasing this as a very black and white issue: any commentary means one is trying to render poor women sterile. Well, no: but if I were to give advice (as I have done many times) to a young person of EITHER sex, who wanted to make and save money, it would be: work hard and don’t have kids yet. If you’re pregnant, consider an abortion.

     But that’s the thing. I personally have a problem with the way that a lot of people seem to see this as an opportunity to spout off commonsense advice to individuals, as if individual virtue can fix systemic problems and poor people as a group are just too stupid to understand that children cost money. I agree with you that it’s better for most people to limit their family size, wait until they have financial stability to have kids, etc. I imagine that most people — rich, poor, of whatever race — have heard that or can figure it out. But for whatever reason, not everybody follows that advice.

     When we talk about, say, 13-year-old girls having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, and thinking that this is normal, we’re dealing with a social problem that cannot be solved just by throwing out some advice. I am not saying that it’s a good idea to have a baby at that age, but saying “just say no” isn’t an effective strategy for much of anything. “My advice is, if you’re pregnant, consider an abortion” kind of gives me chills — I suppose a lot of people are not that well informed about abortion rights, but assuming they are informed, deciding whether to carry a child to term is an incredibly intimate and personal matter. I would be really loath to tell a woman so casually what I thought she ought to do with her body.

     As for the right to produce more children than you can support, well, we make a whole bunch of assumptions about whose responsibility it is to care for and subsidize children. Most of us go through our lives taking advantage of (and paying for) all sorts of subsidies, whether we know it or not. Parents are far from unique in that respect. To my mind, the question of subsidies begins conversations; it shouldn’t shut them down.

     I happen to think that “as many children as you want” isn’t likely to be that many children for the majority of people. It’s not like the idle rich tend to have big families; quite the contrary. So to some extent I think this “how can you have so MANY” thing is a red herring. How many women are having five or ten kids, in this day and age? Some, sure, but ISTR that your average American “welfare mother” has two.

108. Indeed as some have pointed out above I don’t believe an any kind of coercion with regard to pregnancy or termination thereof. Nor do I believe in ‘punishing’ people for having a number of children. It would be great if my mom could have sued the pants off her employer, but even now she probably would just be quitely forced out with a bad schedule instead of fired on the spot – try finding counsel to take a claim like that on contingency or the time and emotional energy to deal with big lawsuits. It would be even better if I could make my employer pay me as much for billing a 40 hour week as they pay other people for billing a 60 hour week, plus pick up the cost of a nanny. I’m not holding my breath. In total Nirvana, I would not have to worry about living in a certain school district for my husband’s two children that is ALSO close to their mom, because all schools would be awesome (good school district = expensive homes in most of America). Fact is, I’m on my own. Most women are. All those things I just mentioned are not going to change in time for it to be feasible for me to have 5 kids without doing great damage to me and my existing family. If you want to tell two kids and a husband they have to pack up and move to an apartment, forget about us helping with college, and the need for the kids to take after-school jobs instead of playing any sports or being in school clubs, have fun and let me know how that goes. And I would never claim I am some kind of hard luck case. However, I shudder to think about those who are – about when I was making 17k in a major city with no car, house, or other meaningful assets or support – and talking about pouring 3 kids or even one on top of that because the governement, employers and society ‘should’ support it, when it is clear that won’t happen. I guess I would be happier if I couldn’t do math, but the reason I framed my comment by looking at children as a ‘luxury item’ is not because I deny the humanity of existing people, but in making the choice to make more people, budget has to come into play or women end up in a very vicarious position indeed. No one is going to obligate themselves to pick up most of the the tab for rearing your children. Full stop. If I ended up in bankruptcy for buying a huge couture wardrobe I assume you would not think much of my decision; assuming I could control my reproduction (again, a leap), why would you think any more of my decision to have more kids than I can pay for? Because I’m ‘entitled’ to a family? Like I said, nice philosophy, not supported by anyone willing to write you checks. This is not to say there is nothing that can be done to change any of this, even small things like letting my paralegal leave early to get to daycare (management fought me on that) to big things like trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that the means of production moved off the family farm, thereby geographically separating child care from work that leads to wealth, and child rearing is not any longer a means of producing wealth within the family unit due to child labor laws and the demise of agrarian economy (different analysis on a national scale – countries doing that analysis are adopting policies supporting working families better). While we sort that out, unfortunately, women have to attend to the financial responsibilties of having kids, and the struggle about the ‘right’ to have them (or not) should not obscure this.

109. I do hope everyone knows I was trying to be a bit silly when I called pushing for acceptance of intellectualism “Nerd Rights”. I’m not making fun of it, I agree completely that it’s important.

     I’m just sort of stuck here: I can’t decide if all the anti-intellectual backlash in the US is that we just don’t value educated people, so those who are educated are marginalized, or if indeed we value them at such an essential level that for those who are not intellectuals, it is simply something they can’t relate to. I… don’t know.

     I just finished Brave New World and I’m thinking of the scene near the end when John the Savage asks Mustapha Mond why everyone isn’t just an Alpha Double Plus. Hm…

110. If you want to tell two kids and a husband they have to pack up and move to an apartment, forget about us helping with college, and the need for the kids to take after-school jobs instead of playing any sports or being in school clubs, have fun and let me know how that goes.

     bmc90,

     As someone who has lived in various apartments in a working class urban neighborhood, worked an afterschool job six days a week to help support my family while managing to participate in high school extracurriculars, and attending a decent private liberal arts college on a near-full scholarship and freelancing so my parents never had to pay one cent towards my higher ed expenses….I can attest that I am currently doing pretty well for myself.

     Moreover, I am far from a unique case as the majority of classmates from my public urban magnet high school lived under similar or worse economic circumstances….yet they’ve all managed to find ways to survive and even prosper in high school, college, grad school, and the professional environment.

     Experiencing some or all of the above does not necessarily mean a life permanently impaired as you seem to imply. Also, taking part-time jobs….even ones with long hours does not necessarily preclude one from participating in high school extracurriculars.

111. I’m just sort of stuck here: I can’t decide if all the anti-intellectual backlash in the US is that we just don’t value educated people, so those who are educated are marginalized, or if indeed we value them at such an essential level that for those who are not intellectuals, it is simply something they can’t relate to. I… don’t know.

     Kelsey Jarboe,

     American anti-intellectual attitudes actually go back nearly to the beginning of this republic’s history. In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville has made references to this in his “Democracy In America”….especially in Chapter X.

     There are also plenty of examples within pop culture and society who tend to be dismissive of those who are “too passionate” about learning…especially in the academic sense.

     Whereas other societies value and appreciate the efforts of their enthusiastic and capable learners and their teachers, we tend to dump upon them and make them the butt of popular jokes. This widespread disrespect for teachers by students, parents, education bureaucrats, and society is one reason so many friends who entered the teaching profession quit within 3 years, especially those who could gain employment with more social respectability and higher pay.

     And we wonder why the American K-12 educational system is considered by many to be the laughing stock of the world.

112. Why it is part of our heritage, though? The Puritans valued education, and I still feel that here in New England, it’s hardly anti-intellectual.

     What changed? Is it that having to work a farm leaves no space for “fancy-pants” education, where as sitting in your house in the middle of the Massachusetts winter leaves you with nothing better to do but eat canned goods and read?

     I mean… I don’t buy that America has always been the way it is now, especially since a lot of our ancestors truly valued education, being from those amazing “other places” you speak of.

     Is it post-industrialism? Is it a culture of consumption that has to discourage reason in the name of selling things? It is post-Watergate distrust of the government? Is it a post-modernist existential crisis?

113. (I’m not implying farmers are not smart, and I’m annoyed there is no tone of voice or facial expression over the internet. I am alluding to common ideas in an effort to push beyond them.)

114. Sailorman,

     I completely disagree with you that the distinction between rights/and moral ought is meaningless. I am pro-choice. That does not mean I would feel comfortable pushing abortion as a solution, or discouraging anyone from getting an abortion. In my moral mind, I think there are better and worse circumstances for getting an abortion. Just because I am completely pro-choice does not mean I would ever feel comfortable saying someone should or should not get an abortion. But, although I don’t want to, I could come up with a moral hierarchy of reasons to get an abortion.

     Same goes for childbearing. I could come up with better or worse reasons to have children, and timing that I thought was smarter or dumber, and support systems that parents should make an effort to have, etc., and I certainly wouldn’t encourage anyone to have children willy-nilly, but I would absolutely support the right to do so. And I don’t want people to be having children accidentally, but I will not be so patronizing to think that ‘poor people only have children on accident.’ My other point with historical examples like the great depression is that the person making the childbearing choice is in that situation. They do not know when it will end, if ever. That is the same situation that many people today in poverty face. What will their health be like when they are older? If they have children at a younger age, will their parents/family be better able/more likely to assist in the childcare? Do they have any guarantee that salaries will get better? Or worse? As someone mentioned upthread, other animals under stress procreate young and plentifully. It is a good reproductive strategy. Children born to younger (within limits) parents are healthier. The parents, if they live in high-stress, poor nutrition, poor medical care environments are better able to look after children if they have them while they are young. So even morally, if the question is, what makes a better life for my children, the answer may be, having them younger.

115. After having read all these well-thought-out comments, I only have a few points to add – what about the grandparents ?

     The fact is that wealthy grandparents help their adult children and therefore their grandchildren and family money and privilege passes from one generation to the next. If middle-class (increasingly poorer and getting poorer by the day) and working-class grandparents and their adult children sat down and thought about pooling their resources they would find that they could improve their financial situation. This was the way everybody used to live before industrialisation forced families to break up but it will return simply because the economic situation is getting worse and people will be forced to improve their finances in this way. I have a daughter and I know that I will have to help her with her children, even if she conforms to ‘middle-class’ expectations because that’s the way the economy is going.

     In fact there’s an argument (raised by several people) that young women might be wise to have children young with the support of their parents (and not relying on the biological father – other points to raise another time on co-habiting parents) before finishing their education – they get the process ‘out the way’ while they’re young and fit, becoming a parent changes a person to such an extent that they may well find they have different values, priorities and characteristics and therefore are better-suited to completely different types of work so they can choose the most suitable degree/training course in the first place and even better they in turn will be young, fit grandmothers ! The matriarchy may even return 🙂

     In truth there is no ideal time to have children – each age has its own pros/cons. There are no guarantees in life so even if a person has built their middle-class nest (increasingly more and more difficult to do) it will never be 100% secure. Money helps but it isn’t the only factor in parenting – the single most factor is the way the parent was brought up and how able they are to pass this own to their children in turn.

     Children don’t belong to their families they are independent members of society with a valuable future social role – that’s why the state provides education, healthcare etc in recognition of the fact that they are vulnerable persons but who repay in full the investment made in them in their early years.

     “It takes a village to raise a child”

116. The Puritans valued education,

     Only to the extent the “education” ensured the rigid conformity to the Puritan orthodoxy on the pain of being exiled, persecuted, or even killed. In many ways, their “education” or indoctrination along with their society is not too far removed from indoctrination and social mechanisms to ensure strict orthodoxy and social conformity in more modern fascist or communist regimes. The harsh treatment of those who even deviated slightly from the orthodoxy as well as the travesty of the Salem Witch trials in 1692 should put to rest any notions that Puritans actually valued education….especially when doing so would threaten the strait-laced orthodoxy-ridden conformist society they were trying to create.

     If you were trying to find historical examples of Americans who actually valued education, the Puritans would be the one of the last groups I would use as an example.

     More importantly, such rigid indoctrination does not only go against modern American values as stated in the Constitution, but would also severely hamper our society’s ability to increase economic productivity that would increase the amount of resources available for society to call upon to help any of us when we are in need.

     One key ingredient in innovating new ideas, paradigms, and inventions is to question and go against the prevailing status quo…..something groups like the Puritans were vehemently against.

117. Exholt, I’m not saying it can’t be done, but the people in your high school and work enviroments were those who did not have an oops occur that pushed them out of their precarious positions where they may have become invisible unless you happen to be going through a drive-through. Such folk were not in high school. They were working several jobs and taking care of a disabled parent, for example. Their mom went into rehab and they had to move in with an aunt and sleep on a smelly couch with not much homework getting done. They ended up in one of my mom’s GED prep classes when they were 25. Glad you and your magnet school buddies made it, but one piece of bad luck on top of the expense of too many kids – I won’t put my family at risk of an oops, which is what I’d be doing if I procreated too much. As it is, if I get hurt or underemployed, we can move into the apartment and I can waitress or live on my disability. If you start in the crummy apartment barely covering your expenses, you have no place to go but your car or a shelter.

118. So my question is just this: Say a person is paid a wage deemed suitable to support their family. That means a person with 4 kids gets X amount. So does the person with 2 kids, or no children, get less for doing the same work? My childless, single self would not appreciate it if a person in the same job got more money than me because they support child(ren). My gut response would be to say “It was their choice to have kids, and my choice so far not to. So pay us the same, and I’ll save up for a house or pay off my student loans. They can spend it on their kids. We each picked our priorities.” I agree that something needs to be done about poverty in America, but it’s a big ole systemic problem. How about subsidized childcare, or improved maternity leave, improved educational opportunities and job creation? Universal health care to provide basic health needs. But even my do-gooder self is going to be pissed if I find out someone else is getting more money for the same job because they have children.

119. Exholt, I’m not saying it can’t be done, but the people in your high school and work environments were those who did not have an oops occur that pushed them out of their precarious positions where they may have become invisible unless you happen to be going through a drive-through. Such folk were not in high school.

     bmc90,

     Actually, I cannot absolutely say one way or another. Who knows how many of my high school classmates or my professional co-workers may or may not have had an “oops” moment? Unless it was plainly visible or the individuals concerned mentioned it to me, I would never know….and would not exactly go out of my way to find out.

     There were a few classmates at my private liberal arts college, however, who became parents because of the “oops” that you referred to…a few even brought their babies/toddlers to some of my upper-division classes.* The only difference between them and the people you were referring to is the fact those classmates were all from upper/upper-middle class families which does provide some insulation from socially-encouraged scorn, especially compared to what would by visited on their working class/poor counterparts without the cachet of high socio-economic status or being college students.

     * Contrary to popular stereotypes, these children were on average far better behaved and considerate than many supposedly “more mature” college-aged classmates….especially the first years and sophomores.

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121. bmc90, I see what you’re saying about the current reality, but feminism (and other political movements) are about trying to make changes, no?

     I don’t think anyone here is out to encourage people to have children they’re going to have trouble supporting, or to whitewash the reality. But I feel very strongly that being a feminist means respecting other women’s reproductive choices and supporting initiatives that will make it easier for women to make the choices they believe are best for them, even if they aren’t the choices I would make.

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