RSS Feed Menu“Keep your laws off my body.”
It’s a slogan that works equally well for the pro-choice left and the anti-nanny-state right.
How well does it work for America?
A new study by the National Center for Health Statistics has found that the “likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first.”
If you are a conservative, you probably seized upon this study as further confirmation of your belief that government should support traditional marriage.
If you are a liberal, on the other hand, you probably shrugged off the news item (if you noticed it in the first place). Maybe non-marital relationships are riskier. So what? Put that information in the lifestyle section. It’s got nothing to do with public policy.
However, if you are a liberal, you probably welcome the Obama administration’s emphasis on the health risks of obesity and overweight. The obese and the overweight are more vulnerable to a range of illnesses and diseases, from depression to knee injuries to heart failure. And of course poor and minority Americans are the most likely to be obese and overweight.
If you are a conservative, on the other hand, the whole issue probably strikes you as one more unwarranted government intrusion into personal life. “Hey Obama!” shouted Rush Limbaugh on his March 3 program. “Why don’t you shut the hell up and stop lecturing us about our lives! Same thing with Mayor Bloomberg. We’re not supposed to eat trans fats. We’re not supposed to eat salt. We’re not supposed to have Mickey Ds in poor neighborhoods. Stop nagging us!”
Maybe McDonald’s food is unhealthy. So what? Put that information in the lifestyle section. It’s got nothing to do with public policy.
While conservatives think it outrageous that the administration would spend $10 million to promote healthy eating, you don’t hear much protest on the right about the many millions spent over the past two decades to teach schoolchildren the benefits of postponing sexual activity until marriage.
Liberals, by contrast, jeer at abstinence education. As they note, such programs generally do not achieve much. What’s the track record on anti-obesity campaigns? Not much better, surely. Yet it is only the conservatives who jeer at those.
So far, this tale of two campaigns with dubious cost-benefit ratios sounds like yet another weary refrain on ideological double standards. But look closer, and you’ll see a deeper paradox at work.
What is the great liberal social policy preoccupation? Inequality, right? Especially the growth of inequality in the past three decades.
Yet the crisis in the American family may well qualify as the single greatest driver of inequality. We know that children who grow up with both biological parents are dramatically more likely than children from broken families to finish school, avoid out-of-wedlock births, and stay out of prison. In addition, we know that family stability is self-reinforcing. Over the past two decades, the families of the college-educated have regained the stability typical of families prior to the 1970s. But the families of the non-college-educated have not; those families are just as unstable today as when disco was king. Consequently, we have a widening gap in children’s life chances based on the gap in the stability of their parents’ marriages.
And what is the great conservative preoccupation? The growth in government spending, right? Yet the greatest driver of government spending is rising health-care costs – and obesity is one of the most important drivers of health-care spending, accounting for nearly one dollar in ten by most estimates. By 2018, researchers at Emory University estimate, obesity-related illnesses may carry an annual price tag of $344 billion.
As Americans get fatter, they become more prone to expensive illnesses such as diabetes and heart failure, driving up healthcare costs, which drive up Medicare and Medicaid costs, which drive up taxes.
So what we have here is more than a display of reflexive moral stands by left and right — that liberals value sexual autonomy while conservatives cherish consumer freedom. What we have is a more subtle paradox between liberal and conservative policy goals and liberal and conservative cultural values.
The liberal value of sexual autonomy is undermining the liberal goal of greater equality.
The conservative value of consumer freedom is undermining the conservative goal of lower taxes.
On both sides of the aisle, the rights we most determinedly defend are devouring the goals we most ardently wish to achieve.
Originally published in The Week.
DFL // Mar 4, 2010 at 9:20 am
At risk of being obsequious, this was an excellent essay.
Carney // Mar 4, 2010 at 9:34 am
It was indeed.
However, like too much of public policy writing it ignores a central factor that drives many issues, including poverty, obesity, and family breakup: IQ.
Low intelligence is closely associated with impulsiveness, low ability to defer gratification, low ability to think through consequences, and so on.
Headlines like “Obesity hits poor neighborhoods hardest” are farcical; treating obesity as an avenging angel that passes over homes with high bank accounts and strikes at those with low ones. Instead, if you’re impulsive, indisciplined, and have a live-for-today mentality, you’re likely to make many bad decisions, such as flunking out or dropping out of school, getting in trouble with the law, getting infected with an STD, making out of wedlock children, cheating on spouses or “partners”, over-eating, and watching too much TV.
Those things tend make you a poorer prospect for high paying employment as well as a poorer prospect for a lasting marriage with a stable trustworthy person. It all ties together, but the factor that does the tying — inherited and unalterable low intelligence and negative behavioral traits — are something most of us prefer not to think about.
sinz54 // Mar 4, 2010 at 9:48 am
You’re right.
That’s why liberals and conservatives don’t really disagree that a balance has to be struck between freedom and equality. They just disagree on how and where they would strike that balance.
The real ideological war is between totalitarians and libertarian anarchists. The former want control everywhere; the latter want control nowhere. Fortunately, none of those has a prayer of being elected President.
sinz54 // Mar 4, 2010 at 9:54 am
Carney: However, like too much of public policy writing it ignores a central factor that drives many issues, including poverty, obesity, and family breakup: IQ.
Human intelligence hasn’t changed much in centuries, perhaps millennia.
Yet social pathologies like the ones you mention have ebbed and flowed over the centuries.
The rise in cohabitation hasn’t been paralleled by a decline in average IQ. Nor does IQ have anything to do with work ethic or moral integrity.
There are many other factors involved: The decline in the power of religion over one’s daily life; the rise of women’s liberation; the long-term secular decline in manufacturing employment.
Obama told to quit smoking - Page 3 - MotownSports.com Message Board // Mar 4, 2010 at 10:25 am
[...] David Frumm, for what it i….s worth Our Values Paradox | FrumForum [...]
balconesfault // Mar 4, 2010 at 10:46 am
Here’s what jumped out at me from the study:
Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.
Don’t get married too y0ung … and don’t get pregnant before you get married … if you want to increase the odds that your marriage will last.
LauraNo // Mar 4, 2010 at 12:32 pm
“…the families of the college-educated have regained the stability typical of families prior to the 1970s”.
Perhaps if we address the income disparity we will right the ship of family cohesiveness. That seems a liberal value that would result in a conservative value. Since prior to the 70’s, middle-class families had the financial security that only the college educated have now.
Carney // Mar 4, 2010 at 1:11 pm
However, balconesfault, don’t get married too late and don’t wait too long to have children, either. The Western world is facing a demographic winter of below-replacement fertility rates, particularly among its defining core populations and especially in their best-educated and most successful sectors. Driven primarily by women waiting too long for marriage and especially children. There’s something profoundly unnatural and wrong about our current cultural, political, and economic incentives keeping women in their prime childbearing years in school or the workforce seeking to validate their existence, then waking up in their late 30s or 40s with the stark reality of biology facing them and squandering fortunes in desperate fertility efforts, risking birth defects, etc.
DFL // Mar 4, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Carney has a point. My wife has given birth six times, at ages 29-39. She’s 43 now and baby seven has been difficult to create.
mlloyd // Mar 4, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Thought-provoking entry, David, much better than the typical “both sides are wrong!” conventional wisdom that we typically see from the MSM.
As for obesity, I think the bigger issue is that we subsidize foods that make you fat:
http://consumerist.com/2010/03/why-a-salad-costs-more-than-a-big-mac.html
But that’s a structural Congressional pork issue more than an ideological one (I think).
As to the point about IQ, I appreciate your point about cultures changing over time, sinz, but IQ actually does too. “The average IQ score of America’s “white” population today is 100. According to Ulric Neisser, America’s “white” children in 1932 had an average today’s-test IQ score of 80. Dutch army conscripts in 1952 scored 30 IQ points lower than conscripts in 1982.” http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/11/william-saletan.html
IQ is a result, not a cause.
anniemargret // Mar 4, 2010 at 7:01 pm
But no one is looking at the reasons obesity rates in the last 30-40 years have risen. Notice any connection to in-home, cooking food and fast food? Since the influx of fast food our nation has gotten fatter. And I’m not just talking about McDonald’s here. I’m talking about ‘fast food’ at the grocery stores.
You know -throw em in the microwave and nuke them foods. Full of chemicals. Fake food really. All those low-fat and low-sugar come-ons? BAD for you, since what they ‘take out’ they have to ‘put back in’ and what they put back in is BAD for you. The average American’s metabolism is skewed with all these synthetic foods.
Have you tried just eating ‘healthy?” Very expensive by the by. Fresh fruits and veggies used to be cheap – not anymore. Fresh fish used to be cheap – not anymore. The average family is not going to pay $20 to buy some salmon for a family of four – if they’re pinching pennies they will opt for macaroni and cheese.
This is much much more than a ’self-discipline’ issue. It is a way of life that America has cultivated. The food industry has pushed for corn syrup which now makes up a sizeable percentage of what farmers now grow. Gone are the days of variety in farming – corn crops reign. So much of our foods have corn syrup in it, or other forms of insidious sugar.
Our fast-paced, two working parents lifestyles is also bad. No one is home. Parents get home late, and very few are going to work at creating a family-style dinner the way Grandma and Gramps used to cook. Kids are in multitudinous after-school sports and recreational activities – too much so, that they also get home late.
Our entire American lifestyle stinks. It is all this and more. There is too much stress – and now with a failing economy, parents are even more stressed than usual. And stress is shown to increase obesity.
All a deadly unending circle.
anniemargret // Mar 4, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Oh…also read recently that taking a short ‘nap’ in the afternoon will make most people more healthy, more productive, less stressed.
Can you imagine American companies opting the average worker for ‘take a nap’ time? It is rare in the USA. The human body was not meant to be awake and moving from sunup to sundown without a break, physically or mentally.
And what about mental health? that’s the area no one wants to talk about, yet mental illness will strike most families at one point or another in their lifetime. There are solutions to that as well, which would improve our society as well as the marketplace, but it’s still taboo. This is a very backward thinking, and in the year 2010, I would like to think we take the bull by the horns and do something about it. Should be part and parcel of a comprehensive health plan. We need to let the Middle Age thinking about it go. Past time.
After all, your brain is in your body. If it ‘breaks,’ *you* break.
Carney // Mar 4, 2010 at 8:04 pm
anniemargaret, you mix some good points in with myths. The reality is that food costs far less of the family budget than a generation or two ago. It’s not cost that prevents the low IQ underclass from buying it; they don’t WANT fresh food because they have childish tastes and low self-control.
As for “chemicals”, we are all made of chemicals, and so is the most “organic” food you can think of. The distinction between “chemicals” and “natural” food is entirely imaginary, but infects public policy. The quantity of naturally occurring methanol in an orange would result in it being banned by the FDA if it were a processed or “artificial” product.
I do agree with you that two parent homes are a problem, as are too much screen time and not enough sleep.
anniemargret // Mar 4, 2010 at 8:51 pm
carney: don’t you think these ‘childish’ tastes are a direct outcome of our love affair with fast food? Do you not see a correlation? It’s fast, it’s easy, it tastes good. It has corrupted our health and our childrens’ health. Prior to the advent of ‘fast food’, people bought food and cooked it. We’ve become used to having things..quickly.
The ‘chemicals’ I’m talking about are not the natural ones . If a product contains more than 3 or 4 ingredients, and lists 20, certainly you would not think it can be good for you. How many people even bother to read the labels?
I agree about self-control however. We are not a very disciplined society – certainly not like the last generation was.
spikeytx86 // Mar 5, 2010 at 1:30 am
“It’s not cost that prevents the low IQ underclass from buying it; they don’t WANT fresh food because they have childish tastes and low self-control.”
I grew up in a very poor household, I don’t have a low IQ, and I can crave anything from a good pulled pork sandwhich or a nice piece of Texas Brisket, to Mediterranean or French Cuisine.
Many poor people wan’t to eat better foods, but when you can buy 73/27 ground beef for $1.99 a pound or all natural grass fed prime steaks for $19.99 per pound what do you think they are going to choose? Or how about seafood, are they going to opt for wild caught Alaskan Salmon fillet’s for $15 per pound or some cheap catfish filets they can fry up for a few bucks a pound?
When you got $100, maybe $125 bucks a week to feed a family of four what are you going to choose?
I can tell you from experience I never met someone who would willingly turn their nose at grilled fish and fresh steamed vegetables so they can get their helper on.
Carney // Mar 5, 2010 at 8:57 am
spikeytx86, your anecdotal evidence to the contrary, the poor are dramatically less intelligent than the more affluent, and are getting less so each generation as barriers preventing the few remaining intelligent poor from advancing socio-economically continue to fall.
Canned sardines are an excellent source of Omega-3 fatty acids, and extremely cheap. Canned salmon is also readily available and inexpensive. http://tinyurl.com/ycwtjww
I can fill up stadiums fill of people who would reject the meal you offer, in favor of junk.
sinz54 // Mar 6, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Carney: There’s something profoundly unnatural and wrong about our current cultural, political, and economic incentives keeping women in their prime childbearing years in school or the workforce seeking to validate their existence
All the women I know who work in 9-to-5 jobs aren’t doing it to “validate their existence.” I once mentioned that motivation to some of these women and they laughed in my face.
They’re doing it to pay the mortgage and the medical bills, and send their kids to college.
In the 1950s, it was possible for your average Joe to support a family in a comfortable middle-class living on just his income. Now that’s just not possible.
What is often neglected in those Consumer Price Index numbers we get each month, is how the prices of individual components have risen at differing rates:
http://i49.tinypic.com/dyncyr.jpg
As you can see, the price of a college education has risen much faster than the CPI–it’s risen 800% in the last 30 years. And yet with the decline of manufacturing employment, a college education is now a virtual necessity if you want to stay out of poverty. That has driven up demand for a college education, pushing up tuition costs in accordance with the law of supply and demand.
In fact, the existence of government financial aid packages for students has made this problem worse. There is no incentive for colleges to hold down tuition costs, if their students can just pass those costs on to the Federal and State governments via financial aid packages.
The cost of health care has risen nearly as fast. We’ve discussed the reasons for that on this blog many times.
The result is that having two incomes is now a virtual necessity for most families.
sinz54 // Mar 6, 2010 at 12:49 pm
anniemargaret: don’t you think these ‘childish’ tastes are a direct outcome of our love affair with fast food? Do you not see a correlation? It’s fast, it’s easy, it tastes good.
You left out the biggest reason: It’s inexpensive.
It’s loaded with fat, which makes it possible to get 900 calories into your body for just a few bucks.
Carney // Mar 8, 2010 at 12:54 pm
sinz54, I also mentioned economic incentives, but my point is that if we re-worked those incentives and stopped pushing women out of the home, a big part of the angry response we’d get is about how we’re ogres trying to stop women from seeking self-fulfillment in the workplace.
Thanks to discrimination law, the government now forbids the once-routine “family wage” – the idea that a man who gets married and/or has kids would be paid more than a single man with the same rank and experience, in recognition of the former’s need to support dependents.
Carney // Mar 8, 2010 at 1:11 pm
sinz54 @ 18, please. As if some 80 IQ type is carefully reading nutrition labels and plotting out calories per dollar ratios on various foods.