Strapped
I read this boook awhile ago, but some of the central themes keep coming up, and I thought I'd stick it out here and see if there are any thoughts from the 'sphere ...
One take-away is the author's use of the traditional life milestones used in our culture to measure whether one has established oneself as an adult
1) Moving Out of the parents' house for good
2) Getting a Job
3) Getting married and having kids
She cites statistics that in 1960, 65% of men and 77% of American women had reached these milestones by age 30. In 2000, 31% of men and 46% of women had reached these milestones.
Tamara Draut, the author, places most of the blame on the failure or absence of certain federal government entitlement programs. As a former inside-the-beltway type, I can identify with this assessment, but I'm convinced that this isn't the government's fault.
What cultural/societal factors are contributing to this trend?
posted by corey at
10:51 PM
4 Comments:
I would attribute the difference to the vast amount of wealth flowing into ths country during the Cold War Era. In 1960, an American could get a relatively well-paid manufacturing job with very few specialized skills. That began to change dramatically during the 70's, when the "Rust Belt" formed and corporations began to outsource manufacturing overseas.
I am very skeptical about 77% of American women hitting the second milestone in 1960. I think the trend then was to skip the first and the second and go straight to third. My take on the current culture is that women now make up a far greater portion of the white-collar workforce and therefore require more years of education (delaying all three milestones).
I also see a very healthy ethical trend in not considering having kids to be a "milestone" at all. I think in today's crowded world, educated people no longer consider procreation a necessity as much as an option. This usually means a greater amount of commitment to a smaller number of offspring, often later in life.
By
Shannon, at 2:18 PM
Shannon,
We had a technical glitch - sorry this just went up. I've been away from the blog for a few weeks and I just went in to moderate comments and saw yours sitting there.
I had a few days last month when my email account was rejecting all messages. I'm afraid that's what happened when you posted this.
Thanks for commenting. A couple of responses: 1) the stats are there, and based on very reliable data, including information from the census. They may not match with your experiences, but they are an accurate measure of the country as a whole. 2) Your thoughts on "procreation" seem to make a number of assumptions that I don't think are true, including the idea that we live in a crowded world. This is an older statistic, and needs to be modified based on population growth since, but back at the beginning of this decade, it was true that if every person living on this earth was forced to move to Texas and given an equal share of land, each would receive 1/8 of an acre.
This is not a crowded world. Sure, there are a lot of people, and strains on our current resources, including that most basic of resources, clean/treated water. And, I'm not suggesting that every couple have 10 kids, but this is not a crowded world. Plus, the replacement birth rate in the US (by definition) is 2.1 (+/-) children per woman. Meeting that third milestone only once would not lead to a more crowded world than we already have.
By
corey, at 7:33 AM
Just for accuracy's sake, Texas is 268,581 sq mi. By my calculation, that's about 172 million acres. The world's population is about 6.5 billion, so if we all lived together in Texas, we'd be packed in at 38 people per acre (Tokyo has about 23.5 people/acre).
If you have ever driven hour upon hour through the emptiness that is West Texas, you can imagine just how monstrous a dense urban sprawl the size of Texas would actually be.
By
Milton, at 3:06 PM
Milton,
Thanks for doing the math. I guess I remembered that memorable stat a little incorrectly - it must have been 1/8 of an an acre per hypothetical family of 4.
By
corey, at 10:18 AM
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