Right-Sizing a Family House

Yesterday I wrote about a family who found that their big dream house was separating them as a family. This led to some interesting personal replies and links about what is a good size for a family house.

We used to live in a lovely small house of about 1100 square feet. Facing the prospect of three growing kids and one bathroom, we moved down the street to a house of about 1800 square feet with two more half baths. It is hard to know how exactly to measure the space - we have an attic which makes a wonderful teen bedroom, despite the 4-foot ceilings in most of it. Likewise, the dry basement is good for storing things, though it is not living area.

In any case, I find the size of our house to be ample for our family. I am delighted that our house has long been the place that teenagers hang out and sleep over. Last Christmas we had our college girls back with their friends and a horde of teens in the attic - all at the same time. Mrs. G. and I sat by the fire, reveling in the life of the house.

As I look at the websites offering advice on a good square footage for families, the modest consensus seems to be about 200 per person. We are well over that. I have been trying to figure out how a smaller space would work for us. None of the kids share a room. We also have an old outside porch that has been enclosed, which is additional space, though a bit awkward. Still, we seem to be over the recommended family-sized house, without feeling too spread out. Hmm; perhaps I shouldn't count the attic and basement.

As I think about how we use the house, we do seem cozier. We tend to gather together when we are all home. Still, as I imagine what we would have to do with a room lopped off of each floor, we could adjust well.

I think one of the things that makes McMansions so hard on families is that each room tends to be large, larger than the family needs even if they were all together at once. That may be the next frontier in thinking about family-sizing a house.

The Power of Half of Our Too-Big House

The Salwen family were living a comfortable upper-middle class life. Hannah, a tender-hearted fourteen year old, was moved by the plight of the have-nots when her family had so much. This story is probably repeated in most upper-middle families.

What made the Salwens notable is that Hannah's parents were moved by her argument. The family cut their expenditures in half, so they could give to others more. They have written about their new life in The Power of Half: One Family's Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back.

What particularly struck me in their story is that the family's biggest move was to sell their "dream house" in suburban Atlanta and move into a house half that size. I don't know the exact sizes of these houses, but I have seen suburban Atlanta upper-middle class neighborhoods, and they can run to quite large. Kevin Salwen, the father in the family, reported the unexpected effect of living in their large dream house:

In our big house, we stopped communicating. We'd scatter to different rooms, far from one another physically and spiritually. The house actually began to weaken our love, or at least our ability to express that love.

I think the richer classes in America are often afflicted with this unexpected problem: their houses are too big for their families to live in as families. The much-desired structure actually undermines family life.

Perhaps a silver lining of the bursting of the housing bubble is that more people will want more modest houses, with manageable mortgages. And the unexpected benefit will be greater intimacy in their families.

Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator

I do learn interesting things from Malcolm Gladwell, but I also find his books a bit precious.

Evidently, other share this feeling: Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.

Premarital Sex 5: The Main Point

Most emerging adults engage in premarital sex. This has been true for awhile. What is new in this generation is that they have fully sexual relationships which they do not expect will lead to marriage.

Many think that getting broad sexual experience will help their later marriages. Some think that sex is no big deal. A few think that introducing sex early in a relationship will speed it along to true intimacy and love. They are all wrong.

The earlier sex is introduced in a relationship, the shorter it is likely to be.

Women tend to be emotionally hurt by sexual relationships that go nowhere, even when they think they won't care.

Men and women are scarred by broken relationships. The more broken relationships we have in our past, the harder it is to make a secure marriage in the future.

Interestingly, Regnerus and Uecker found that the intercourse itself was a positive factor in the quality of the relationship while it was happening, and even afterward. But that positive effect was outweighed by the negative of a broken relationship, and a broken sexual relationship was even more negative than a non-sexual one.

Premarital Sex 4: Drinking

Regnerus and Uecker found a pretty straightforward connection between drinking and casual sex:

“One in three women who drink almost every day reports having had sex with someone the first time they met, a number even higher than their male counterparts (at 29 percent).” (91)

“drinking does have a strong, linear, and enduring connection to the formation of casual sexual relationships: the more alcohol, the greater the likelihood of sex.” (280, n. 11)

Their research shows that young women who were sexually abused or strongly pressured into sex in high school or younger are more prone to casual sex or to sex at the beginning of what they hope will be a relationship. We know from other research that fatherless girls are more likely to turn to sex earlier and with older men.

A running theme of Premarital Sex in America is that emerging adults follow a small number of standard "scripts" about sex that shape what they think is normal. I think that some young women follow a script that says that casual sex is a quick way to get men to pay attention to them (which is true). But they also experience that casual sex and broken relationships hurt them, even if they try to tell themselves that it shouldn't.

Putting these facts together, I think young women who follow the casual sex script, even though it hurts them, use alcohol to self-medicate against the pain that their script - their lives - are causing them. Drunkenness provides a socially understandable excuse and fuzzes their memory of what happened.

Premarital Sex 3: Who Has Sex the Most?

Yesterday we looked at which unmarried young adults were likely to be virgins. Today we look at the opposite end of the spectrum in the same group.

Regnerus and Uecker start with a bit of bracing realism: “Men report more sexual partners than women do. Period. Everywhere.” This is not a false stereotype, nor a construct of our culture. How is this mathematically possible? Because some women have sex with many men.

They present the figures on how many sex partners these young adults, 18 - 23, have had, broken out by sex, ethnicity, education level, religiosity, parents' marital status, drinking habits, risk-taking habits, and other characteristics. Since real people are combinations of these categories, they also make a list of some common combinations. They then ask, what proportion of this group has had five or more sex partners?

The lowest category was not surprising to me:

Hispanic women who have gone to college, attend Mass, and have married parents: 0.6%

The second highest category was not a big surprise, either:

Black men, not in college, who first had sex before 16, and like risks: 58%

The highest category - the group most likely to have had five or more sex partners before age 23 - did surprise me:

White women who drink regularly and have had an abortion: 73%

Premarital Sex 2: Who Are the Virgins?

Regenerus and Uecker estimate that at 18, the threshold of emerging adulthood, 1/3 are still virgins. Who are most likely to be virgins?

• In college
• Religious
• Not prone to getting drunk
• Do not think of themselves as popular

Some subgroups that are especially likely to choose to delay sex:

• Asian men
• Regular churchgoers - men more than women
• Politically conservative women

The role of physical attractiveness is interesting in predicting sexual activity. In their interviews, the Texas team rated the physical attractiveness of their subjects, as well as asking the subjects to rate themselves. The actual physical attractiveness of the young adults they talked to was not correlated with whether they were virgins or not. However, people who thought they were attractive - regardless of what the interviewer thought - were more likely to be sexually active.

The basic fact of sexual attraction is that any willing woman can find a man for sex, especially among young adults. What needs to be explained, then, is why some choose not to. Young adults who are still virgins have a reason and a support structure that helps them stick to their choice.

The main reason is they want to finish their education, and sometimes get their careers launched, first. College students, and especially Asian men in school, are particularly moved by this reason.

The main support structure is a religious community. This is a complex matter, though: evangelical Protestants are more likely to have sex than mainline Protestants. Regnerus and Uecker argue that evangelicalism is such a relational, pro-marriage, pro-family culture that it makes sex more likely - in part because it also supports marriage and family life if they do get pregnant. Episcopalians and Presbyterians were more likely to be virgins: they were more likely to have education and career plans that would be derailed by early pregnancy.

Premarital Sex 1: They Don't Expect Sex to Lead to Marriage

This week I will be blogging on Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker's Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying. This is a fine, large empirical study that will be the standard work on this question for some time.

They are looking at "emerging adults," 18 - 23, who rushed through their adolescence, only to be in a holding pattern before full adulthood until their mid or even late '20s. Nearly all of them want to marry, but they connect marriage with having a job and being ready for kids - which is not where they are yet. On the other hand, they do not connect sex with either marriage or children. Instead, sex is something that women see as a natural part of a romantic relationship, even if it doesn't lead to marriage. Men don't even insist on the romantic relationship as a setting for sex, though they accept that rule if women insist on it. As a result, 84% of the unmarried emerging adults are not virgins, and most of them have sex fairly regularly.

Premarital sex is certainly not new. What is new, Regnerus and Uecker conclude, is that it is no longer connected in the minds of young adults with marriage, at least not to the person you are in a relationship with now. That, they say, is a sea change in our sexual scripts.

The Sort of Thing That Gives Christianity A Good Name

This is a real spirit lifter:

Egyptian Christians formed a massive human shield to protect their Muslim countrymen as they prayed during the violent protests.

Skin Graft Gun is an Exhilarating Good Thing

The long, painful, and dangerous process of skin grafts seems to have taken a giant leap forward. This is such a "wow!" story that it worth a whole day of hopefulness.

A World of Democratic States

The Muslim world is the major ideological holdout against democracy.

To be sure, there are still a few "Communist" states that justify one-party rule with a veneer of ideology. Yet nearly all of them have become market capitalist states in fact. I think it is only a matter of time - short time - before the middle classes being created by capitalism in those places demand a say in the government.

There are also military dictatorships and naked kleptocracies. This will always be true, I think - sometimes gangs get into power.

And there will always be organized criminal gangs in the poorest places, fighting with the legitimate authorities for control.

But since the end of the Cold War there has been only one large bloc of states that ideologically resist, if not reject, the idea of democracy - the Muslim states from Morocco to Indonesia. Turkey has been a Muslim nation with a democratic state for a long time, but it did so at the cost of a fierce secularism. Several Muslim nations have had elections, but they have had a very hard time holding two free elections on schedule, in a row.

Yet it is clear to me that there is a large core of pro-democracy Muslims in every Muslim nation, concentrated in the sectors that are connected to the world economy. If the wave of pro-democracy movements sweeping the Muslim world right now were to bear fruit in several states at once, the back would be broken of Islamic ideological resistance to democracy.

If the Muslim world became predominantly democratic, there is not now another serious anti-democratic ideology capable of creating a bloc of states. There would still be islands of tyranny, and there would still be plenty for democratic states to argue about, both internally and with each other. But we can imagine a world, within this generation, of democratic states.

Nurturing the Fragile Flower of Muslim Democracy

A great good thing may be happening in the world. Massive movements against dictatorship and for democracy have broken out in Egypt and Tunisia. Anti-dictator protesters are in the street in Yemen. Polite crowds pushing for parliamentary monarchy are on the move in Jordan. Massive street protests for free elections were suppressed recently in Iran, but the sentiment has not been crushed. The one great example of democracy in a Muslim nation, Turkey, has seen a Muslim party come to power without destroying democracy or the secular state.

The most encouraging thing to me about these movements is that they are led by local leaders of civil society organizations, who have grown up in uneasy independence from the state. There are, of course, dangerous people, secular and religious, who want to exploit this unrest. People just like them are in power now. But the crowds in the streets have been surprisingly disciplined. They seem focused on getting the bad regime out, and creating a legitimately elected regime in its place. What happens after that is up to the course of normal politics.

The second most encouraging thing to me has been the restraint and quiet positive nudges from the world powers. The U.S. and European governments seem to be helping the democracy movement, as much by staying out the way as by not propping up the dictators. The Russians, Japanese, and Indians seem not to be making things worse. The Chinese have been hiding the pro-democracy story from their people, not surprisingly, but so far have made no openly disruptive moves.

If there were a wave of democratic movements in the Muslim heartland the world would be a better place.

The Lesson of Vietnam and Middle Eastern Democracy

Elections were scheduled for 1956 in north and south Vietnam to create a government for a unified state. When it became clear that the Communist Party would win the election in the north, the strongman in the south refused to participate. He was backed up by the U.S. government. Instead, prime minister Diem rigged a referendum, in which he "won" 98.2% of the vote, and declared a separate state in the South. Thereafter, the U.S. backed an illegitimate government, which we later helped overthrow in an even less legitimate coup. After 20 years and millions dead, we finally gave up.

The Vietnamese Communists were, indeed, communists. They would have created a centrally controlled economy, and limited political freedom, no matter what we did. However, they were nationalists first, fighting what they regarded as a war of national liberation against the French. Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist, Communist leader, appealed to the United States for help, and quoted the Declaration of Independence.

I believe that if we had supported democracy, Vietnam would have held elections in 1956. If we had spent our political capital promoting democracy, instead of merely anti-communism, we might have pushed for free elections, commitment to future free elections, and protections for religious groups that feared persecution. Ho would likely have won. He would have made a communist, or at least a socialist, state. BUT if we had supported democracy, and honored the results of the election even if our opponents won, the whole disastrous Vietnam war could have been avoided. Vietnam would be, at least, the kind of market socialism that it is today, without the decades of catastrophe in between.

If the United States supports democracy even when our opponents win, we will serve our interests, and the good of other nations, better than we do when we accept dictatorship in the name of stability and short-term gain.

If all the Middle Eastern dictatorships held free elections, some of them would be won by anti-American groups. But if we support the legitimacy of democratically elected governments over and over again, their periods of anti-Americanism will be shorter and less violent. Indeed, if we supported democracy consistently, there would be much less anti-Americanism to begin with.

Democratic Dominoes in the Middle East

I am very hopeful about the possibility of a good "domino effect" producing a series of democratic states in the Middle East. Egypt is the most hopeful, with Tunisia close behind. Yemen is imaginable, though a long shot. The new nation of South Sudan, or whatever it will be called, is likely to at least to attempt to begin as a democracy.

Some friends to my right politically are worried that people in that region are not culturally ready for democracy, and fear that removing useful dictators will create a power vacuum for something worse. This is, of course, a real possibility, as Somalia shows. Nonetheless, I am very hopeful about a democratic movement that begins in massive, peaceful street protests, supported by a varied (and competing) set of opposition groups.

Other people on the news have been worried that free elections might bring to power people we do not like. Liz Cheney, who supported the Palestinian elections in 2006, now thinks they were a mistake because they brought to power a group she does not like. I think this position is based on a legitimate fear, but also on a basic misunderstanding of democracy. There is no contradiction in a democratic nation electing a government that opposes other democratic nations, including opposing the United States. Indeed, if the U.S. has supported a dictatorship that prevented democracy, we should expect that the first free government would be anti-American.

Democratic governments, though, tend to moderate over time and to get along with others. This does not even take very long; the knowledge that another election is coming soon moderates extremists now. In general, democracy is good for peace, freedom, and prosperity. The people tend not to elect governments that keep repressing them. The people tend not to elect governments that make big wars which require popular sacrifice and interfere with trade. If there were a wave of democratic revolutions in the Middle East, it is likely that some of the first governments would be anti-American, and some would be more strongly Muslim (these are not at all the same thing). Even so, I believe the U.S. should support the democracy movements in the Middle East, and in all Muslim lands. This will create more moderate states that are less repressive of their own people, less threatening to Israel and the West, and better partners to the U.S.

The Young Are Embracing "Mixed Race"

The New York Times has a nifty story about the younger generation choosing to identify more as "mixed race." I think the Census Bureau made a sensible decision in 2000 to allow people to choose combinations from broad array of races and ethnicities. The current younger generation embraces it.

I think, though, that two generations from now, most of the "races" that we now talk about will be archaic. And America will never have a "minority majority," but will have absorbed most third-generation-plus Americans into the great American ethnicity.

Does Jesus Require Us to Carry Guns

A Georgia church and the organization GeorgiaCarry.org filed suit against a law prohibiting carry guns in a church. The GeorgiaCarry.org president offered this argument against the law, which is a new one to me:

Stone wrote in a filing that his “motivation to carry a firearm as a matter of habit derives from one of my Lord's last recorded statements at the ‘last supper,’ that ‘whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one ... I believe that this injunction requires me to obtain, keep and carry a firearm wherever I happen to be.”

Ayn Rand Goes on Medicare

Ayn Rand's brand of libertarianism has always puzzled me. I don't think her vision of utterly independent individuals, only a few of whom are competent and forever under siege by the parasites, is at all like real human life. Even more puzzling, I don't understand why many people find it an attractive vision of life, rather than a dystopian nightmare. Last year I read Atlas Shrugged to gain some insight into the Randians. One of my libertarian churchmates, who had been shaped by the book in his youth, was eager to hear how it affected me, hoping I would join the movement. I told him it was the most preposterous story I ever read. Moreover, her view is so scornful of church - any church - that I didn't see how he as a Christian could reconcile the two.

Rand was particularly scornful of government programs that taxed everyone to help citizens when they are in need, like Social Security and Medicare.

I was particularly interested to learn, therefore, that the recently published memoir of people who knew Ayn Rand, 100 Voices, reveals that she herself went on Medicare. She did not admit this, and went on excoriating the "parasites" who did. Rand, a chain smoker, needed medical help late in life. She allowed her lawyers to quietly apply for the help under her real name, Ann O'Connor.

Rand was entitled to the help of Medicare. She had paid into it as other workers in the commonwealth of the nation did. She was entitled to is as a citizen who was ill and needed help. Rand accepted Medicare. But apparently the reality of her own need did not affect her ideology that people should not be in need.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Overall

I think any Democrat could have been elected president in 2008. That person would have faced extraordinary challenges, the worst of which were leftovers. Any Democrat would have come in with some version of the Democratic agenda. We have the "mommy party" aims of equalizing opportunity and providing a basic safety net, and the "knowledge party" agenda of education, new technology, new energy sources, and transparency. Any new Democratic president would have had 18 months to fix the inherited mess and to pass the most important new initiatives. After that, the continuing economic mess, even if it was getting better, would still be so bad that the Democratic Party would lose seats in the midterm election, and probably lose a house of Congress. All of this seemed clear (to me, anyway) in January of 2008.

I believe we got a better-than-ordinary Democrat in Barack Obama. I think he understood the challenge before him in the same outline that I did.

He hit the ground running, attacking the economic collapse as soon as he was able. I think he did a pretty good job. The decisions to save some "banks" and let others collapse had already been made. The bailout for AIG, the remaining "banks," and the car companies had already been made. The decision to have some kind of massive stimulus had already been made. Given that, I think the administration did a reasonably good job. The car company bailout has been managed pretty well. Cash-for-clunkers, even if it made no big economic dent, was worth trying, and did restore a sense of hope that the government was working on the economic problem. Also, it improved the fuel economy of the country's automobile fleet (that is what made a "clunker" worth trading up).

Obama also had a problem of winding down the wrong war, and pursuing the right one. This has been done about as well as could be expected.

At the same time, I am glad he had the nerve to spend most of his political capital on universal health care. From fifty years of debate and resistance by the companies that benefit from the old system, anyone could see this was going to be a huge fight. The opposition party was unusually united and oppositional, and some members of the president's own party were unusually opportunistic. Nonetheless, I give Obama great credit for succeeding. He had the nerve to go ahead with a new initiative despite the many fires he also had to put out, and he had the wisdom to put almost everything else on hold until that job was done.

If he had done nothing else but prevent a great depression and get universal health care, Barack Obama's first Congress would be counted a success. That he had quite a few other successes, and the most successful lame duck session in half a century, is a happy bonus.

Obama has done some things that I am disappointed about. I would have been tougher on the investment banks and AIG - at the least, they should not have been allowed to give those ridiculous bonuses until they had paid back the bailout. I think he should have cleared out all of our political prisoners - charged them, put them on trial, and gotten it over with. This would have meant revealing the torture, violations of human rights conventions, violations of our own laws, and the other ways in which we botched the prosecutions of possible enemies. This would have been painful and extraordinarily embarrassing to the United States, but the worst would be over by now. We help our enemies when we act like them; when we prolong the offense and cover it up, this only makes the problem worse.

I am a centrist and a Christian realist. I think President Obama is, too. He is probably a bit to the left of me, but he is also realist enough to know that the electorate is a bit to the right of him. He also does not act alone - the chief executive is partner to the legislature, both of whom are constrained by the judiciary. I think President Obama's chief partner in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi, was a very effective leader; Senator Reid - not so much. The judiciary was mostly its usual sensible self, except for the significant mischief of the Citizens United decision. In the new Congress, the president will face a persistent opponent in the new Speaker, and a competent obstructionist in the Senate's minority leader. President Obama's second Congress will probably be less successful than his first. On the other hand, the lame-duck session showed that the president's long and lonely pursuit of bipartisanship is starting to bear fruit.

I look forward to the next two years. I believe things will be even better in President Obama's second term.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Big Achievements

President Obama has had a series of significant achievements, with an especially strong rally in the lame duck session. I will list just a few of my favorites.

The nuclear weapons treaty with Russia is probably the greatest substantive achievement, and the culmination of Obama's major concern when he was in the Senate.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell - and his call, in the State of the Union Address this week, for the return of ROTC to all the colleges and professional schools which have long excluded the military because of the DADT policy.

Streamlining and expanding financial aid for college students.

Health care for 911 first responders - why the opposition party opposed it in the first place is a mystery.

I think extending the Bush tax cuts for nearly all Americans is a good idea. I think it would have been better if the tax cuts for the top 2% had not been extended - that would have been a good $500 billion start on reducing the deficit. Nonetheless, if that was the price the President had to pay for his other successes, so be it. In two years, when the economy is stronger - and the deficit will still be pretty large - we can let the top tax cuts expire.

President Obama has begun to achieve the modest beginning of bipartisanship. This despite the very sad decision of the Republican leadership to obstruct Obama and the Democratic Party merely for the sake of opposing. My senior senator, Mitch McConnell, is the worst offender, having declared that the top agenda of the Republican Party is making Obama a one-term president. I hope we will see much more bipartisanship in the new Congress.

There are many more. I would be interested in your favorites.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Health Care

Universal health care will be the signal achievement of the first Obama administration. Long after the recession is gone and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are over, all Americans will be able to afford basic health care.

I am confident the net effect will be to reduce health care costs, as we eliminate the overhead costs of preventing some people from getting care, and of forcing other people to use emergency rooms for basic medicine. As we integrate the health care system better, standardizing reporting, records, and electronic information, we should make the whole system much more efficient. Indeed, we should be able to make it a true health care system for the first time.

The health care law as we have it has many problems, most of them inflicted by legislators protecting specific home-state or big-donor industries. The government will improve the law for decades to come. Right now the Republican leadership is making a show of repealing universal health care, but this is more theater than substance. Universal health care is overwhelmingly popular, and they know that it will become more so as Americans come to count on it as much as they do on Social Security and public schools. The act will cost more in the short run, as millions of people are included in regular (not just emergency) health insurance, but the Republicans know it will starting saving money soon - that is why they specifically exempted health care repeal from their requirement that all new bills reduce the deficit.

The United States has the best health care for those who can afford it, but a truly terrible health care system. We have started on the long road to fixing that problem.