Cohabitation Practice

I asked the "Family Life" class to talk with their friends about what they thought of cohabitation vs. marriage.  Since many of my students effectively live together on campus, I thought that many had already voted with their feet in favor of cohabitation.  To my surprise, they did not regard living together on campus as real cohabitation, because the couple was not cooking together, or splitting the rent, or responsible for most of the things involved in living in the 'real world' yet.

This is a fair enough distinction.  It did give me an idea, though: encourage the couple who are living together to conduct experiments simulating, as realistically as possible, what real cohabitation would be like.  They could, say, make all their meals together for a week.  They could spend another week really pooling their finances, and facing together what sharing all their costs would look like.  They could start interacting with one another's families in a routine way.

Such an experiment might be eye opening.

An important point that we make in the "Family Life" class is that cohabiting is not really the same as marriage.

We could go back one step earlier in the chain to get students to come to grips with the ways in which sharing a dorm room is not the same as cohabiting.

And all of this is in the interest of 'deciding not sliding' into the biggest decision of your life.

7.1 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

This is a great day for our nation.  We are making progress toward health insurance for everyone, despite massive resistance by political opponents of the president.

And this number does not include the further millions of young people who continue to be covered by their parents' insurance, including some of our own children.

Not to mention ending the injustice of denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

In a few years, Obamacare will be part of the fabric of the American safety net.  And those who oppose it now will deny they were ever against it.

Spouses Can Calm Each Other's Brains in a Way Cohabitors Can't

Holding your spouse's hand when you are expecting a shock calms your brain.

Holding your cohabitor's hand in the same situation does not.

Trust comes from the permanence of the commitment.

All Parents Can Talk to Their Kids

Kids from professionals' families have heard 30 million more words from adults by the time they get to school than kids from poor families.

This is a gap that families of any class can close.

One of the saddest footnotes I know is early on in Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods. She writes that by the age of three, middle class kids have a bigger vocabulary than welfare parents do.  So the poor parents will have to work on their own language skills to help their kids.

They should.  Win-win.

Things Are Getting Better: Child Mortality

Bill Gates says this is his favorite chart.

This is, indeed, one of the best arguments that things are getting better.

Go sanitation!

The Beginning of the End for Big-Time "College" Sports

Football players at Northwestern University have won the right to unionize.  The National Labor Relations Board has recognized that players in the Division I money sports are, in effect, full-time employees of the university.

It is true that, as the commercials run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association say, nearly all college athletes will go pro in something other than sports. At Centre College's level, in Division III, all the students are truly scholar-athletes.

The money sports in Division I, on the other hand - especially football and basketball - are minor league professional teams located near universities.  The scandal recently documented at the University of North Carolina is only the tip of vast empire of fraudulent academics to sustain the myth of "scholarship" athletes.  The genius of the Division I sports teams is that they run a professional league where everyone gets paid like a professional - except the athletes.  In most states, the highest paid public employee in the entire state is the football or basketball coach at the flagship state university, making millions more than the governor.

I appreciate the role of local teams in creating a collective effervescence and promoting social solidarity.  Allegiances to athletic teams is one of the few things that binds people in a region across class and race lines. Sharing in the fortunes of 'our' team is an important part of the American civil religion.  However, it is only a happenstance of our history that two of our leading sports at the moment have their farm system located in universities.  Baseball had the good fortune to develop its minor leagues before the era of big-time college sports.  This is a model that would be more appropriate for football and basketball, as well.

Then the universities could concentrate on teaching and research, without the massive distortion to their mission that comes when the big sports tail wags the entire university dog.

More power to the players union.

Some Sexual Distinctions I Had Not Heard Before

My "Family Life" class is reading Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker's excellent Premarital Sex in America. I have sent the class out to interview their peers about their own experiences of, and attitudes toward, premarital sex.

One of the interesting results of this assignment is that I learn some of the true, on-the-ground moral distinctions that young people use in regulating and judging sexual practice.

In general, Regnerus and Uecker found that most young people think that sex is best and most appropriate within a committed relationship.  However, many young people, especially young men, have some experience of casual sex.  How do they explain this? 

One young man distinguished between a few 'sexual experiments' that he undertook in casual relationships, which he thought were useful learning experiences, and 'habitual hookups' undertaken by some of his peers, who sought casual sex regularly and for its own sake.

Regnerus and Uecker also found that alcohol was involved in many young people's sexual relations, especially (almost universally) in the casual ones.  So how to distinguish between moral and immoral drunken sex?  One interview subject distinguished between drinking a bit to foster intimacy, which was good, and a 'blackout hookup', which was not.

More dispatches from the front of 'emerging adult' sexual ethics as I receive them.

Childhood Obesity is Down 40%

That is great news.  I didn't see that coming.

Obesity is one vice that is a side-effect of our virtues - in this case, the virtue of plentiful food.  That we still have plentiful food and are combating the side effects is excellent news in itself, and about our problem-solving abilities.

Riots Against an Elected Government Are Not the Same as Riots Against a Dictator

The ongoing occupations, street battles, and riots by mobs of protesters in Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela are not justified.

I don't care for any of those governments.  And I supported the ouster of the dictatorships in each of those countries.  But using the same tactics against an elected government - which plans to hold the next elections on schedule, in the usual way - is wrong.

Parliamentary systems are a little different than ours, in that public protest could force an early election.  But the protests themselves need to remain peaceful, or they lose their moral claim.

Speaker Boehner Leads the Way in Congressional Comity

... if a little grudgingly.

Still, I applaud his decision to bring a bill to raise the debt ceiling without other strings on it. 

This will allow for Republicans and Democrats to work together, which I opens the way to more normal political compromise on other things.

CVS Drops Tobacco: Another Step Up in Our Changing Cultural Standards

Whenever people say that our culture is falling apart, I think of the growing cultural movement against smoking. 

The latest positive development: CVS Pharmacy will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products.

We are not losing our standards.  We are changing them.  And, with a few exceptions, I think our cultural standards are changing in a positive direction.

Elite Women Are Becoming More Like Elite Men, Less Like Other Women

Alison Wolf's main point in The XX Factor is that women in the top fifth of the economy live lives more like their male counterparts - high education, long careers, hired help. 

In fact, if they hire help and go right back to work after they have kids, women of the top classes do not even pay a 'mommy penalty' in their earnings.  Elite women, in other words, are living more like elite men than they are like other women.

The bottom 80% of the economic structure is very gendered.  The Fortunate Fifth, though, are becoming more integrated and similar to one another.

One Reason Women Go to College More Than Men: Women's Careers Have Become Much More Credential-Driven

This is a helpful point made by Alison Wolf in The XX Factor. 

As is well known, women are now more likely to go to and complete college than men.

Part of the reason is that they can go to college now much more than women could in the past.

But another part of the reason is that traditional women's careers - which are still overwhelmingly female - require more educational credentials than they used to.  Nursing and the other health care fields, in particular, are much more credentialized than they were even a generation ago.

Traditional men's careers, by contrast, such as electricians, carpenters, and plumbers, do not require a college degree.  They may even require more certifications than they used to, but not the kind given by colleges.

Men and Women Work the Same Total Hours (There is no 'Second Shift')

This is a finding reported in the excellent new book, The XX Factor, by leading British economic researcher Alison Wolf.

She says of all that she reports in this book, this fact is the one she expects readers to have the hardest time believing.  The belief that men and women now work equally outside the home, and then women come home to an unbalanced 'second shift' is very widespread, especially in the U.S.

As women have worked more outside the home, men have done more housework.  But, as expected, women still do more housework than men. 

However, men still do even more work outside the home than women do, which means that in the rich countries pretty much across the board, men and women work, on average, the same total hours.

Colorada Sensibly Legalizes Marijuana

I think we should legalize marijuana across the board, and tax it heavily. I do not favor using it, but I think it is not worse than alcohol, and should be treated the same way.

I commend Colorado for legalizing the recreational use of marijuana.  I believe this will be the wave of the future.

This is some sensible news to start the new year.

Chinese Democracy is Coming

Two of the happiest developments to end 2013 with was the announcement by the Chinese government that they will end their brutal labor camps, and ease their 'one-child' policy.

I think democracy will come to China as their middle class grows.

They will need a major cultural change to reduce corruption from within.  My hopes are on the evangelical Christian revival that I think will come when they have religious freedom.

Chinese democracy will be a great step forward for the whole world.

It will not come in 2014, but soon.

The Rational Search for That Which Transcends the Rational

I was reading Kelly Besecke's You Can't Put God in a Box, a study of intellectuals seeking a transcendent religion they can believe in beyond the narrow fundamentalisms of existing religions.  They start from a belief that there is a transcendent beyond what any language can adequately say.

I believe this is true.  Thinking about this search for the transcendent clarified something for me.

You can't explain rationally what the transcendent is. However, you can explain rationally why you can't explain rationally what the transcendent is.

The limits of language are rationally discernable.  This helps us be both open minded and humble in describing what is beyond language.

Hurrah for Political Compromise in the Congress

I find it very encouraging that Republican leaders are making a budget with Democrats.

I particularly am delighted that Speaker Boehner has finally attempted to take back his party from their dangerous coalition partners, the Tea Partiers.

This bodes well for actual government.

Caring Ingeniously

In the "Happy Society" class we were talking about Julian Simon's idea that human ingenuity is the greatest resource, the reason we can have confidence in humanity's ability to solve or ameliorate its problems.

One woman, who will in a few years be a fine and caring doctor, was encouraged by the idea of human ingenuity as a great source of hope for humanity in general.  This led me ask her, and wonder myself, how this idea applied to people like her.

The question I asked her was:  "What do you think will be the best way to focus your own ingenuity? People who want to care for and serve others – most of whom are women – tend to think of how they can care well, but not how they can care ingeniously."

Health Care Navigator Suppression Laws are Just Evil

Thirteen states have passed laws making it extremely difficult, or even illegal, to help uninsured people navigate the new health insurance exchanges.

For example, in Texas, "navigators must have 40 hours of state training in addition to the 20 hours the health care law requires. Republican Gov. Rick Perry 'is even trying to limit the hours of navigator operations from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., which is an extraordinary restriction for ordinary folks who are working for a living who want to buy insurance and get benefits'".

I understand that Republicans and Tea Partiers want to deprive Pres. Obama of major legislative achievement.  They fought tooth and nail when the act was being passed.  They shut down the whole government, at huge expense, to try to prevent Obamacare from starting - to no effect.

But to prevent the good work of helping people get health insurance out of sheer partisanship is very, very wrong.