J.K. Rowling on Incentives and Single Mothers

In a recent op-ed in the London Times, author J.K. Rowling slamed Tory leader David Cameron for his apparent hostility toward single mothers.

Rowling writes:

Yesterday’s Conservative manifesto makes it clear that the Tories aim for less governmental support for the needy, and more input from the “third sector”: charity. It also reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.

I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it.

Rowling goes on to detail the trials of single-motherhood, and portray Cameron as out of touch with the lower-class and ignorant of nontraditional family dynamics.

But what is Cameron really saying that’s so controversial?

There are a number of things that bother me about Rowling’s piece. While it’s true that some children suffer because of acrimonious marriages, the overwhelming amount of research suggests that – all other things being equal – kids are substantially better off in stable two-parent households. Asserting that two-parent households are better for children in the aggregate isn’t the same as demonizing single parents. It's simply acknowledging what seems to be the empirical reality. Rowling is wrong to misconstrue Cameron's statements as some sort of crusade to smear single moms.

The central complaint of Cameron's “sticking up for marriage” campaign is that the British welfare system provides a fiscal motive for single-parenthood, while the tax system fails to encourage matrimony in any meaningful way. Since we know that kids from two-parent households perform better – even when controlling for a range of other demographic factors – this makes little sense. Conservatives argue that we need to provide parents with more of an incentive to stay together for their children.

The real question, then, is whether you believe that people actually respond to economic incentives – even if those incentives seem relatively meager. Rowling is very skeptical, primarily because she doesn’t believe couples will stay together for such a trivial amount of money. Afterall, why would any woman base her decision to get married on the how much she would receive in tax breaks?

Of course, this is a pretty silly oversimplification. And whether she knows it or not, Rowling is actually challenging decades of microeconomic research (with broad theoretical underpinnings) that shows people do respond to these kinds of incentives, at least on the margin. Certainly, no one is expecting – or hoping – that an abused wife will remain with her husband so that she can take advantage of a small tax break. But what about a young couple that recently had a child out of wedlock and is wavering on the marriage issue? Or a couple that has lived together for years and never thought it was “worth it” to get married?

What bothers me most about Rowling’s piece is her ignorance of microeconomic theory – an ignorance that I believe is widespread. Microeconomic analysis rests on two primary assumptions: people respond to incentives, and those responses can be measured on the margin. This is the central thesis of books like Freakonomics.

To argue that people won’t respond to a tax incentive because you can’t picture them responding to it strikes me as a pretty weak and ineffectual argument, particularly when you're railing against such a widely-held and widely-supported proposition.

But, then again, Rowling has never been very good at economics.

Victim-Blaming?

A friend directed me to this post criticizing advice columnist Amy Dickinson for apparently 'chastising' a woman who who wrote in describing an alleged rape.

The post is entitled "Idiot Advice Columnist Calls Raped Girl 'Victim of Her Own Judgment'":

We guess they'll let anybody write advice columns these days. Take, for instance, Amy Dickinson, who recently chastised a rape victim in her syndicated Tribune Media column "Ask Amy," calling the young woman a "victim of her own judgment."

. . .

While Dickinson goes on to admit that a crime was committed, her first impulse is to blame the victim. Which we find, frankly, despicable.

. . .

Also reprehensible? Characterizing all frat guys as potential rapists. Fraternities are social organizations with group housing, and their members are just as morally diverse as any pool of human beings.

This is what Dickinson actually said:

Were you a victim? Yes.

First, you were a victim of your own awful judgment. Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact.

You don't say whether the guy was also drunk. If so, his judgment was also impaired.

No matter what -- no means no. If you say no beforehand, then the sex shouldn't happen. If you say no while its happening, then the sex should stop.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Web site (rainn.org):"Alcohol and drugs are not an excuse -- or an alibi. The key question is still: Did you consent or not? Regardless of whether you were drunk or sober, if the sex is nonconsensual, it is rape. However, because each state has different definitions of "nonconsensual," please contact your local center or local police if you have questions about this. (If you were so drunk or drugged that you passed out and were unable to consent, it was rape. Both people must be conscious and willing participants.)"

Go to your college's health department to be tested for STDs and pregnancy. See a counselor to determine how you want to approach this. You must involve the guy in question in order to determine what happened and because he absolutely must take responsibility and face the consequences for his actions, just as you are prepared to do. He may have done this before.

In her letter, the alleged victim initially states that she "made some mistakes." And, based on her story, she's right. Despite what Dickinson's critics say, it is risky for a girl to get drunk at a fraternity party and go off with a fellow she doesn't know very well. This decision reflects poor judgment.

Simply acknowledging this obvious point is not equivalent to "blaming" the victim for being raped. The girl in this account is partly a victim of her own bad judgment -- and she is also a victim of events totally beyond her control, for which she bears no responsibility. Both of these things are true, and neither of them implies that the she deserved to be raped.

One of major problems that I have with what Katie Roiphe deemed "rape crisis feminism" is that even the most sensible advice -- like cautioning young girls against becoming intoxicated and returning home with strange men -- is often misconstrued as victim-blaming. The unavoidable impression is that good judgment simply doesn't matter, and risky decisions can be wholly divorced from their negative outcomes.

Rape is never the victim's fault, but that doesn't mean that the victim's prior decisions are always value-neutral.

Update: Amy Dickinson qualifies her statement:

Unfortunately, I started my answer by expressing frustration at her judgment to get drunk at a frat house, calling it "awful." This is the part of my answer that has enraged readers, who have accused me of "blaming the victim."As a mother (and stepmother) to five daughters -- four in college -- I have counseled (and worry about) all of my many daughters because of how vulnerable they are if they choose to drink.

Drinking to intoxication poses very serious security issues for our daughters and sons, because being drunk impairs judgment and the ability to discern risk.

Because "Victim" wondered where the line was, I tried to draw it for her. My intent was to urge her (as I often urge readers) to take responsibility for the only thing she could control -- her own choices and actions -- but I regret how harshly I expressed this.

I certainly didn't intend to offend or blame her for what happened, and I hope she will do everything possible to stay safe in the future. I'm grateful that she chose to share her question with all of us, because talking about it will help others.

Sullivan Goes Overboard, and Young Follows

I was just reading through some of Cathy Young's old posts and I came across this bizarre assault on Andrew Sullivan:

As I said in my previous post, I have limited sympathy for Sarah Palin.

However, this, from Andrew Sullivan (on top of the never-ending flogging of Trig Palin conspiracy theories), is outrageous. I saw the reference to the “white trash concupiscence” Palin-slam in Douthat’s column and wondered who could have written that. Despite my knowledge of Andrew’s raging PDS, I was shocked . . . . I fully intend for this to be my last visit to The Daily Dish, and I have to say that at this point, if someone started a campaign to get The Atlantic website to drop Andrew, I’d back it. Imagine the reaction if a journalist/blogger writing about a black politician referred to “ghetto concupiscence”, without even using the word “black.” [Emphasis mine]

While I agree that Andrew Sullivan's criticisms of Sarah Palin during the election were often over-the-top (and sometimes downright nasty), I don't quite understand why Young finds this particular comment so uniquely offensive. How else would you describe the Palin Family's never-ending psychodrama? To me, the Levi Johnston affair alone seems like it could easily be described as "white-trash concupiscence" . . . .

Honestly, I wouldn't have expected this kind of politically correct nonsense from Young. In my opinion, she remains one of the most insightful and fair-minded feminist writers out there.

During the Kobe Bryant trial, Young penned a brilliant and well-reasoned op-ed on "rape shield laws." It's probably the most intelligent consideration of the subject that I've ever read.

An excerpt:

Like many such cases, the Kobe Bryant case is primarily a "he said, she said" matter, with ambiguous corroborating evidence that county judge Frederick Gannett characterized as weak even as he sent the case to trial. The woman's sexual activities prior to the alleged rape may well be relevant to the physical evidence; if, as the defense has hinted, she engaged in consensual sex shortly after her encounter with Bryant, it may well be relevant to the question of whether she was raped; if she is mentally unstable, it may well be relevant to her credibility.

These are wrenching questions. Obviously, a woman with a history of mental illness or substance abuse could still be a rape victim. Obviously, the prospect of having embarrassing personal details exposed in court (let alone paraded in the media) may discourage victims from coming forward. Just as obviously, suppressing relevant evidence may result in sending an innocent person to jail. And if it's frightening to put oneself in the place of a sexual assault victim who finds herself on trial in the courtroom, it is no less terrifying to imagine that you -- or your husband or brother or son -- could be accused of rape and denied access to evidence that could exonerate him.

For some feminists, the dogma that "women never lie" means that there is, for all intents and purposes, no presumption of innocence for the defendant. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- forgetting that as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and his accuser are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law. Wendy Murphy has blasted Kobe Bryant's attorneys for feeding uncorroborated rumors about the alleged victim to the media maw. Yet, appearing on Fox News, she made the claim, highly prejudicial to Bryant and so far untested in a court of law, that the woman "suffered pretty terrible injuries" the likes of which she had not seen despite having prosecuted "hundreds of sex crimes cases."

The Moral Certitude of Modernity

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers writes:

I've been reading Marilynne Robinson's book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Her essay entitled “Puritans and Prigs” sets out to defend the Puritans and contrast them to a group she calls prigs, the sort of politically correct thought police that the right used to rail against in the 1990s. I think her argument also has a lot in common with your indictments of fundamentalism and movement conservatism.

The Puritans' belief that we are all sinners, Robinson says, gives "excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain." However, she argues that modernity, of which prigs are emblematic, is essentially Stalinist, in that it believes that society "can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas."

. . .

Indeed, much the same could be said of today’s right. For my part, it seems all such prigs (left and right) stem from the fundamental epistemological arrogance of modernity--that all things can be known. This is as true of Darwinism as it is of Biblical fundamentalism. The older I get, the more folly such claims seem to contain. This is not a new insight: one need only look at Ecclesiastes. Efforts such as political correctness and movement conservatism are destructive of civil society and are based on nothing more than a chasing after the wind.

I think this is a brilliant summation of the problem with both the contemporary right and the contemporary left. Forgiveness and understanding are no longer virtues.

They've been replaced by self-righteousness and moral certitude . . .

Cowen on Mandates

Tyler Cowen comes out against health insurance mandates:

The paradox is this: Reform advocates start with anecdotes about the underprivileged who are uninsured, then turn around and propose something that would hurt at least some members of that group.

Right-Wing Extremism Again

I just re-read two excellent posts from Conor Friedersdorf, tearing down Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. So good.

Check them out: here and here.

Does Social Security Create Poverty?

I recently came across this piece by Edgar Browning -- the author of my microeconomics textbook -- in which he suggests that Social Security actually increases poverty rates among elderly Americans by crowding out private investment.

It's an interesting contention, though I'm not quite convinced by it.

Putting Browning's argument aside, though, I think there's a pretty obvious problem with a Social Security system that simply collects taxes and disburses benefits without affording Americans the opportunity to make their own financial decisions.

Today, financial literacy in the United States is pretty dismal. I can't help but feel that most Americans would be a bit more savvy if they actually had more personal control over their money . . . and if their retirement really depended on them making good decisions.

(Interestingly, a strong plurality of Baby Boomers may be collecting Social Security income at age 62, rather than the "normal retirement age," due in part to financial necessity.)

Update: Freakonomics's Stephen Dubner points to this study on financial literacy:

[F]ewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial literacy is strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings is about 50 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy.

Is Rush Limbaugh the Problem?

This is a really great commentary from LZ Granderson.

I'm not a big fan of professional sports, so I've never read Granderson's ESPN column. But he's a great writer.

Oh, and just for the record, Rush Limbaugh is a racist . . . .

Hate Crime Legislation

Today, Andrew Sullivan linked to an old piece that he had written for the New York Times Magazine ("What's So Bad About Hate?"). It's a brilliant exploration of hate crime legislation and the standard concept of "hate." Definitely worth reading.

Here's a short excerpt:

So the concept of "homophobia," like that of "sexism" and "racism," is often a crude one. All three are essentially cookie-cutter formulas that try to understand human impulses merely through the one-dimensional identity of the victims, rather than through the thoughts and feelings of the haters and hated.

This is deliberate. The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

In reality, human beings and human acts are far more complex, which is why these isms and the laws they have fomented are continually coming under strain and challenge. Once again, hate wriggles free of its definers. It knows no monolithic groups of haters and hated. Like a river, it has many eddies, backwaters and rapids. So there are anti-Semites who actually admire what they think of as Jewish power, and there are gay-haters who look up to homosexuals and some who want to sleep with them. And there are black racists, racist Jews, sexist women and anti-Semitic homosexuals. Of course there are.

Equal Bodies

My friend recalls an old conversation in which I argued for a more gender-balanced view of sexual objectification. She writes:

. . . men and women aren't treated equally, aren't seen as equals, aren't valued in the same ways in the same spaces. And yes, men shouldn't be reduced to muscular arms and flat, tan stomachs and shouldn't begin to enter the world of debasement women have been living in for such a long time, that reaching equality at the lowest common denominator is no way to reach equality. [But] men - white men, I should specify - are still generally seen first and foremost as people. Therefore, being reduced to an object is still a terrible thing, but its cultural impact is not the same if the same image is with a woman. Because, as much as I wish all things were equal, women are still primarily seen as bodies first. [my emphasis]

I'm not sure how to even begin unpacking this last sentence.

By whom are women "primarily seen as bodies" rather than people? Men? Society? The dominant culture? I think my friend may be lumping these three together.

Is it really so easy to pin down the dominant strands of contemporary American thought amidst such vast ideological diversity? Can we really paint with such broad strokes? Is power really so highly concentrated in today's pluralistic society?

As a policy person, I may approach these questions from a slightly different perspective. To me, power is the ability to place things onto the political decision agenda or to keep them off of that agenda. In both respects, women's organizations have been immensely powerful over the past several decades. And I think this may be part of the reason why I am unwilling to accept such a generalized conception of how women are "seen" in America.

This model of society -- a culture that is so fundamentally repressive toward women -- fails to incorporate the past 40 years of social progress, and the incredible political clout that women's organizations now wield.

It's no coincidence that the first bill President Obama signed into law was the Fair Pay Act. Nor was it surprising that one of the president's first public acts was to rescind the Mexico City Policy. Over the past several decades, feminist groups have deeply transformed the political landscape in America -- and, with it, many aspects of our culture. These changes should not be portrayed as exogenous. Indeed, they have played an important role in our cultural evolution, and they should be considered an internal part of our social model.

Unfortunately, I think that many contemporary feminists -- like other kinds of activists -- have a "tendency to minimize victories and exaggerate threats." In some ways this makes sense. Activism necessitates a certain kind of hyperbole. But these exaggerations distort the complex reality.

After multiple waves of feminism, a series of profound policy changes, and decades of intense social criticism, it's not so easy to make blanket statements about how women are really perceived by society.

At the very least, we should acknowledge that the issue of social perceptions is complex and requires quite a bit more qualification today than it did in the past . . . .