Half Changed World

Today’s book is All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.  Moxie has it on her list of "highly recommended" books on her sidebar, so I requested it from the library.

All Your Worth is basically an amplification of the financial advice provided in the last chapter of their first (mostly policy-oriented) book, The Two-Income Trap.  In that book, they argued that most families get into financial trouble not by overspending on shoes or lattes, but by committing too much of their income into fixed costs — especially housing — so that they have no ability to cope with unexpected emergencies — the loss of a job, a medical crisis.  Therefore, they propose a financial plan that won’t get you rich quick, but will keep you out of debt and bankruptcy.

Their plan is simple: Never spend more than 50 percent of your take-home pay on "Must Haves" — housing, insurance, car payments, and any other long-term commitments.  Save 20 percent (either in the form of obvious savings, or by paying off debt).  The remaining 30 percent can be spent on anything you want — nicer food, clothing, charity, electronic toys — as long as they don’t involve ongoing commitments.  Pay cash for your wants, and put at least 20 percent down before buying a house.  As Warren and Tyagi themselves say, their plan is in many ways a throwback to 30 or 40 years ago, when credit wasn’t readily available to everyone, and bankers wouldn’t loan you more money than they realistically thought you would pay back.  They’re explicitly encouraging you to live less luxuriously than most people at your income level — but to have the security of knowing that you won’t be knocked off course by a setback.

This isn’t rocket science — it’s very similar to the "60 percent solution" offered by MSN Money editor Richard Jenkins.   And Warren and Tyagi acknowledge that there are times that it’s not going to work — when you have a new baby, when someone in the family is seriously ill, when you’ve just lost a job, are going back to school, or are starting a new business.  But they argue that you should know when you’re in those special circumstances — and set a specific time when your budget will be back in balance.

Probably the least satisfying part of this book for me was the discussion of housing costs.  Warren and Tyagi argue that housing hasn’t, on average, appreciated any faster than inflation, so there’s no point in going into hock in order to get into the market sooner rather than later.  That may be true about the country as a whole, but certainly not if you want to live in a coastal urban area.  In their first book, they wrote quite poignantly about how people were going into hock in order to get their kids into good school districts; in this book, they simply say "don’t do it."

I haven’t done the exact calculations that Warren and Tyagi recommend, but I’m pretty confident that we’re within the proportions that they recommend.  So I can testify to their general point — if you keep the big expenses under control, you don’t have to scrimp on the little ones.  (We have memberships with both NetFlix and GreenCine.)  But I’m the first to admit that a lot of our "wisdom" is actually luck — we bought our house 8 1/2 years ago, and so our mortgage is very managable.  If we were buying for the first time today, we’d be in a very different situation.

My clock radio is set to 90.9, so if I set my alarm for 6:30 am, I wake up to the purring voice of Garrison Keillor and The Writer’s Almanac.  Every weekday, he talks about a few writers who were born on that day, and reads a poem.  Today’s poem was Casabianca, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, better known by its first line "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck."

It’s a very 19th century poem, lauding the obedience and courage of the young son of an admiral, burning to death rather than leave without permission:

The flames rolled on – he would not go
Without his father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

My understanding is that schoolchildren used to memorize this poem and recite it.  (I know I read a children’s book in which the main character recites it.  One of the Little House books?  The Great Brain?  Anyone have a guess?)

Over the weekend, while my parents were visiting, at one point my mother praised N for his obedience, and my father commented that probably wasn’t something he was especially proud of.  I see obedience in children as mostly an instrumental virtue — if I can trust my son to stop when I shout stop, I can let him go further than an arm’s length away.  I find the glorification of obedience for its own sake in Casabianca pointless and more than a little horrifying. 

Annette Lareau has suggested that obedience has become largely a value of the poor and working-class in the US.  She argues that middle-class families in the US typically place higher value on independence of thought, reasoning, and self-confidence rather than obedience.  I was reminded of this reading Cecily’s post today, in which she writes "I will, most likely, never ask my kids to call me “Ma’am.” " as a marker of the cultural differences between her and her siblings.

Any thoughts?  Is it possible to raise kids to be both obedient and to trust their own judgement?  Do you find yourself saying "Because I’m the mother, that’s why"?

It’s one of those laws of parenting — going out late for dessert and drinks with friends guarantees that the kids will wake up early, especially when your partner is away and so you can’t roll over and beg for an extra half an hour of rest.  I brought the boys up to my bed for a while, but that only bought me maybe 20 minutes.

By 9 am, I had read:

• Old Black Fly (three times)
• Bang Bang Rattle Book (three times)
• Let’s Ask Four Questions (twice)
• Touch and Feel Playtime
• Kitten’s First Full Moon (twice)

So I’m not feeling too guilty about the fact that I’m letting D watch The Magic School Bus Space Adventures while N naps this afternoon.  I’m not sure what we’ll do when N wakes up, but we’ll deal with it then.

This evening, NPR had a story with the headline "Strange Bedfellows Join Forces on Immigration Bill," on how SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) is joining with the Chamber of Commerce to support a "guest worker" program — a program that would allow non-citizens to come the US to work legally without putting them on the path toward citizenship.  Think H1B visas, but for low-skilled workers.

This made my jaw drop.  As NPR noted, unions have traditionally looked with suspicion on immigrants, fearing that they would impose downward pressure on wages.  (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on two obscure 19th century labor activists, and it was amazing how modern their concerns about immigration and about technological displacement sounded.)  More recently, unions have recognized that cracking down on illegal immigrants once they’re in the country (as opposed to stopping them from entering in the first place) mostly serves to make them even less able to stand up to unscrupulous employers than they’d be otherwise.  As the Drum Major Institute notes in its recent report on immigration policy:

"Because undocumented workers are under constant threat of deportation, they cannot effectively assert their rights in the marketplace… So U.S.-born workers are left to either accept the same diminished wages and degraded working conditions as immigrants living under threat of deportation or be shut out of whole industries… The solution is to eliminate the second-class labor market in this two-tiered system and allow immigrants and U.S.-born workers to compete on an even playing field by allowing immigrants — including undocumented workers — equal labor rights."

Unions have usually looked with great suspicion on guest worker programs, fearing that they will institutionalize a two-tier labor market.  I’d love to hear more about what made SEIU decide to sign on.

Academic Coach wondered whether the NY Times story sent me much traffic.  Here’s the Statcounter graph of my hits from this month:

So yes, I’ve gotten more hits than usual, but only by maybe 10 or 20 percent, not by an order of magnitude.

Recent searches that led people to this blog include:

• This image (I linked to it back in September 2004, and I get a surprisingly regular trickle of hits from it — don’t know if it’s Library of Congress staff, or what).
• aap recomendation peanuts
• gogurt narnia
• choice feminism
• caitlin flanagan husband
• half changed world
• jonathan kozol the shame of the nation
• nova scotia bump miner
• get up grrl
• who are the real members of the book random familiy
• information on a black person who changed the world by doing something
• proof that nurture wins

bj wondered whether I’m anonymous.  The answer is "sort of."  As I’ve noted before, my full name doesn’t appear anywhere on the site, but I’ve included links that would make it possible for anyone who really wanted to find me to do so.  And my family and friends know about my blog, as do some of my coworkers.  (Check out Ann Bartow’s post on "real name bloggers," via the Carnival of the Feminists 7.)

In the Fall of 1999, Jane Juska ran the following personal ad in the New York Review of Books:

Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.  If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.

A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance is Juska’s story of what happened after she ran that ad, along with some discussion of what led her to it.  In short, she had some really creepy dates, met some interesting men, had some good sex, was introduced to some of the literary wonders of New York (the desk where Melville worked at the Customs House, Trollope’s hand-written manuscripts), fell in love, and was rejected by the one she loved.  It’s a quick and entertaining read — Juska generously shares the joys of her adventures, but turns into funny stories the moments that must have been agonizing to actually live through.  (She also throws in some interesting discussions about teaching, both in high school and in prison, although at times they seem to have wandered in from a different book, maybe True Notebooks.)

Hugo Schwyzer writes today about why he believes that the highest form of commitment — to which one should aspire to  —  is "the commitment to be a loving, reliable, and enduring presence in the lives of those with whom we have chosen to be sexually involved." 

I’m not sure that Juska would disagree.  But I’m pretty sure that she would say that it was not realistic for her to hold out for such a commitment — at 66, divorced for 30 years, the odds were against her.  (Due to both women’s longer lives and the traditional pattern of men partnering with younger women, there are many more older women looking for men than the reverse.)  And given the choice between sex outside of a committed relationship, and no sex at all, she was not willing to give up on the likelihood of sex — other than with herself — being part of her life.

Juska concludes:

"I take pleasure in the memory of lying next to a man who knew what to do with me. I recall with equal pleasure the conversations with intelligent men who were lively and curious and thoughtful and who liked to talk with me.  That was a surprise.  I never thought we would actually, as my ad offered, ‘talk first.’  But we did, first and last and sometimes, in the middle.  All my parts have been fed by these men.  They have made me a rich woman.  But rich doesn’t mean full, and rich as I am, I am not full."

The book got a lot of favorable attention when it came out.  I hope it made Juska decent money, so she’s able to travel to New York without having to be a not-fully-wanted guest.  And I’m enough of a romantic that I want to believe that maybe it brought her someone to love and be loved by.  (The note at the end of this CBS story suggests that maybe it did.)

Update: This NY Times story (via F-words) says that Juska has a second book coming out this spring, and that her story does not have the happy ending I hoped for:

"I am moved to tears with longing and love for this man," Ms. Juska writes, "with despair and regret for what cannot be."

D’s preschool sends home a weekly magazine/worksheet from Scholastic.  Each week, it has a different theme, usually more or less related to the season or an upcoming holiday.  Last week’s focus was, as you’d expect, Martin Luther King, Jr.  The magazine had pictures of different ways that you can be kind, and said that Dr. King "taught people to be kind."

That’s been bugging me since I saw it.  "Kind" seems like the wrong word.  Even if every white person in the segregated South had been "kind" to black people — and some certainly prided themselves on their kindness — there still would have needed to be a civil rights movement.  Kindness is doing something nice when you don’t have to — standing up on the bus because someone else looks more tired than you feel, lending someone a hand when they’re struggling with carrying too much. 

I think the right word — remembering that the audience is 4- and 5-year olds — is "fair."  Dr. King taught us to be fair.  It wasn’t fair that black people had to ride in the back of the bus, and stand if there weren’t enough seats to go around.  It wasn’t fair that black kids could only go to inferior schools. 

Kind is when you share your cookies with your brother who doesn’t have any.  Fair is when you realize that mom gave them to both of you.

As Landismom was kind enough to point out, this blog was mentioned in the New York Times this morning, in Patricia Cohen’s article about Hirshman and "choice feminism."   (No, I hadn’t seen it — leisurely reading of the Sunday paper is one of the things that went out the window for me when I had kids.)

If you’re looking for my reaction to the Hirshman article, the post that Cohen quoted is this one — The domestic glass ceiling.  I also wrote several posts about other aspects of the article, focusing on Hirshman’s Rules and Litmus test feminism.

Gender and domesticity is definitely one of the recurring themes of this blog, and I recently made a list of the posts from last year where I discussed it.

• Vacuuming
• Your mommy hates housework and your daddy hates housework
• Division of Labor
• Marriage and compromise
• The domestic glass ceiling
• Cleanliness is next to…

And if you’re wondering where the title of the blog comes from, as I explained in my very first post, it’s from the subtitle of a terrific book called Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein.  And my thanks to Orenstein, who was very gracious when I emailed her to ask permission to use it.

Welcome, and I hope you’ll continue the conversation.

The last time we were at Costco, D asked me to buy a box of GoGurt.  I’m not quite sure how he heard of GoGurt — whether he somehow saw an ad for it on TV in spite of our best attempts to TiVo out all the commercials, or if one of his friends brought it to school.  It’s fairly high in sugar, but not otherwise bad for him, and we’re always trying to get him to try new foods, so I said sure.

As it happens, GoGurt is having a Narnia movie tie-in promotion, so all of the tubes have pictures of different characters.  D understands that there’s a lion, and a witch (who is bad even though she’s very pretty), and informed me yesterday that the movie is "coming soon on DVD."  I’m not sure whether D could handle the movie yet — I think it might scare him — but in any case, I want his first encounter with the story to be with the book.

So when we went to the library tonight, I asked him if he wanted me to look for a Narnia book.  They did have several copies of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so we took it out.  When I finished reading the first chapter, D asked "what’s a faun?" and I told him that after he brushed his teeth, we could look on the computer and see if we could find a picture of one.  And sure enough, the Narnia website has pictures of all the main characters.

So, between the marketing tie-ins and the multi-media experience, it’s not exactly an unmediated encounter between a child and the story.  But if that’s what it takes for him to have the patience for a chapter book, I can live with that.  Because getting to read stories that I loved to my kids is up there on my top 10 list of perks of parenting.

I’m tired and don’t have the brainpower to post.

Fortunately, it’s Delurking Week, so I’ve got a good excuse for a zero-efforty post.  Everyone reading this is encouraged to post a comment to say hi.  And if you feel so inclined, post your favorite knock-knock joke.

Mine is:

Knock Knock (KK)

Who’s there?  (WT?)

Boo!

Boo who?

Don’t cry, it’s just a knock knock joke.

(As Moxie points out, If you don’t have a blog, and you don’t want your email shown to the world, post a fake URL, and your email address will be hidden to everyone but me.  If you don’t want ME to know your email address, go ahead and post a fake one.)