Half Changed World

Lisa at Learning the Lessons of Nixon has inspired us to start our own version of her  Family Dinners.   And you’re invited.

The idea is that at least half of the effort of having people over for dinner is the hassle of emailing back and forth, trying to find a date that works for everyone, then hoping that no one gets stuck working late and the kids stay healthy.  This hassle can be largely overcome by just saying "Ok, standing invitation for dinner on Tuesday night.  If you can’t make it this week, come next."  The menus are centered on the sort of low-fuss dishes that can be cooked in large batches as easily as in small (and that freeze well if no one shows up some week).  And it will be good for us to have a precipitating event that forces us to vacuum the cat hair off the living room furniture once a week.

I’m serious about the invitation.  Since we can’t guarantee that we’ll be home every single Tuesday evening, I’m making a list to send everyone whose interested a weekly notice of a) whether we’re on and b) what’s for dinner (this week, it’s homemade pizza).  If you’re in the greater DC area and would like to be added to the list, send me an email.

I respond well to deadlines.  I’ve been thinking of doing the guided walk by Janet Cardiff at the Hirshhorn since it opened.  It’s about 4 blocks from my office, and takes 45 minutes.  It closes Sunday, so I finally got over to it today.  I really enjoyed it.  Even knowing what she does with audio, I still found myself turning to see if someone was coming up behind me.

Without deadlines, I procrastinate endlessly.  So, I’ve gotten pretty good at seeking out things that create artificial structure when there isn’t natural.  It’s how I wound up running several marathons.  I found myself looking at the National Novel Writing Month website this week.  I don’t especially want to write a novel, but the structure and comraderie appeal to me.  (No, I’m not going to do it.)

I fantasize about figuring out a way to make a living by reading and thinking, but I worry that without a structure to keep me moving, I’d get really good at playing Bejeweled. 

Ironically, one of my favorite ways to procrastinate these days is to read the productivity tips at 43folders.

I’d guess that I may be one of the few members of the liberal blogosphere who spend the day hitting the refresh button on my computer trying to get the latest news on the Budget Reconciliation process rather than on Fitzmas.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last three years of my life working on welfare reauthorization, and suddenly I have no idea what the heck is happening.  The Senate has not included it in its reconciliation package.  The House does seem to be including it, and has left the TANF block grant mostly alone, but is trying to take a great big chunk of money out of child support enforcement.  Whatever happens, it’s likely to be the result of some deal cut at 2 in the morning, and no one in Congress is going to have a chance to read the bill before they have to vote on it.  And then the Republicans are going to turn around and try to pass more tax cuts.

Yup, we’re making sausages now.

Did you know that October is "Disability Awareness Month"?

BitchPhD points to a post at Camera Obscura about how the Americans with Disabilities Act also protects people from discrimination based on their association with someone with disabilities.  She wonders (and suggests that I might be able to answer):

"So, for example, you can’t be not hired because your employer is afraid you’ll take too much time off to care for your disabled child. How this would play out if you already had a job and needed, say, flex time to care for the same child, I don’t know, but it’s an interesting question."

The answer, according to the EEOC, is that you need to be treated the same as other employees.  If they’re allowed to take unpaid leave, or juggle their hours, your boss needs to let you do the same.  But if everyone else has to work 9-5.30, the ADA doesn’t require them to cut you a break.  If you work for a big enough company and have been there for at least a year, and the person with a disability is an immediate family member, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) might help you take unpaid leave, but otherwise you’re out of luck.

While I’m on the topic, a friend forwarded me this list of Myths and Facts about People with Disabilities, from the Easter Seals.  I was particularly struck by #8:

Myth 8: Curious children should never ask people about their disabilities.
Fact: Many children have a natural, uninhibited curiosity and may ask questions that some adults consider embarrassing. But scolding curious children may make them think having a disability is "wrong" or "bad." Most people with disabilities won’t mind answering a child’s question.

This morning, before showering, I decided to peak at a couple of my favorite blogs, and immediately learned that Rosa Parks had died.  I love this quote from her biography (quoted in the Washington Post):

"People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Until I heard about Parks, I had been planning on blogging about the book I just finished, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.  I thought about skipping my weekly book review, but then saw a connection between the two.  Because Gaiman claims that Anansi stories — stories about the trickster Spider (or about Coyote, or Br’er Rabbit, or whatever name you choose)  — were what taught humans that there are ways to get what you wanted without resorting to violence and that brains can be as effective as sharp knives.  Those are certainly lessons of the Civil Rights Movement.  Anansi stories also teach that making your enemy look foolish is sometimes better than scaring him.  And the Civil Rights Movement suceeded in part because it made segregationists look foolish and backwards.

I don’t want to give away the plot of Anansi Boys, but I will say that I enjoyed the book and stayed up later than I should have to finish it.  Most of the reviews seem to describe it as a sequel to American Gods, but I thought it had more in common with Gaiman’s Neverwhere.  It’s a fable, set in the present day, about someone who thinks he’s quite ordinary (even super-ordinary) and turns out not to be.

One detail that I really liked is the way that Gaiman handles race in this book. Almost all of the main characters are of African or Afro-Carribean descent, but that’s never explicitly stated; a few characters are identified as "white."  It made me realize how many books I’ve read where characters are assumed to be white unless stated otherwise.

On a related note, I took out from the library Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock by Eric Kimmel, which is on the list of 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know that Jody at Raising WEG found.  I think I liked Anansi Goes Fishing, by the same author, a bit better, but they’re both good.

Landismom wrote yesterday about working as a waitress:

"And waitressing seems to cross class lines for a lot of women. I know a number of men–my husband included–who have never had a job in food service. But I don’t know any women who I can say that about–even women I know who have high-level corporate jobs have some kind of waitressing in their backgrounds."

I’ve never worked as a waitress.  Is that really so unusual?  I’ve worked as a babysitter, and as a camp counselor, and as a receptionist/file clerk/girl friday in a doctor’s office, but never in food service.

Part of the explanation is that I grew up in New York City, and I think those sorts of jobs are less open to teenagers there than in suburbia.  (I know Katherine Newman has written about how in Harlem, even fast-food jobs are hard to get.)  And part is that my parents were generous enough that I didn’t have to work while in college, and was able to take unpaid or low-paying internships over the summer.

I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study of the role of unpaid internships in transmitting class privilege.  Well-off students can afford to spend their summers doing things that look good on a resume, but pay little or nothing.  Students whose families are already reaching to send them to college can’t.  (Or have to moonlight at a paying job or two on top of their internships.)  I used to fantasize about organizing a strike of all the interns on Capitol Hill. I still think that politicians who consider themselves progressive ought to figure out a way to pay their interns at least enough to cover the cost of housing for the summer.

As I think about it, I suspect the main barrier to paying interns isn’t the cost of the stipend, but the time that it would take to wade through the pile of applications that you’d receive if you advertised a decent wage.  I know in my office (which far less a glamorous place to work than the Hill), the only interns we’re able to pay are those who come to us through various formal programs, which serve to prescreen the pool of applicants.

Via Feministe’s Weekend Roundup, I read this post from Andrea at Vociferate, on Do straight feminists always have to compromise?   Looking at my own marriage, my answer is no, not if you define "compromise" as Andrea seems to, as giving up on something fundamental.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes find myself muttering as I pick up T’s balled socks from the floor.  But I pick them up, and I don’t think it’s a violation of feminist principles to do so.  Because he does lots of things for me, like doing almost all the driving on long trips, especially when the weather is lousy, and puts up with my bad habits, like leaving piles of newspapers and magazines all over the house.  Does it balance out?  More or less, enough so that we’re both happy.  I’m a firm believer in equality in relationships, but I don’t think that means keeping score all the time.

I think the socks are like the woman in the zen koan, who asked two monks for help crossing a river where the bridge had been washed out.  The elder picked her up and carried her across.  Three hours later, the younger said "Master!  We’re not supposed to touch women, and yet you carried that woman across ther river."  The elder replied "I left her behind at the river; it seems that you are still carrying her."  It’s a lot healthier for our relationship to just put the socks in the hamper than to let them fester in the back of my mind.

Andrea’s post made me think of Ann Lander’s famous question "Are you better off with him or without him?"  Landers’ advice was that if you decide you’re better off in a relationship than not, you should stop banging your head against the wall trying to change aspects of your partner.  The problem with that advice, of course, is that abusers tell their partners that they’re too ugly to ever get another partner, too stupid to get a job, and after hearing that enough far too many people start to believe it.

I’ve written here before about Rhonda Mahoney’s book "Kidding Ourselves."  She applies the logic of game theory to compromise in marriage and argues that that the stronger an individual’s fallback position is, the better deal they can negotiate with their partner.  So, if you can make a credible threat of leaving your partner — if you have the skills to support yourself, a decent hope of getting a new partner, a good chance of getting the custody arrangement you’d prefer — you’ll be better off even while married.  Thus, many feminist women are suddenly unhappy with the division of labor in their relationships following the birth of a baby because they’ve been hit by a double whammy: the amount of total work that needs to be done has increased dramatically just when they’ve given up much of their credible threat of walking out.

I see a lot of truth in that story, but I’m enough of a romantic that I resist the suggestion that power and threat points are the only factors that determine who makes which compromises in a relationships.  If I had to point a finger to what makes a committed relationship, it wouldn’t be duration of the relationship, or a marriage license, but to whether the partners really think about "what’s good for us" rather than just "what’s good for me."

Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post.  For those of you who aren’t addicted to statistics and didn’t find it quite as thrilling, this is why I think those figures matter.

It’s really hard to talk about income and work-family choices without getting into the mommy wars.  I think most of my readers would recognize that it’s a fairly hostile  statement to tell parents in dual-income families that if they just got their priorities straight and "cut corners" and didn’t waste money on luxuries, they could afford to stay home.  It’s obnoxious because it implies that you, the speaker, know better than the parents what their priorities ought to be.  But, as Jody pointed out, comments like that get made all the time.

It’s just as annoying for families who have chosen to have a parent stay home to have to listen to comments about "how lucky they are" to be able to afford it, especially when those comments come from dual-earner parents who live in bigger houses, drive nicer cars, or send their kids to private school.  Attributing it all to "luck*" denies the real financial sacrifices that many families make in order to live on one income, as jen commented.  Suggesting that only the rich can afford to have an at home parent makes the experiences and concerns of lower-income families invisible.

I think that the vast majority of discussion in this country about the incomes and needs of dual-earner families, and of families with SAHMs are totally disconnected from reality — they’re about people’s fears, fantasies, and projections.  So I was excited to find real data — especially data on the distribution of income, not just averages or medians — because it helps us develop a more accurate picture of the real range of experiences of American families.  And then maybe we can start to have a dialog that doesn’t assume that a single solution is going to be right for everyone.

* I’m not denying that luck can play a role; as I’ve mentioned before, we can afford to live on my salary because we were lucky enough to have bought our house before the real estate market went haywire.  That said, we made a deliberate choice to spend significantly less than the banks would have loaned to us.

RebelDad asked today if anyone could find the Census data that journalists are using to say that there were 147,000 SAHDs in 2004, up from 98,000 in 2003.  Of course, I took that as a challenge, and dug it up.    It’s this table, cell I7.

However, the part of this table that caught my attention was rows 27-38, which have income data for different types of married couple families with children under 15.  This is the first hard data I’ve seen on the subject.  I have seen lots of conjectures, including Stephanie Coontz’s statement (in Marriage) that the only two segments of the population in which male breadwinner families predominate are the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution and the top 5 percent, and Nathan Newman’s provocative suggestion that SAHMs are "luxury goods."

So what do the data say? First, that married two-parent families are overall fairly well off — over 40% have incomes over $75,000 a year, and only 7.3% are poor.  Second, at the level of detail the Census provides, such families with SAHMs are generally worse off have lower cash incomes than average — only about 31% have incomes over $75,000, and 12.2% are poor.

The income categories most likely to have a SAHM are those with annual family incomes between $10,000 and $25,000.  The women in these households are likely to have low potential earnings, and between child care costs and the phaseout of some tax breaks, it probably doesn’t pay very much for them to work.  I would also guess that many of them are from cultures that highly value at-home mothering.  At the other end of the spectrum, married couple families with incomes over $100,000 are slightly more likely than those with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 to have a SAHM.

Turning to the families with SAHDs, I was surprised to see that they were generally worse off had lower cash incomes than families with SAHMs.  Less than 22% have family incomes above $75,000, and 15.6% were poor.  This presumably reflects the overall lower earnings of women compared to men. But I would have guessed that the influence of selection would have pushed the average family incomes up.

Revised 10-20-2005 to reflect Parke’s suggestion.

Do you remember the song from A Chorus Line, "Dance 10, Looks 3"?  Today’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn Loury, gets a rating of "Content 9, Writing 3."  Loury makes some very important arguments, but they’re buried in some of the most inpenetrable writing I’ve ever encountered.  And it’s especially frustrating since I’ve read some essays by Loury that I found both lucid and eloquent.

Loury uses the language and mathematics of classical economics to address the question of why racial disparities aren’t fading away in American society now that formal discrimination ("discrimination in contract") has largely been eliminated.  (Paul Krugman writes that there was a MIT joke that Loury’s thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping…") Specifically, Loury argues that even if you begin with the assumptions that race is a social convention with no underlying biological reality, and that there are not overall differences in the innate capacities of the different races, it can still be rational for people to treat members of different races differently. 

An example Loury offers is of the cabbie who must decide whether to pick up a potential fare.  Loury suggests the following scenario:

• Criminals are distributed equally often among members of two groups.
• Criminals are less sensitive to how long they have to wait for a cab than law-abiding citizens (who can turn to alternatives like taking the bus or asking a friend for a lift — these are not good substitutes for someone planning a holdup).
• Cabbies believe that members of group A are more likely to be criminal than members of group B, and therefore are less likely to stop for them.
• Therefore, members of group A have to wait longer for cabs that members of group B.
• Therefore, the law-abiding members of group A are less likely to take cabs.
• Therefore, the subpopulation of group A who takes cabs is in fact more likely to be criminal than the subpopulation of group B.

Loury argues that similar logic could apply to various other scenarios, such as hiring workers. He then offers the question: "If the association between payoff-irrelevant markers [such as race] and payoff-relevant traits [such as criminality or work ethic] is not intrinsic, but is engendered by the nature of agent-subject interaction, then shouldn’t somebody learn what is going on and intervene to short-circuit the feedback loop producing this inequality?"  (And yes, the whole book is in this sort of awkward language.)

Loury’s answer is yes, somebody should figure out what is going on, especially governments and other large entities.  (He writes: "Consider a traffic cop sitting in a $50,000 cruiser, who has received $100,000 worth of training, is backed by a big bureaucracy, and has a computer at his fingertips that allows him, by simply reading a license plate, to instantly generate reams of information.  This is an observer with no excuse for allowing his behavior to be driven by racial generalizations.")

So why *don’t* we study these sorts of interaction more closely and figure out the intervention points that could break the cycle?  Loury argues that it’s because of persistent racial stigma.  He claims that when girls are laggging behind boys in school, people think "something must be wrong with the schools" but when blacks are lagging behind whites, people think "something must be wrong with the blacks." 

Loury is a somewhat controversial figure.  In the 1980s, he was considered a prominent black conservative, known for opposing affirmative action and arguing that self-destructive behavior was responsible for many of the problems of the black underclass.  He’s moved away from his former allies on the right, but is still far from a classical liberal — in this book he argues that the self-destructive behavior is in part a result of the distorted incentives and limited opportunities offered by a racially unequal society.  I think his ideas are worth grappling with, but the dense language of this book makes it hard to get a grip on them.