Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school.
"Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home
"We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases
It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.
Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them.
The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
I don't know if I count as educational elite, but I have a few degrees, so does my wife, and we have talked disparagingly about marriage in the past.
My gripe is that marriage, as an institution, ought to evolve to meet the people's changing needs, and by codifying it, the government locks in features (like the assumptions about gender or money or about who gets to make medical choices of certain kinds) which might then later fail to match up with how the people are living.
So it's not that I think it's irrelevant, it's just that I think it could serve us better if we kept a cleaner divide between what we practice socially and what we legislate. Whatever it is that you might need a reference to marriage for in the law, instead create separate decoupled systems for handling those things. More flexible that way.
We weren't going to bother with the marriage paperwork, because who cares what the state thinks. But then we did our taxes both ways and decided to swallow our pride and take the money.
I used to think similarly to you, but now I realize that between my wife and I (4 graduate degrees between the two of us so maybe we are in a similar boat) what really matters is that we pattern our life on the concept of traditional marriage we inherited from the past generations rather than put a confused modern spin on it.
I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.
I don't really quibble with the idea that marriage (can) work well. What I have a problem with is the suggestion that somehow the so-called "elite" opinion that social relations like marriage should be more flexible
1. constitutes a denigration of the institution
2. actually materially causes the decline in marriage rates we see, especially among the economically exploited.
Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society. I'm pretty sure that people having kids out of wedlock aren't doing it because they read about it in GOOP or whatever. In fact, further down this thread someone has posted a survey which suggests that people more likely to get divorced actually have a stronger belief in marriage than people less likely to. This suggests strongly that it isn't the opinions of the upper classes that actually cause divorces and points to other economic causes.
> Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society.
I don't disagree that traditional marriage works. Despite all attempts to reject tradition, we've ended up living a pretty traditional married life. We wouldn't have ended up here if it wasn't a stable equilibrium. But I think the following are equally valid explanations for the results:
> Marriage is good, actually.
> Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health.
It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.
When we got married, we didn't tell anybody. We had already been living like we were married for years, so it was just a tax thing.
A year or so later, my wife decided she wanted to have a party and make a big deal about it--the primary driver for this decision was that she noticed that her female co-workers weren't treating her like a professional, and she suspected it was because they didn't see her as really married.
I didn't press the issue, we had a party, it was great. But apparently, women treat unmarried women differently in professional contexts.
Also, men do. Also, the IRS does. Also, parents do. Do nurses without a family end up working different hours? There are a lot of factors.
I'm just saying that it's really difficult to sort out whether being married helped these women because it's so great, or whether not being married harmed the other ones because they were treated poorly in ways we don't understand.
Of course it's the women who often have unrealistic standards and much less of a drive to find a mate, for basic evolutionary reasons found in the vast majority of sexually reproducing animals.
I don't think this constitutes denigration of marriage. Its just totally normal reflection about the institution and its role in and interaction with the state. It doesn't sound like you actively preached to people that they "shouldn't get married" and that marriage qua marriage is bad.
If you take "people with college degrees" as elites, you can see two things documented in surveys: a) way less people with college degrees think that marriage is important if a couple has children together than people without college degrees (25% vs 31% in 2020). This holds also when you ask them whether marriage is important for life partners (31% vs 42% in 2020). All this while b) people with college degrees have higher ratios of marriages than people without.
More than half of working age adults have college degrees. I wouldn’t call that a satisfying definition of “elite”. When I think of the elite I’m thinking heads of state, CEOs, and leaders of the arts and sciences. Not a rando marketing manager with an English degree.
Right, but this difference in opinion hardly constitutes an active denigration of marriage. And this survey result actually undermines the idea that marriage decline is _because of_ elite opinion that marriage isn't important: the classes with the highest rates of divorce and unmarried parenting actually believe marriage is _more important_ than those with the lowest.
Gee, I wonder if there is a material, economic, explanation for the stability of various family structures in different classes?
South Bay Area has quite a few prosperous cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga) where the demographics are politically liberal in candidate preference and their public schools are outstanding. Maybe they're not as good as the private schools you're talking about, but the cities in South Bay tend to be brimming with optimism for their young generations.
In one well known city with a strong middle class, one might expect half of the students to be on the fastest math track available and half of the math faculty in the local high school to be Calculus teachers. The surrounding cities are not too much different.
I wonder what makes your city different? Would you mind specifying what region you're talking about?
Pretty much the rest of the country has awful public schools. Every large city has a few good ones and a number of less than wonderful ones.
I think a meaningful separation point might be the cost of living and more specifically the taxes raised from housing. If you have houses with an average price of $1M and houses with an average price of $300k, in the latter a public school system would simply have less to work with.
This gets brought up a lot, but in (all? most?) US states the additional state and local funding that goes to low-income schools more that makes up for the decreased local property tax revenue. That manifests as a negative correlation between affluence and per-pupil spend, and (at least in Ohio where I grew up) a negative correlation between per-pupil spend and various measures of academic success.
I wish people would look up the data on this sort of thing before confidently making claims.
"Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home
"We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases
It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.