Economist Nicholas Eberstadt lays out a bleak future in an important essay just published in The Wall Street Journal. He makes the case that selfishness, as evidenced by the unwillingness of people to get married in the first place and stay married in the second, is setting humanity on an unknown and potentially dangerous course.
Eberstadt describes a global flight from family. “All around the world today, pre-existing family patterns are being upended by a revolutionary new force: the seemingly unstoppable quest for convenience by adults demanding ever-greater autonomy,” he writes.
“Thanks to this revolution, it is perhaps easier than ever before to free oneself from the burdens that would otherwise be imposed by spouses, children, relatives or significant others with whom one shares a hearth,” he continues.
What Eberstadt shows is not just the ever-expanding incidence of fatherless homes, which is old news by now, but the breakdown of family in ever new ways and directions.
In the United States, “a 2011 study by two Census researchers reckoned that just 59% of all American children … lived with married and biological parents.” Eberstadt says that in the foreseeable future, “American children who reside with their married birthparents will be in the minority.”
What may shock many is the exploding number of men and women who are simply not interested in marriage–ever. Eberstadt cites data from Belgium where “the likelihood of a first marriage for a woman of reproductive age is now down to 40%, and the likelihood of divorce is over 50%.”
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7 comments:
Instead of getting married,reverse the process and get divorced first.No one ever thought of that,but filing divorce papers together in an attorneys office has merit.With the need for getting along removed from the equation all of the pressures of being married would not exist.I guarantee couples would stay together longer.
This is heart breaking to me. The greatest gift in my life is my family. I would sacrifice everything for any one of them, gladly. It is true, that I don't find many young people with those values.
LadyLiddy, 3:51 Everybody in my immediate family has those values and we know many others with those values too. I think there are those that simply protest too much because it causes more of a stir than talking about the ones that are doing things in the traditional way. There certainly must be less money to be made writing about that.
I hope you are right 5:09.
3:08 - you are an imbecile. that is the most incomprehensible statement I've heard - and that includes the weird crap on JT's blog.
One word that is the major reason....WELFARE
Second ..removing the lord our savior from our countries lexicon.
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