Denmark Vesey: Marriage Fights Poverty

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Marriage Fights Poverty

You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty:

1) finish high school
2)marry before having a child, and
3)marry after the age of 20.

Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.

William Galston

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: #4 Child and spousal support payments...; Oct 9, 2007, 12:14:00 PM
paul said...: Casper said, "#4 Child and spousal support payments..."

It's cheaper to keep her.; Oct 9, 2007, 1:58:00 PM
Anonymous said...: Correction

Avoid #4 Child and spousal support payments...; Oct 9, 2007, 2:48:00 PM

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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"