MORE ON "FRENCH FAMILY VALUES": Reihan Salam

...Have the French struck the right balance? I tend to think they haven't. That said, I do favor "family-friendly" interventions of a different kind--finer-grained interventions that focus on parents and would-be parents, including tax and tuition credits for full-time caregiving parents. Such an intervention would increase the relative attractiveness of remaining in the home for some transitional period, yielding over time a wide array of spillover benefits. ...

What's More Important--Marriage or Staying Together?: An unusually smart friend wondered if French fertility and marriage rates are higher than ours, which would bear on whether or not the French have hit upon a superior social model. Marriage rates in France are low and declining at a rapid clip, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of the Civil Society Pacts (the French "civil unions") Fertility rates, while lower than those found in the US, are, as the also extremely perspicacious Patrick points out, are very high for Europe--second only to outlier Ireland.

So it could be that fertility rates would be even lower in the absence of the current labor regime. As for marriage rates, and here I'll indulge in a little bit of heresy, I consider them less important than statistics concerning the proportion of disrupted families, i.e., families in which children are not living with both biological parents. The number of children living in disrupted biological families is, according to Ellwood and Jencks (PDF), much higher than the number in single-parent households, and it's been growing at a faster clip. What does this have to do with France? I'll leave that to Ellwood and Jencks. (I actually have to transcribe this, so be grateful, loyal readers.)

It is true that out-of-wedlock births are as common in many European countries as in the United States. But the estimated percentage of fifteen year olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than it Western Europe. Even in Sweden, where nonmarital births are almost twice as common as in the United States, most unmarried parents raise their children together. As a result, two-thirds of all Swedish fifteen year olds are expected to live with both of their biological parents--a figure comparable to that in Germany and France.

It seems that our higher marriage rates are the tribute vice pays to virtue. When it comes to the really damaging kind of social change, namely the rise in disrupted families, we have Western Europe, France very much included, over a barrel.

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posted by Eve at 6:54 PM | link

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