Babies Houses And Babies - Road to the Middle Class

ON SATURDAY I went to a fringe theater on the last day of the run of DOB, a play by John Kaufmann about birthing. Yes, he went down to California just as his sister was having a baby, and the whole thing turned into a play.

Most of the play takes place in the hospital operating room during his sister’s labor.

The play was a delight, and a real shock.

Here were your young starving actors and your avant-garde types dressed in artistical black and they were putting on a light-hearted, nicely crafted play about having babies. Whatever will they come up with next?

This matter of babies is important, particularly as the voters of the United States are dividing up between the party of babies and the party of, er, fetuses.

In Britain, columnist Minette Marrin is also thinking about babies, or rather the British baby problem.

[T]here is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.
The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects.

And what with modern divorce, a woman can’t get too far away from the job market. The problem is that houses are so expensive in Britain that it is hard for a middle-class family to afford both a house and a baby.

In the United States, an interesting trend is developing. Although divorce is dropping a little, it is much lower than normal among college-educated women. Their divorce rate is 25 percent. That makes it much easier to afford children. There’s nothing like divorce to take that last child out of a woman’s life.

Is there something happening here, fellow trend-spotters? Should we be advising up-and-coming young men that babies is the coming thing?

By the way, a word to Minette Marrin. The best thing for you Brits to do about the baby problem is to forget “what everyone knows:” that there is no space left in Britain to build houses. Anyone who has sat in a Boeing 747 early in the morning looking blearily down at England’s green and pleasant land as the airplane circled in a holding pattern waiting to land at Heathrow will know that Britain has plenty of open space for houses.

Those new houses would get the price down, and then those middle-class women could fill the houses with babies. Beautiful bouncing babies.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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