I think this is a case of the unwashed masses having no idea how good it can get, and the government failing to counteract cultural messages that being a single mom is empowering.
Though the article could have done a better job explaining this. It's like a reverse phenomenon of "do as I say, not as I do".
That's probably what the article meant but I'm skeptical that it makes a significant difference in behavior. There are other positive behaviors that "social apex" people say and do but lower income people as a group still don't imitate them. Strictures like "don't use tobacco," "don't impregnate/get impregnated as a teen", "drink unsweetened iced tea instead of Coke," and "use free time to exercise instead of snacking and binge watching" are significantly less popular among low income/status groups than high income/status groups.
Yup I just made a similar comment (but using other examples). TFA is contradicting itself and another linked article (from the same author) is also contradicting itself.
(I don't think there's anything in it but that's what the author is saying.)
> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes.
> But actively undermine the norm for everyone else.
1. "Elite Influence on General Political Preferences"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266731932...
2. "Exploring the direct and indirect effects of elite influence on public opinion"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
3. "Trickle-Down Preferences: Preferential Conformity to High Status Peers in Fashion Choices"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Yes, but they do not support this with data, just an anecdote.
Two questions he doesn't seem to answer:
1. How are The Elite™ actually doing this? Cultural norms are set by culture itself, not some "cultural lawmakers" holed up in an ivory tower somewhere. By what mechanism are these upper class mustache-twirlers "setting cultural norms" for the rest of us? I think this needed more discussion.
2. Why are they doing it? How do they benefit from growing dysfunction and deprivation and society in general going down the drain? How are they benefiting from unmoored non-productive men sitting around all over the place? What is the end game?
I don't think the elite actually control the culture. To a large degree, the culture controls the (external behavior of) the elite. They have to appear to be everything they're supposed to be. So they give verbal agreement to single motherhood, unmarried cohabitation, and so on, so that the culture doesn't condemn them. But for themselves, they know that those things cause damage to the next generation, and they avoid it like the plague.
Note that this may be true even if "culture" means elite culture. I could see the culture among elites being that 1) you would be condemned if you were not sufficiently verbally supportive of single motherhood and related shibboleths, and 2) you would be condemned if any such thing happened in your family. (I don't actually know; I don't hang out in those circles, and I don't have a good handle on actual elite culture.)
But why?
Article>> Yes, she agreed, stability does matter to children; but having made that enormous concession to my point of view, she suggested jokingly that I had better leave now. It was not a concession she would make openly, and nor could she have articulated it in the course of the meeting.
Why is she so uncomfortable about saying it openly? Is this some kind of controversy I'm too un-elite to get?
We tell our kid "Don't be a single mom, it's a really tough life, and usually ends up as poverty." And she sees examples of this just looking at her peers' single moms. Not a single person I know would ostracize me for this take. It's pretty uncontroversial and backed up by data at this point.
In those countries the other social strata don't happily follow suit, young women do something else, they opt out of family formation altogether. If you go to South Korea and ask pretty much any young educated woman why she doesn't want kids or even a relationship, the answer is that she'd risk being trapped in it and disadvantaged at work. The same is true in Iran or Turkey which now have lower birth rates than France.
This stuff has nothing to do with "elite values" or "luxury beliefs", I'd say it barely has a cultural component. As education levels and absolute incomes rise virtually everywhere people change their values.
Specifically, it says the ruling class no longer publicly supports traditional family structures, despite continuing to follow them for themselves.
Nobody these days would have anything bad to say about single mothers, or unmarried couples. But when you look at the behaviour of the top 20 percent in socioeconomic status? They're all forming married two-parent households.
(The book covers a load of other topics and supports its observations a lot more than my short HN post, naturally)
Henderson acknowledges this explicitly. He spends a great deal of time pointing out the hypocrisy of wealthy Americans proclaiming that marriage is outmoded and unnecessary for raising children, yet mostly wait to get married before having children themselves.
The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%.
The idea that the social apex has decided that family instability is unimportant is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.
But most such narratives are based on grievances and not facts. So it’s not surprising that the author makes claims that are not only not backed by evidence but are disproved by all the evidence the author themselves includes in their article.