From: bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 07:54:44 MDT
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030818ta_talk_surowiecki
Ref: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going
Broke by Elizabeth Warren, et al
Release Date: September 2, 2003
The New Yorker has an interesting article about a new book which claims
that the cost of having kids is ruining the middle-class.
Another reason for the dropping birthrate?
The article also points out that having fewer children will mean big
financial problems in the future.
Also in the Financial Times (UK)
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059479217608&p=1037535656670¶
Quote:
You might, then, expect American families to be luxuriating in good
fortune. But, compared with people who don’t have children, people who
do are in worse economic shape than they’ve ever been in. The Harvard
law professor Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi
demonstrate, in their forthcoming book “The Two-Income Trap,” that
having a child is now the best indicator of whether someone will end up
in “financial collapse.” Married couples with children are twice as
likely as childless couples to file for bankruptcy. They’re seventy-five
per cent more likely to be late paying their bills. And they’re also far
more likely to face foreclosure on their homes. Most of these people are
not, by the usual standards, poor. They’re middle-class couples who are
in deep financial trouble in large part because they have kids.
In the past two decades or so, the cost of having children has risen
much faster than the cost of being childless. Conventional wisdom aside,
this has little to do with spoiled kids, acquisitive parents, or
PlayStation 2. Instead, it’s the result of two things: housing and
education. According to the Federal Reserve Board, between 1983 and 1998
the price of housing for married couples with children rose seventy-nine
per cent in real terms, roughly three times as much as it did for
childless people. One reason is that houses are bigger now. But,
according to Warren and Tyagi, the real reason is that parents get into
bidding wars for homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools.
Then, there’s college. Thirty years ago, middle-class parents could feel
they’d done a good job of raising a child if he or she made it through
high school—decent jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor were
readily available. Today, such jobs are much harder to find, and college
is considered a necessity. Needless to say, it is also extremely expensive.
The United States has $6.7 trillion in debt and forty trillion in
potential obligations to the elderly or soon-to-be-elderly, and we’re
sticking future workers with the bill. Even if the American birth rate
stays where it is, we’re headed for serious trouble. If it drops, look out.
End quotes.
Food for thought?
BillK
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