[Handsome Creepy Eel]

So much for our conservative-leaning British newspaper...

Quote:

Women breadwinners
The natural order
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracy...turalorder

CENSUS BUREAU data show that four in ten American children live in a household in which their mother is the primary breadwinner. In 1960 women brought home most of the bacon in just 11% of households with kids. Another benchmark in the grinding struggle for women's equality? Not according to the indignant panelists in this glorious Fox Business segment, led by the professionally choleric Lou Dobbs:

Juan Williams fears the worst. In the rise of lady-led households, Mr Williams says, "you're seeing the disintegration of marriage... You're seeing, I think, systemically...something going terribly wrong in American society, and it's hurting our children. And it's going to have impact for generations to come. Left, right—I don't see how you can argue this!" I suggest empiricism. Elspeth Reeve of the Atlantic digs up a few facts:

What is going terribly wrong in American society? Crime rates are at historic lows. So are teen pregnancy rates. Worker productivity is high. Dobbs mentioned the high dropout rate, but it's declined from 12.1 percent in 1990 to 7.4 percent in 2010. He said we needed to "teach our kids to read and write," but the literacy rate is 99 percent. Very few people even smoke anymore. America is kind of awesome, actually, despite all these terrible working women.[/qoute]

Wheeeee! Crime rates are low (possibly because of the pacification effect of porn?)! This makes everything sustainable! Moreso, it confirms that single motherhood is good for society! How about some causality here?

I'll just leave this one of a hundred studies here:
http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/ar...0/abstract

[quote]Mr Erickson's appeal to the natural order points to a matched conservative folly: the tendency to imagine the familiar, recent past in especial accord with timeless human nature. Once one considers how far we've come since the Pleistocene—what with all our capitalism, nation-states, dentistry and cable news—this sort of biological essentialism seems unbecoming of conservatives who, if they are about anything worthwhile, are about the defence and advancement of civilisation. The defence of atavistic privilege, which invariably proceeds on the basis of specious claims about natural hierarchy, is the hardy, incivil part of conservatism. Gentlepersons left and right will leave this nastiness behind, and cheer the ongoing economic achievements of the fairer and not-yet-equal sex.

How can a sex be both equal and fairer? If anything, that's discrimination :b

Granted, I'm not sure I'd choose Lou Dobbs to represent a red-pill view, but he made a fine argument and, as usual, was met by a wall of hamsterism.

[Soma]

(06-01-2013 05:19 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

So much for our conservative-leaning British newspaper...

Not to beleaguer your main point, but I would hardly call The Economist a "conservative-leaning" publication in any sense. Their stance has always been mainly classical liberal/libertarian with support for some socially liberal causes.

[Vicious]

The Economist puts out dozens of quality articles every month. Of course there will be some that won't be to your own agenda. It doesn't take anything away from the overall quality of the magazine.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Yeah, that's true. They're very good otherwise.

NYT, on the other hand...

[DarkTriad]

If these "breadwinners" are living off of forced transfer payments, wouldn't they more accurately be called "breadtakers"?

[Exactaking]

Its scary how the cathedral believes marginalizing males and turning them into porn addicted zombies will create a utopia. What happens if one of those Guy Fawkes types takes out the grid?

[Basil Ransom]

(06-01-2013 07:25 AM)Vicious Wrote:  

The Economist puts out dozens of quality articles every month. Of course there will be some that won't be to your own agenda. It doesn't take anything away from the overall quality of the magazine.

The Economist may have started as a classically liberal magazine. But its positions just seem to be a consensus of what elite people consider good taste, without reference to actual facts. It's pure pandering.

The environment - they used to champion Bjorn Lomborg, and take a critical stance. No more.
Guns - for strong gun control.
Islam - occasionally honest in diagnosing the problem, but the ensuing policy recommendations are nonsense or fantastical. Eg, mentioned in a special on France a while back that the majority of its inmates are Muslim, but... that shouldn't imperil flows of those immigrants.
Feminism - see above.

When The Economist's original position differs too much from what is fashionable and tasteful, it simply changes course. It has Patek Phillipe and Cambridge University as advertisers to keep happy, don't you know.

Aren't most of these kids bastards anyway? And bastards tend to have far worse life outcomes than legitimate children. It's pretty germane, but no one wants to rain on the feminist parade that more female led households really just means more deadbeats, dropouts, thugs and lowlifes.

[Therapsid]

I don't care for the Economists policy of having only anonymous writers. Since you never know who writes what, there's no way you can hold to account or explain shifts in their line on an issue like climate change. Nor do I appreciate the pious tone of the writing in this "newspaper" (yes they're pretentious enough to call their magazine that).

The Economist speaks from the same moral pedestal that a monarch might, when talking down to her subjects and using the royal we. It does so despite the fact that its writers are not the wizened Oxbridge greybeards they make themselves out to be, but are arrogant, young toffs.

Because it makes no distinction between editorializing and reporting, every article, no matter how informative, combines opinion and objective fact, conjecture and statistic, bromide and insight in equal measure.