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Link Biscuits: 25 January 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 11:43
  • Crooked Timber, Civil Unions and Straight Marriage [Via Arthur Goldhammer]: "Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight) ... The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship."
  • Stumbling and Mumbling, Going to the Dogs Under Brown: "Gordon Brown’s vision for the country is a desperately feeble one: 'A fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams whether that's owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business.' Is this a society for humans, or for dogs? Dogs can work hard and obey rules, and be thrown a few bones as a reward. There’s so much missing from this, not least: who makes the rules, and how? Isn’t a “fair society” one in which people get more power over their lives? What’s shocking here is the contrast between this and the ideals leftists had 150 years ago. Back then, John Stuart Mill deplored the “struggling to get on…the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels“ as a “disagreeable symptom” of a passing phase of society. Brown, by contrast, seems to glorify such grubby materialism. And Marx thought a rich society - and Britain today is surely richer than even Marx envisaged - would be able to offer its members self-actualization and freedom. Brown, however, can do no better than a mediocre human resources manager seeking to entrench capitalist alienation: turn up on time, do what bosses tell you, and you‘ll get a little pay rise. ... There’s something, though, that depresses me even more than the narrowness and lack of ambition of Brown’s words. It’s that they might actually appeal to voters."
  • Frank Rich, What Could You Live Without?: "Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house. “We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”"
  • Kevin Drum, The Vicious Cycle of Stagnant Wages: "Here's my capsule view of the great financial meltdown of 2008: For the past couple of decades, the benefits of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the rich. But the middle class still wanted to prosper, so the rich loaned them money to continually improve their lifestyles. That worked for a while. And then it didn't. This is a fairly idiosycratic view, and obviously not the whole story. And although plenty of economists have condemned growing income inequality and years of middle class wage stagnation, none of them (as far as I know1) have explicitly given it a share of the blame for the economic collapse of 2008. But via Mike Konczal, I finally have a credentialed ally. Take it away, Raghuram Rajan: 'In a new book he is working on, entitled “Fault Lines,” Rajan argues that the initial causes of the breakdown were stagnant wages and rising inequality. With the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living, there was an urgent demand for credit. The financial industry, with encouragement from the government, responded by supplying home-equity loans, subprime mortgages, and auto loans....The side effects of unrestrained credit growth turned out to be devastating-a possibility that most economists had failed to consider.'"