Free Market Family Values
“The innermost contradiction of the free market is that it works to weaken the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past – the family is a key a example. The fragility and decline of the traditional family increased throughout the Thatcherite period. The proportion of women aged eighteen to forty-nine who were married fell from 74 percent in 1979 to 61 percent, while the proportion cohabiting increased from 11 percent to 22 percent during the same period. Births outside of marriage more than doubled in the 1980s. One-parent families increased from 12 percent in 1979 to 21 percent in 1992, with the biggest single increase being in single mothers who had never been married.
By 1991 there was a divorce for every two marriages in Britain – the highest divorce rate of any EU country, and comparable only with that in the United States. Is it coincidental that no other EU country apart from Britain has imposed American-style deregulation on its labour market? In those British cities in which Thatcherite policies of labour market deregulation were most successful in lowering rates of unemployment, rates of divorce and family breakdown were correspondingly highest.”
John Gray in False Dawn. (It should be noted that Gray was initially supportive of Thatcher’s policies as pragmatic solutions for Britain’s miserable economic performance in the 1970s – his disillusionment with them now appears to be the result of their move from pragmatic solution to dogma.)
Is there any causal explanation given? It’s not intuitively obvious to me, anyway, why deregulating the market would cause divorce.
Also, stable families can exist in common-law marriages (though it’s not clear how the “cohabiting” category was defined)…
This question is especially interesting to me for two reasons:
1) The quote suggests divorce rates increased while unemployment decreased. Thus the explanation can’t be the pressures of poverty brought upon by an unfeeling free market. It’s actually the wealth produced by the market (according to this argument) that led to divorce. Why is that?
2) The answer can’t be “the rest of the EU has less freedom in sex and marriage laws”, because basically the whole Western world allows for no-fault divorce at this point, and I’m betting France’s culture, for example, is far more socially tolerant of divorce than America or Britain.
Of course, it’s also trivially obvious that increased coercion can (at least for at time) prevent any undesirable behaviour. If you made it a law that all couples who break up will be shot in the town square at high noon, your rates of relational breakdown would probably drop, but it’s not obvious (to say the least) such a scenario would be better overall.
Part of what the free market prefers is a fairly mobile, flexible labour pool. The family unit can be encumbrance insofar as the skills and abilities of one or both spouses may be desirable in a location where the other one for reasons of family or career or community would prefer not to move.
OK. That does make sense. The moral question then becomes what’s the better trade-off.
Obviously I meant in terms of political decisions about economy; the personal issue of whether spouses should divorce to increase their economic status is a no-brainer, I think.
Here’s a quote from a review by Paul Krugman:
What Gray dislikes about free-market capitalism, in short, is the constant change it produces. He is certainly not a liberal, in either its 19th-century or modern American senses. Instead, he is an old-fashioned conservative – paleoconservative? – in the tradition of Burke, or of modern representatives like James Goldsmith, Edward Luttwak, and once and future U.S. presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan (whose new book The Great Betrayal sounds many of the same themes as False Dawn). What he really wants is a society in which people stay in the neighborhoods in which they were born, stay with their spouses, and stay with their traditional cultures. It’s a defensible goal, though Gray refuses to offer any hint of how it might be achieved.
…
At first I found this reticence puzzling, but I now think I understand it; and I think it ties in with his garbled economics. What Gray really wants is to stop things from changing so much; he himself would be quite happy, it seems, to sacrifice economic progress for the sake of a more stable social order. But most people, faced with that choice, would be less sure – would indeed wonder if there wasn’t a whiff of aristocratic condescension in the assertion of a comfortable don that we should all settle down, that society already has enough of the material things. And so Gray tries to have it both ways, arguing that free markets are bad for progress anyway. But his heart isn’t in it – and neither is his mind.
See more here: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/gray.html
It strikes me that Gray’s argument, even if correct (i.e., that it’s the free market that’s causing marital decline), would simply serve to remind conservative Christians that advocating for a society with less government violence shouldn’t be the sum total of their missional goals. They also have to work for regenerate hearts, and thereby a regenerate society, where people freely do what is right in their sexual and family lives.
Keith, I don’t really get where Krugman draws this impression of Gray. He’s not really making a normative case but rather a descriptive one – at least that’s my impression so far.
A new book is out by Carl Trueman of Westminster Sem called Republocrat. I think he’s a British communitarian who would probably agree with much of what John Gray has written on this topic.
This is pretty cool because Trueman is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) which seems to be pretty hostile to the political left. And I’m pretty sure he’s the only faculty at Westminster to read Marx for fun. Trueman truly (?) is an individual.
Your probably correct on that one, Gray is also reminiscent of the sorts of things that Charles Taylor has written about the disembedded individual (Taylor being another communitarian).
What makes US and Israel societies so entrepreneur friendly? Its their history.
http://haphazardcontemplations.wordpress.com/
It seems to me tenuous at best to draw a cause and effect relationship between Thatcher’s policies and family disintegration. It just not reasonable to suggest that people started having children out of wedlock as a result of Thatcher’s labor policies.
If anything, the factors leading to disintegration were long in place before Thatcher came to power and remain there long after she left office. One could just as easily argue that higher taxes, which force both the man and the woman to enter the workplace, causes family breakdowns. The analysis, at least as presented in this post, is wholly inadequate because there are to many other factors to take into consideration.
What’s problematic with this criticism is that one has the rest of Europe as a sort of control group, as Gray says, this level of family breakdown did not occur in other EU countries during the 1980s and early 1990s.
In order for a control case to be legitimately scientific, every single factor must remain the same except the factor under study, in this case Thatcher’s policies. Now let me ask you this question: were the all other factors the same in the other EU countries? Well, let’s see: do the French watch the same TV shows, attend the same churches and listen to the same music? What about the Germans and the Italians?
There are some broad similarities between the Dutch, French, Germans, and Italians; yet they speak different languages and live in very distinct cultures. Having visited each of these countries, I would be very reticent to believe that they would make good controls for studies of British society. An example of a better control case could be the following: Consider the impact that Western policies had on West Germany, and Soviet policies on East Germany. Which was better for the family and why? West Germany could perhaps be a control for East Germany in a study of the impact of Soviet communism on the “traditional family”, because at least both countries are German.
For that matter, why couldn’t Quebec serve as a control? Since the Quiet Revolution, Quebec culture seems to have largely rejected traditional family values. Were Thatcherite polities implemented against the unions in Quebec? Or is it that Quebec can’t be a control because they aren’t part of the EU?
It seems to me that the study isn’t scientific but an attempt to create a narrative. It would make more sense to me as a compelling narrative, that the reasons for the 1980-90′s breakdown of the family in Britain had more to do with cultural influences on children in the 1960-70s, such as the Beatles, than because Thatcher implemented free market reforms. Also, what was the moral example set by star soccer players?