Curt Doolittle

Form: Reply

  • “What, if i may ask, is your criticism of Miller? it would be interesting to see

    —“What, if i may ask, is your criticism of Miller? it would be interesting to see if it holds water”— Ayelam Valentine Agaliba

    (reposted for archival purposes)

    Val,

    I don’t disagree with Miller’s multiple “standards of justice”. I just would state it very differently, as necessities, demands, incentives, and evolutionary strategies. I mean, I say the same thing. I just say it very differently.) That said, standard of logical decidability in all matters is provided by one universal moral rule that is necessary – but we can build infinitely complex systems upon it. That one rule provides us with Decidability in law regardless of construction of social norms, and that single, necessary inescapable, universal logical test is very different from the contractual terms by which we construct social orders out of various exchanges, and inside of which we produce multiple standards of justice.

    One thought: (A Criticism)

    —“By mistakenly supposing that thinking intelligently is identical with

    thinking logically, critical thinking textbooks almost invariably regard the purpose of argument to be a combination of justification and persuasion, authoritarian goals that critical rationalists, and other supporters of the open society, must shun. “— David Miller (Abstract)

    Well, his criticism is correct, in that our populace is being taught very bad (justificationary ideas). But then, he doesn’t solve the problem. Popper’s argument is much narrower than Miller intuits.

    So, I think that this is not quite right. Instead:

    (a) I must justify my actions in accordance with objective morality, local norms and laws. (I must show that I met terms of the contract for cooperation – thus if I err I am blameless and free of restitution.)

    (b) I must warranty my testimony is truthful by critically prosecuting it.

    (c) I must(can) Innovate (reason / Develop Theories) by any free associative principle possible.

    I believe that is the correct hierarchy. Because it is a NECESSARY hierarchy. Just as these are necessary hierarchies:

    (a) Tautology, Deduction, Induction, Abduction, Guessing, and Free associating.

    (b) Teleological ethics, deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and intuitionistic ethics.

    (c) Murder, violence, theft, fraud, omission, indirection, socialization, free riding, privatization, rent seeking, corruption, conspiracy, conversion, invasion, conquest, and destruction.

    (d) manners, ethics, morals, laws, constitutions, property.

    (e) life, movement, memory, cost, property, cooperation, norms, property rights laws, government, state, empire.

    So, I while I understand Miller’s assumption, he is making a mistake of ‘one-ness’ or ‘monopoly’ that is a byproduct of some rather structural errors implicit in the use of logic in the discipline of philosophy. Which, if were instead, express not as manipulation of sets (which is how he works if I remember correctly) , but as a sequence of possible actions (existentially possible categories of actions), then he might not make this mistake. I mean, it seems that falsification is a hammer, and everything appears to be a nail. But at some point this is nothing but framing (using concepts one has specialization in, rather than integrating those concepts into the greater whole.

    And in this case, the greater whole, is the universal language of truth telling: science. And until insights obtained through logical analysis can be converted into truthful speech (scientific language) then it remains UNFALSIFIED. <– ***Which is my underlying argument.***

    One of the things economics teaches you is to think about equilibrating processes that negate all our actions into the realm of marginal indifference, rather than seeking binary truth of states.

    So I would argue that we should be taught the following:

    1) Manners, ethics, and Morality under the Golden Rule, Silver Rule, and the one-rule of property and voluntary exchange. The miracle of cooperation. How we insure one another in a multitude of ways.

    2) Truthfulness, Witness and Testimony (Operationalism and Existential Possibility) as well as how to spot errors in truthfulness, witness, and testimony.

    3) Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, Debate and Oratory (as we once were), including how to spot ignorance, error, bias, deception, and Loading-Framing-Overloading (“Suggestion that overwhelms reason”).

    4) External Correspondence (empirical observation, analysis and testing) with a nod to Instrumentalism. And how to falsify external correspondence. What a pseudoscience is, and how to spot it.

    5) How to use free association (what we call ‘creativity’) “Filling the shelves of your mind, and then ‘playing’. Which is a discipline if you work at it. (It’s my preferred discipline.)

    6) arithmetic, accounting, finance, economics (in that order)

    7) Mathematics, Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry, and at least the ‘idea’ of calculus. But taught as the history of the development of these problems that people were solving, instead of as wrote. With far more emphasis on word problems.

    8) Mind. Biology. Chemistry, Physics, (in that order)

    And honestly, I think all philosophy is discardable except as an interesting inquiry into the intellectual history of the struggle to develop science: Truth telling.

    I hope this puts my criticism of Miller in perspective.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2015-02-01 10:29:00 UTC

  • TO LEE ON JAN LESTER —“Lester does not equate liberty with property because he

    TO LEE ON JAN LESTER

    —“Lester does not equate liberty with property because he has a “pre-propertarian” theory of liberty.”—

    No. That’s just the word-game he uses. (And in doing so abuses critical rationalism on a scale that only a rationalist could.) It’s embarrassing really.

    Oh wait, “People use the term liberty as such… therefore….”. OMG. Honestly?

    We move, we remember, so we can acquire.

    We acquire. When we acquire, costs are subjective, therefor value is subjective.

    We developed emotions to reward us for acquisition and punish us for loss.

    We defend what we remember having acquired (property). We developed emotions to reward us for defense, and punish us in the presence of theft or loss.

    We cooperate (to increase production). We developed emotions that reward us for cooperation, and punish us for failure.

    Cooperation evolved in-group (kinship), We evolved to grant priority to in-group members. (males more so than females who were portable between groups of males)

    We prohibit free riding (to preserve the incentive to cooperate) even in kinship groups, by defending production with the same vehemence we defend our property. We developed emotions (moral intuitions) to prevent parasitism.

    We developed moral intuitions to eliminate or control alphas (to wider distribution of mates).

    We developed norms for more elaborate rules preventing parasitism.

    We developed myths rituals and religions for institutionalizing them.

    We developed laws to institutionalize them further.

    We developed property rights as a contractual limit upon what our group of mutual insurers (those we cooperate with) are willing to act to enforce without damaging the cooperative incentive itself.

    We developed prohibitions on parasitism via alphas, authorities, norms, rules, rituals, and institutions because it is reproductively to our advantage to control our options.

    NO PRE-PROPERTY LIBERTY CAN EXIST BECAUSE PROPERTY (Defense of one’s acquisitions) EVOLVED PRIOR TO COOPERATION – MORAL RULES – AND COOPERATION PRIOR TO MORAL CONSTRAINT UPON INSTITUTIONS/AUTHORITY/ALPHAS: LIBERTY.

    I don’t disagree with him that (a) value is subjective, and (b) that imposing costs upon others is a violation of the necessary physical law of cooperation, and that this law is the cause of moral intuitions, and moral facts. What I disagree with is that he abused critical rationalism, and committed the kind of rationalist word-game that I would like to see made illegal in matters of property (of all kinds), because it is precisely the vehicle that the other side uses to lie, cheat, steal, free ride AND IMPOSE COSTS upon us with.

    You kept advocating his work, and I finally read it. But it’s nonsense. It’s 20th century pseudoscience.

    So, it’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that he worked backward from liberty and therefore justified it rather than constructed it from first principles by causal necessity and then criticized it.

    He said that I wasn’t doing philosophy, that he was doing philosophy, and that I was doing anthropology or social science. He’s right. That’s what I’m doing. Worse: I’m actively trying to outlaw what he is doing, as Hayek’s warning against 20th century mysticism.

    The only reasons philosophy and science are not synonyms are (a) that prior to now, we didn’t understand that there is but one logical rule to morality – prohibition imposition of costs, or positively stated, requirement for voluntary transfer. And (b) that without operationalism (action) it is impossible to eradicate imaginary information from rational content. In other words, there isn’t any difference between philosophy and science any longer, and it’s time to put rationalism to bed along with mysticism.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-28 15:17:00 UTC

  • there is a lot of identity crisis in various ideological positions surrounding o

    there is a lot of identity crisis in various ideological positions surrounding opinions regarding GMO. but it seems to square perfectly with how you are framing up intellectual commons and warranty once you strip away the statism, libertarianism, veganism, regulationism, etcisms..

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-16 16:41:00 UTC

  • Ayelam Valentine Agaliba : You’re right. Once one just attacks justification, it

    Ayelam Valentine Agaliba : You’re right. Once one just attacks justification, it all comes together much more neatly.

    Thank you. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-16 04:11:00 UTC

  • JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN CONTRACT VS EXPLORATION (from elsewhere

    JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN CONTRACT VS EXPLORATION

    (from elsewhere)

    James Stevens Valliant :

    Just wanted to say that you argued this topic quite well. And I was trying to think if I could give you any language that would help you in the future.

    You have one position that I think is correct, and one that I think you should consider modifying. First, I agree that knowledge is reconstructed from information, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

    Second is the problem of conflating (a)awareness, (b)risk, (c)truth content, and truth content consist of two additional properties: (c.i)persuasive power, and (c.ii)parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

    The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

    “Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

    –“If you think that knowledge is something other than true belief, then we also strongly differ. For that old fashioned kind of knowledge, contact with reality is required. But at least you know that I know what we normally call “science” already assumes a mountain of knowledge.”–

    So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

    And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

    For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

    For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as awareness, all knowledge theoretical, where theoretical contains both persuasive power in an honest discourse(risk reduction), and truth content( parsimonious correspondence with reality).

    So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality). If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting. In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

    In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility.

    The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

    The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of it epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as practices, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses. Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms is contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society. So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science. This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contracts.

    And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

    As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    NOTE: I have Kenneth blocked for personal attacks in defense of his ideological position, so I can’t see his posts. But I can understand your frustration. There is a reason why people feel they want to externalize responsibility for actions. And there is a long standing tradition of attempting to treat imaginary concepts as existential rather than experiential. And worse, in German, Jewish and Islamic cultures (not Anglo or Sinic) this is an attempt to create authoritarianism by abstracting the existential into the spiritual (metaphysical or platonic world.) So you have to look at such arguments as non logical, non-truthful, but mere justificationary attempts to establish traditional textual authority – something learned from monotheism. I am not really finished with my analysis of suggestion, loading, framing, overloading, conflation, and obscurantism as rationalist means of deception. I think a quick read of Kevin MacDonald’s analysis of the deceptive argumentative technique of Critique is probably very helpful to most – we can trace monotheistic argument, through greek, christian, and enlightenment, german and jewish counter-enlightenment thinkers. But the more I study the problem the more obvious it is that the purpose of science is to eliminate authority and the purpose of rationalism in all its forms, is to construct scriptural authority out of cunning but deceptive arguments. Science uses logic(internal consistency), experiment (external correspondence), operational definitions (existential possibility), falsification (parsimony), to create a testimony that one is speaking truthfully and non-allegorically, and his work is as free of imaginary content, whether it be error, bias, habituated (unconscious) deception or intentional deception – even if we never know if we speak the most parsimonious theory possible.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 07:39:00 UTC

  • NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW (followup) Shannon, Thanks for the reply. I have a s

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html#comment-170243ON NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW

    (followup)

    Shannon,

    Thanks for the reply. I have a sort of job to do, and it is both easier and more educational to criticize those with whom we have small differences, than those whose ideas require vast effort to differentiate and render comparable. This means it is often more illustrative to criticize one’s allies on tertiary points than it is to make long wholesale arguments against direct opponents. So my apologies. But the end is that we must provide conservatives with the means to argue their ancient group evolutionary strategy in ratio-empirical terms, rather than the metaphorical and intuitionistic terms that they are stuck with – and which no conservative thinker has been able to use to elevate conservatism out of the subject of oft justifiable ridicule.

    My objection was three fold – although obscured by my often-criticized philosophical density:

    First, your article positions the choice between divinely ordained, and rationally chosen social contract. However, that I know of, there are three justificationary positions: divinely ordained (magical, authoritative and conservative), logically necessary for voluntary, peaceful, cooperation(scientific, voluntary and libertarian), and socially contractual(preferential, communal and equalitarian-socialist). (Jefferson was certainly not a Deist. Anything but.)

    Second, that if we look at the data, the demographic correlations show that the origins of these different justifications reflect family structures, and family structures reflect agrarian social models (even crops), and that these persist even when immigrants migrate from the old world to the new. (See Emmanuel Todd).

    Third, that the consistent thread throughout history, from the Stoics to the present, through various magian, rational and empirical expressions, does not position natural rights as equivalent to Moses’ tablets (albeit the ten commandments are translatable into an early list of property rights), but instead, that the there is an optimum natural order of things – a ‘divine order’ that we must adhere to as a defense against our hubris, and the hubris of those in power in particular if we are to flourish (cooperate peacefully) and govern beneficially. It so happens that we can capture these rules as property rights: life liberty and property. Or conversely: ‘impose no involuntary costs upon others’.

    So whether we justify that optimum order as god’s will, justify it as rationally or empirically utilitarian, or abandon the prohibition on hubris with positive law (legislative commands), is largely a product of our heritage – a reproductive bias that suits our evolutionary strategy, and which quite possibly exists as a bias in our genes. And while there appears to be little chance of persuading others to change the justification they use for their arguing in favor of their preferences, the entire planet has adopted the language of science as the universal language of truthful speech. And if indeed the only difference between the allegorical and ratio-scientific arguments is the means of justification, then it is in our interests to argue using the universal language of truthful speech, and maintain metaphors for the pedagogy of our offspring for whom such language is inaccessible.

    As such the debate is between the deist(ancient), scientific(modern), and 20th century (postmodern) strategy, and the deist and the scientific both retain the prohibition on hubris, while the postmodern (leftist) abandons it.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use your post as an example. I hope you appreciate my good intentions.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 18:29:00 UTC

  • NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW Shannon, No. That isn’t quite right. Natural rig

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.htmlLETS NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html

    Shannon,

    No. That isn’t quite right.

    Natural rights were conceived as NECESSARY rights governments must respect in order for humans to flourish.

    A benevolent God would not create a world where flourishing was impossible, only a world where we must observe certain rules in order to flourish. But God did not give us the rules to obey, we discovered them by trial and error. If we fail to observe those rules that we have discovered, then we will not flourish.

    A right must be possible, and it must be enforceable or it cannot exist. Natural rights are enforceable by uprising or revolution, and natural rights were enumerated to construct a moral license given to the population by the church to demand from their governments, and prohibitions placed upon the Spanish in particular for their abuses in the new world.

    All rights are reducible to property rights, where property includes mind, body, kin, physical property, common property and norms we have sacrificed to create. All rights then are limited to prohibitions upon others – rights are positive statements of negative prohibitions: things we must NOT do to others, and others must not do unto us. Rights are stated positively so the injured can lay claim against violators. Duties (prohibitions) are stated negatively as prohibitive laws. But whether positively or negatively stated, all rights and duties that are necessary for human flourishing (cooperation produces flourishing through the division of knowledge and labor) can be, and have been expressed as property rights.

    We have constructed positive demands upon one another using commands (legislative law) not natural law (property rights) – no positive duty can exist, only negative restrictions. This is because while we can all refrain from something we cannot all supply something – that is impossible. We cannot grant someone the right to that which individuals do not have to supply him. We can only state a preference that under conditions of possibility that we will exercise that preference.

    So just as legislative commands masquerade as necessary law, positive rights masquerade as necessary rights.

    The charter for human rights consists of all but (I think) three statements of property rights: prohibitions on government violations of individual’s natural rights. The last three ‘positive rights’ were added to mollify the communists at the time so that they would sign the charter. But positive rights are impossible. They are merely ambitions that all governments should strive for.

    The difference between the american right and left is the difference between the absolute nuclear, and nuclear families, and the responsibility for self-sustaining life (prohibition on parasitism) and the traditional and pre-traditional families where parasitism is encouraged both inside the family and across families as a means of insurance.

    The uncomfortable truth is that that difference is between the moral traditions of the productive eugenic nuclear family, and the dysgenic parasitic moral impulses of other forms of family – the majority being now the dramatically parasitic single parent family.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 04:03:00 UTC

  • Yes

    Yes.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-08 10:54:00 UTC

  • QUESTION: “CURT: WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD and HOPPE IF YOU ADVOCATE

    QUESTION: “CURT: WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD and HOPPE IF YOU ADVOCATE AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS?”

    Because Austrian Economics if stated scientifically, rather than rationally, constrains economics to moral theories and policies, and correctly repositions economics as a moral discipline: the search for institutional improvements to voluntary exchange – in the same way that I have tried to reposition science as a moral discipline: the search to speak the truth; and philosophy as the construction of meaning from the truth that we discover with science – a discipline which expressly lacks meaning (and must). If we seek means of

    (Note: You might want to re-read that paragraph a few times – it’s very important.)

    This is a profound transformation of multi-disciplinary intellectual history into a single, unified theory of peer-cooperation in pursuit of prosperity. And it corrects the errors inserted into the Cosmopolitan (Jewish) branch of Austrian economics by Mises (pseudoscience), and Rothbard (ghetto immorality – the absence of truth-telling), and Hoppe (German Rationalism)

    This transformation of western thought into truth-telling for the purpose of moral cooperation (voluntary exchanges among warriors of universally equal rank), explains why the west innovates and prospers at higher rates than the rest of the world, whenever it is not bound by babylonian-levantine mysticism, barbaric deception, or Asian systemic truth-avoidance: we work constantly to eliminate transaction costs and seize opportunities at lowest cost (early).

    This approach to man’s intellectual struggle correctly positions truth-telling along with trust (transaction costs), property, voluntary exchange, and contract as the necessary institutions of prosperity creation: the high trust society.

    Anglos attempted to combine science and morality – trusting man in the absence of moral authority. But anglos, were an island people without borders to defend, an homogenous in-bred people, and a heavily commercialized people. They had fewer fears. Defectors from moral norms are not a problem for an in-bred island people. There is no group to defect to.

    Germans attempted to combine philosophy and morality – a less radical transformation of religious authoritarian morality. Germans were a landed people with borders under constant question, and who were intermixed with other groups on all sides, and were not as economically diverse as the anglos and as such not as bound to trade. So, “defectors” – those who no longer pay the high cost of the normative commons, were more of a concern.

    Jewish cosmopolitan authors, an un-landed diasporic and separatist people, attempted to preserve internal rule-authoritarianism, separatism, and the parasitic value of separatist dual-ethics. They viewed host civilizations as hostile, generated separatist hostility internally by intention as a means of group cohesion, and often practiced dualist ethics that guaranteed their moral separatism.

    So each of these groups were, as all groups must, attempting to react to the enlightenment using their group evolutionary strategies: island naval and commercial, landed martial and agrarian-commercial, and unlanded, diasporic commercial.

    It is sometimes hard for us to imagine that our use of “Truth” reflects our group’s evolutionary strategy, and that many of our judgements are unconscious. But all groups use truth differently.

    Truth is unknowable and therefore merely contractual in Jewish philosophy – it is a purely pragmatic vision. In German philosophy, truth is dangerous and must be inseparable from duty, which is why all german philosophy conflates truth and duty. In anglo philosophy, truth is divine and its consequences divine – knowing the mind of god. Our duty is truth regardless of consequences, because we believe all consequences are optimum. Neo-puritanism, in the anglo world, which is the dominant postmodern philosophy in government and academy, does not practice anglo truth, but has adopted german and jewish counter-enlightenment philosophy of the sociology of knowledge and truth: truth is what we desire it to be.

    This is systematically destroying our rule of law, which has been, in the past, the source of our empiricism. The source of our science. Not the other way round. Without scientific law, we cannot have a scientific society.

    Law is the most influential property of any society because it determines what one must do, not what one prefers. As such, an unempirical laws, is an incalculable, undecideable, and therefore subjective law.

    The solution is to restore truth telling. To increase the scope of property to include the normative and informational commons. To use law to restore truth-telling.

    All society will adapt rapidly to this change. No authority is necessary. No leadership is necessary. No belief is necessary. No agreement is necessary. No ideology is necessary.

    It is just true, insufficient to know, or not true, and that is enough.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    L’viv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-06 05:25:00 UTC

  • INCOME INEQUALITY OR FAMILY INEQUALITY? CURT: The degree to which inequality is

    INCOME INEQUALITY OR FAMILY INEQUALITY?

    CURT: The degree to which inequality is attributable to income or family reproduction is the difference between left and right positions on the economy. I suggest, that as usual, the right is more correct than the left. Since if the right position was corrected, the right would tolerate redistribution.

    —“among the wealthiest 20 percent of whites, divorce rates and single parenthood have returned to 1950s levels after a blip upward in the 1970s. But among the poorest 30 percent of whites — and among much larger percentages of Hispanics and blacks — divorce and single parenthood have become a way of life. That is exacerbated by the recent decline in college attendance by young men and the dearth of job opportunities for less educated men. That makes them less marriageable and less prepared to take responsibility for children they may father. Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill [states that] we are becoming a “bifurcated society,” not just because of income inequality but because of family formation patterns.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-06 05:14:00 UTC