The Law of the Household

     In a recent issue of First Things, the superb Spengler, now confessed to the world as Daniel P. Goldman, wrote that the economic crisis that the West is facing will prove intractable by methods that do not take into account the human decisions that make or destroy a culture.  To be specific, he observes that the failure of our generation to replace itself means that, among other things, the supply of large houses will for the foreseeable future be far greater than the demand.  Eventually, we will no longer be able to fuel our buying and our debt by means of cheap money.  I'm not enough of an economist to judge whether Spengler is correct in his assessment, though I suspect he is; what I mainly want to insist on is something I'll call Esolen's Law of Mathematical Vagueness: All quantitative descriptions of human behavior are by necessity unrigorous.  That is because human beings are not quanta; they are not predictable even in probabilistic terms.  A whole culture can lose its faith, and with its faith, its hope for salvation -- and then place its desperate caricature of hope in a charismatic madman, and goose-step over a cliff, or in the accumulation of toys, and amuse itself to death, as we are doing now.  Alasdair MacIntyre, even before his conversion to the faith, wrote in After Virtue about the ineluctable historicity of man, the scandal of the historically particular and unpredictable, and the abject failure of the social "sciences" to deliver on their promise (or is it instead their threat?) to manage mankind rationally, for the utility of all.

     I'm thinking about these matters after having heard of a double-income couple making $106,000 together, with a consumer debt of $107,000, not counting their mortgage and the $57,000 they borrowed from their family to pay for the mortgage and the $28,000 in student loans the husband owes.  The couple are on the verge of divorce.  The wife, who makes $60,000 a year, resents her husband's student loan which he, in her words, "brought to the relationship," but is almost solely responsible for the consumer debt they have incurred, much of it from buying expensive toys for their only child, to keep up with the moms' race in her group of maternal acquaintances.  And for the first time it struck me that Esolen's Law of Mathematical Vagueness applies to the individual household as well as to models of national economic activity.  I had long known that when A and B contribute incomes X and Y to the family, the result is not X plus Y.  That is, I had long known that A and B would incur all kinds of additional expenses that would reduce X plus Y considerably: higher taxes, a second car, extra clothing, dining out, and that monstrous thing called day-care.  I had also known -- though this is seldom discussed -- that X would be a drag on Y's increase, and Y on X's increase, due to lost opportunities for overtime, for the procuring of a second job, and for seizing a better job somewhere else; not to mention the lost personal incentive to earn more.

     What I had not counted on was the purely human: that when a man and a woman both work full-time outside of the home, their relationship to one another, to the home, and to the money they earn must, absent a conscious determination otherwise, be fundamentally altered.  Now I can't speak with complete confidence about this; I am more or less wondering aloud.  Does what is called "The Tragedy of the Commons" apply, when no one in particular is responsible for the earning of the money, and no one in particular is responsible for stretching that money, managing it, spending it wisely for the sake of the family?  If no one in particular is responsible for that latter role, does that job actually get done?  Sometimes yes; often no -- we know plenty of double-income families who do not take care of their economic gardens, so to speak, and who live more expensive and also more slovenly lives than do single-income families (for example, the majority of homeschooling families).  Governor Bradford of Plymouth noted that even among his fellow Christians, the fallback position was to do as little work as possible tending land held in common, while deriving from it as much as they reasonably could; his response was to decry the utopias of some (he has in mind Plato's Republic), and to assign to each family their own land to work.  In other words, if no one in particular is responsible for either earning or managing / spending, then a couple may engage in behavior that rewards the individual in the short term, while hurting the family in the long term.  Why should I work my tail off, when my husband or wife has settled into a comfortable position?  Or why should I watch what I spend, when my husband or wife is blowing over a hundred dollars a week on lunch? 

     It is common, and I think misleading, to compare the double-income family of our day with the pattern of family economics that had been the rule until the industrial revolution.  Take for example a farmer and his wife and children.  All of them, unless they want to starve, will be working all the time for the good of the family -- but they will be working at some pretty strictly delineated jobs.  The man is behind the plow; the woman is in the vegetable garden; the bigger children are baling hay; the smaller children are weeding the garden or gathering berries and nuts.  An enterprise such as this is cooperative, not collective; the Tragedy of the Commons does not at all apply.  If the children are irresponsible, the farm fails; if the wife is irresponsible, the farm fails; if the husband is irresponsible, the farm fails; and it fails in the short term as well as in the long term.  There won't be eggs for breakfast, because the wife didn't tend to the chickens, or the husband didn't mend the coop.  The third field won't get plowed this year, because the husband didn't tend the horses properly.  The children look rickety this winter, because the wife didn't put up jars of fruits and vegetables.

     I wonder too about the supposition that the sex of A and B is of no import whatsoever.  Is that not also a subtle reduction of human complexity to the mechanical and mathematical?  Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen?

Comments

[Dan Janeiro]

My wife, when asked her opinion on this, said that its not surprising that they don't form a budget...they assume, well, both of us work, there will be plenty of money. I think unspoken in my wife's comment is the belief that having what we think is more than enough is damaging for the virtues that would actually allow that abundance to be effectively and wisely managed. To use Dr. Esolen's farmer example, if they don't work together, they will starve. The consequences are both dire and immediate. But for the modern couple...starvation is what people in third world countries do, and the slow breakdown of a marriage, and the waste of time, resource and care on trivialities goes unnoticed until you're in court haggling over who gets the newer car.
My wife and I get by on one income, (mine) now that our little one has arrived, and I work as a teacher at a Catholic school. I'm certainly no where near a 6 digit income. My wife handles the budget and is charged with keeping our intake more than our expense. We use no credit cards (we both just use debit) so we are sure that the money we spend is actually there to spend. We have decided not to become serfs of the local bank. We did not decide on this division of labor consciously--it seemed natural, (or at least inevitable, if we were going to make things work) though our personal proclivities certainly played a part. We have one car, 27k in student loans, and have a small condo that is big enough for two. But I tell the kids I teach that one day when they look to find a house, that they should buy one that is one room too small. That way, everyone gets to know each other a lot better.

I would say that though X plus Y does not equal the sum of X and Y in a marriage,the marriage that unites A and B can surely make more of A than when A was alone. Likewise with B. I'd rather get more out of myself than out of my paycheck, anyways.

And besides thrift is romantic, even considering some of the worry. My wife and I must talk to each other. Quite nice, that. And we agree that when she splurges on something beautiful for herself (if such rare and prudent expenditures can be called splurges), she knows that I also will get to spend an equal amount on something (usually an antique book--a hobby of mine). and so we are both restrained, participate in the interests of the other, and as Frost put it, "get a little color and music out of life" along the way.

[Karen]

Single income families work because women get used to never having any time or pleasures of their own. The money is his and the power is his and therefore all the leisure and pleasure is his.

In the couple in the post, they were irresponsible. Both of them. Mr. Esolen, as his is pattern, attributes all the consumer debt to the wife with no evidence supporting his opinion, just his typical assertion that women are stupid and need the firm hand of a male to control us.

[Rob G]

Interesting, to say the least, to compare Mr. Janiero's comment with Karen's. Almost makes one wonder if they read the same post.

[Gina M. Danaher]

Every time I read anything by Mr. Esolen I want to copy and paste it to my Facebook profile for friends and family to read, but I don't believe it is possible. I could just suggest that they visit this site, but sometimes you just have to spoon feed people. This commentary correlated nicely with a much simpler comment I made on Facebook which I will post here since I cannot take liberties in the other direction.

Bad Ideas Have Consequences
Saturday, August 8, 2009 at 9:09am | Edit Note | Delete

Like a piece of sand irritating an oyster, I have had recurring thoughts of the difficulty of young married adults in today's America, living and raising children on a single income. There are many reasons for this. However, it cannot be denied that since the feminists and their misogynist instigators convinced women that being at home with children is NOT a respectable career, and to stay in the workplace instead of coming home to raise the children, those two- income careers have made it difficult for single-income families to keep up. This then has forced those who want to be home to work outside the home just to survive. It's a vicious cycle that has had serious consequences for the last two generations and I am convinced that almost all of the problems being debated politically are the result of two neglected generations. I need to write more on this because I can't stop thinking about how this angle of the debate IS the elephant in the room

[Fr. Bill]

Janiero: My wife and I get by on one income, (mine) now that our little one has arrived .... My wife handles the budget and is charged with keeping our intake more than our expense. ... We did not decide on this division of labor consciously--it seemed natural, (or at least inevitable, if we were going to make things work) though our personal proclivities certainly played a part.

This reminded me of Chesterton's observation in Orthodoxy, Ch. 6:

In many a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money. The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey.But it must be strictly understood that the king has captured the honey in some heroic wars.

Mr. Janiero is on to something here, what Chesteron observed, viz. that in a one-income family earned by the husband in his heroic wars in the public square, it is the wife in the inner domains who has chief responsibility for deploying that income in the inner domains of the marriage. It not only seems natural for her to manage the budget, her budgetary responsibility actually exploits natural proclivities in women to guard the hearth and its resources to secure stability and security for the private domain over which she rules.

In my extended family, it is the wives who manage the income of the one-income families, and none of them have proven profligate or irresponsible. Anecdotal accounts to the contrary from other families show nothing more than that the sinful Adamic nature extends to women as well as men. Chesterton's witty observation, evinced by Mr. Janiero's report, points to a pattern that emerges from the nature of the man and the woman as God originally designed them and their relationship to one another.

[Diane]

"Does what is called 'The Tragedy of the Commons' apply, when no one in particular is responsible for the earning of the money, and no one in particular is responsible for stretching that money, managing it, spending it wisely for the sake of the family? If no one in particular is responsible for that latter role, does that job actually get done?"

This reminded me of what results when three older siblings are tasked as a group to "mind" their baby brother.

"I wonder too about the supposition that the sex of A and B is of no import whatsoever. Is that not also a subtle reduction of human complexity to the mechanical and mathematical?"

One has only to watch a few minutes of American Idol to realize that our culture is starved for the significance of the individual. We are driven to be very small frogs in a vast ocean, having abandoned those smaller puddles of family and community where we could have been much, much larger.

With regard to the sexes, God's plan (which assigns the hierarchy of family responsibilities) is far more freeing and functional than our alternate rule of the stronger, smarter, or last man/woman standing.

[Susan Peterson]

My family has moved through one income and two incomes, from living at about half the federal poverty level to an income similar to that of the people in the little story Mr. Esolen tells.
At various times one or the other of us has paid the bills. We are not so spendthrift as the people in his story, nor are we as prudent as we should be. We were very frugal, out of necessity when we were poor, and we could hardly get into much debt as no one would lend us money. We were good at thrift in penury, not so good at thrift when we have some resources.

I am afraid that I cannot say that the one earner situation was as idyllic as Mr. Esolen portrays it. I think it could be, if each person's role were respected, but this is not really what I experienced. The truth is each of us was carrying a very very heavy load but neither of us had any insight into the difficulties the other faced. I was having a baby every 17-22 months (we have 9) and he was working 6 days a week, 10, 11, even 12 hour days in hot restaurant kitchens. There was no family around to help out. In the stress there were arguments about where the used tricycles from GoodWill would be stored which were decided based on who earned the two or three bucks that they cost, rather than on who had to put them there and take them out again several times a day.

It is too bad, but I have had more respect in the relationship since I started to earn money outside the home. I never experienced what Karen is talking about, since my husband never spent much money on himself and in fact had next to no leisure time. She may well have experienced this, though. My sister did. She didn't have a new dress for 20 years and had to beg for grocery money; she never had her name on a joint checking account. Her husband wore $800 suits. Not many, on his car salesman's income of course. He justified this as necessary for a salesman. The heat was turned down when he left to save money and turned back up when he came home. He had nice cars and she had junkers that broke down going 5 miles to the grocery store in the winter with little kids in the car.

Money is power in a relationship. If the husband does not love his wife as he loves his own flesh,or, at least, strive to do so, that power can be used in incredibly painful and destructive ways. Many women do have reasons to be resentful. You shouldn't be surprised when your paeons to the traditional family occasionally provoke a comment like Karen's.

So, men, if you wife is home with your children, which is best for them, please, above all, show her respect and value her job. Even if the house gets messy, value her care of the children. I think respect is the issue much more than things.

Susan Peterson

[David Gray.]

>Many women do have reasons to be resentful.

In a fallen world this is unsurprising nor is it limited to women, shockingly enough...

[Rob G]

It's important to note that the current tax structure works against the viability of single income families. Also, with the rise of feminism and "equal pay for equal work" the idea of the family wage was done away with. We have gone from 'permitting' women to work outside the home should they choose to, to a situation where it is expected, and in many cases financially required, to the detriment of the family.

As usual, liberalism has produced results opposite to its stated intent.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Rob G.: "As usual, liberalism has produced results opposite to its stated intent."

True, dat.

[William M. Klimon]

In a recent issue of First Things, the superb Spengler, now confessed to the world as Daniel P. Goldman

David P. Goldman