From Darwin to Hitler - The conclusion II

The author of this book completed his study by the following words:

"It would be foolish to blame Darwinism for the Holocaust, as though Darwinism leads logically to the Holocaust. Many Darwinist drew quite different conclusions from Darwinism for ethics and social thought than did Hitler. Eugenics and scientific racism were prominent in scholarly circles in many European countries and also in the United States, but obviously in none of them did Darwinism lead to the Holocaust. It did lead, however, to the compulsory sterilization of hundreds of thousands in the United States, Sweden, and other countries in the mid-twentieth century. As result of the resurgence of eugenics in the later twentieth century. China passed the Maternal and Infant Health Law, which required premarital health exams and strongly encouraged sterilization for those deemed unfit to reproduce. Darwinism also spawned debate on euthanasia and infanticide, and even though these are still illegal in most countries (except Netherlands), they are practiced more widely than many suspect.

To deny the influence of Darwinism on Hitler would also be foolish, especially since almost all scholars of Nazism acknowledge it. The importance of social Darwinist discourse not only for Hitler, but also for those cooperating with Hitler's genocidal program. Without Darwinism, especially social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world's greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy. Darwinism succeeded in turning morality on its head."

Men often are salves of their own thinking, be aware of what of kind thing you possess, for the truth shall set you free, but the false, will bring damage to yourself, bot also to people around you.

Isn't it a great warnings for Sociologists and Sociology students?

The conclusion: From Darwin to Hilter

I came to the conclusion of this book. I have been reading this wonderful book through Jun holiday. It is so convincing and insightful that I think every student who studies Sociology, Political Science and other related social science should know:

"Since its advent in the mid-nineteenth century Darwinism has stirred up debate about many questions touching the very heart of human beings. Not least among these is: How should we live? While many philosophers and theologians rules this question outside the purview of science, most prominent advocates of Darwinian theory believed Darwinism had far-reaching ramifications for ethics and morality.

If morality was built on social instincts that changes over evolutionary time, then morality must be relative to the conditions of life at any given time. Darwinism- together with other forms of historicist ascendant in the nineteenth century- thus contributed to the rise of moral relativism.

But, interestingly, many Darwinists were not willing to live with complete more relativism. They still retained one fixed point of reference- the process of evolution itself. Since morality arose through evolution, they argued that the purpose of morality is to advance the evolutionary process.

But, of course, Darwinism provided no basis to consider some form of morality better than any other, or for that matter, it gave no reason to think that morality was better in any real sense than immorality. Yet most used morally charged language quite freely, apparently oblivious to the contradiction this entailed.

Those Darwinists who made the evolutionary process the new criteria for morality radically altered the way that people thought about morality. Since they generally affirmed that good health and intelligence were key factors in the upward march of evolution, improving physical vitality and mental prowess-especially of future generations- became the highest moral value. The great sin was to contribute in some way to the decline of physical life or intellectual ability.

While Christian morality demands a relationship of love toward God and one's neighbors, which involves self-sacrifice, evolutionary ethics focused on breeding better humans, even if it meant sacrificing other people in the process.

This new "Morality" has shifted the very foundation of society. Darwinism also argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The significance of
individuals life did not seem all that great considering the mass death brought on by the Darwinian struggle for existence. Multitudes necessarily died before reproducing, and this was the key to evolutionary process.

Darwinism also stressed on biological inequality, since evolution could not occur without significant variation. Humans were no exception, so egalitarianism must be misguided.

These views on human inequality, the primacy of evolutionary progress and the beneficence of death in furthering that process produced a world view that devalued human life.

Many used Darwinism arguments to assign some humans to the category of "inferior" or degenerate. There were generally two main categories of people "inferior": The handicapped and non European races. Since they were "inferior", and since the death of the less fit in the struggle for existence will result in biological improvement, why not help evolution along by getting rid of the "inferior"

....."
Now I am sure you see the picture, and no wonder that Hilter acted in such determined manner, rather in delusion,it is no wonder that Holocaust happened in such calm and systematic ways.

Men are often the salve of what they believe. Find the truth, that truth shalt set you free.

A Mafia's consciousness

I was listening BBC Outlook programme on the way to fetch my children today. It was interview with the author of book “A tough guy- the insider story of Mafia”.

The guy, I supposed he was “tough guy” himself, was recalling his life as a member of criminal robbery group, how he was finally caught and stayed behind the bar for 12 years, and miraculously his life was changed by books.

One part, he was asked to copy with the cops to give the names of his group members. His reply was very interesting:

“No one had forced me into the crime, it was my own choice, and therefore, I thought it is justified to bear some degree of punishment. I don’t think it is right to give out others in order to get light sentence for myself. …Others may disagree with me, but this is part of me, my principle.”

After being put in jail, he finally had to think about his life, what he had done, it was waking experience. I daresay it was time of self recollecting and soul searching. At that time, he remembered one of his friends had Bible verse written all over the body, so one day he called this friend, “Please give me some books.”

The friends sent him some books. At first, he stumbled over the words, he then made a vocabulary list, to wrote down all the words he didn’t know and their meaning.

After that, the reading journey started, he had been reading 17-18 hours per day for last seven years in jail.

Today, he says in BBC “I am different person now, I don’t crave for power and money. I have more peace and meaning of life.”

“A tough guy” I don’t know what the story he was telling in this book. But surely a Mafia’s consciousness and books have transformed him.

Moral ethics---the origin

---the origin of moral ethics---

The natural disaster has brought much re-evaluation of traditional moral ethics in China. The act of particular Chinese teacher of abandoned his students as the quake stuck the school and his subsequent "public justification" has drawn an outrage
crying among Chinese, yet, there are a group of people loudly cheer for him, pointing that his action was nothing but a "natural instinct" that everyone might as well do at such a situation.

I recalled not so long ago, I watched a documentary on LA' earthquake in early 80s. The similar natural disaster, however, till today, those selfless, risk their own lives to save others, and help victims, are remembered and praised by many American people.

What happen to China, which has long traditional high moral standard, had always put collective benefit above individual good?

Are there any moral ethics being treasured even by mass majority?

These days, I am reading "From Darwin to Hitler" by Richard Weikart.

One of commentators Dr. Richard Evans said poignantly:

"This outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First of World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and "racial hygiene."

.....
He demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibition, and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientist, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power

I now see the same danger in China, people, who are intellectuals, strive to gain the political power but with amoral mindset, in various ways promoting their personal agenda.

The First World War had left the chilly wake-up call to the western world. What will happen to China?

Let us look at the origin of moral ethics, what use of moral ethics in our society?

Moral ethics has been one of unique characteristics of human beings. For those who believe in God, it is easy to understand that God has put conscious into everyone heart. The moral living is not only required by God but also the inner driven force for anyone who wants to have a peaceful and joyful life.

Even for Darwin, the moral issue was one of hardest difficulties to justify his "evolutionary theory". For Darwin, the origin of morality was not trivial side issue, but a key question he had to confront if his theory of human evolution were to be plausible.

The final suggestion he gave was that the human moral sense had arisen through the combined activity of social instincts and rationality.

Darwin explained that human social instincts and group selection had let quite naturally to the Golden Rules - Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you. There is no need for divine intervention.

He pointed out that other animals live in societies and cooperate, and the social instinct producing this cooperative behavior is heritable.

In human society, these social instincts have developed further than in most other species, and expanded human cognitive abilities, produced what we called "Morality"

What does Morality do to human society?

It is poignant to note that both camps all acknowledge the importance of morality. For God fearing people, that is basic requirement to be morally upright.

For Darwinist, they regarded ethics and morality as the products of evolution., they considered all morality relative to the evolutionary stage of development and also relative to its ability to preserve the species.

That is where the biggest weakness Darwinist evolution theory lies.

Look at our today's society, morality and ethics have been trodden to the very base.

Are we able to see any "evolutionary development" in moral and ethic perspective?

God said in 2Timothy 3:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come, For men shall be lovers of their own selves (as Fai Run Run), covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient, unthankful, uhholy. Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good. Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; .....

We have to be humble to ask divine inspiring to restore our moral consciousness and to pray for God's mercy and grace.
One has to be humble to ask divine inspiring to restore one's moral consciousness and to pray for God's mercy and grace.

"From Darwin To Hitler"

Richard Weikart has written this excellent book, in which allows us to see the underlined link of ideas to social action. Weber believes that the power of idea can direct the path of interest, thus the action, finally lead to dramatic social movement, as from Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism to the formation the modern capitalist society.

In this book, Weikart shows us how the idea of Darwinism in "origin of Species" and "evolution of natural selection" leads to eugenic ideology, finally leads to Holocaust.

Once more, we are reminded:

"sowing an idea, reaping an action;
sowing an action, reaping an habit;
sowing an habit, reaping a character;
sowing a character, reaping a destiny."

BOOK REVIEW

“Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home”
By Pamela Stone
2007 University of California Press

Growing numbers of women from all social and racial-ethnical groups now combine motherhood with paid employment, and fewer of them quit work for any prolonged period while their children are young (Spain& Bianchi, 1996). This has been seen as a revolutionary phenomenon, although as Hochschild pointed out, a “Stalled revolution” given little corresponding changes on culturally and social constructed gender norms and expectations for women as well as in corporate and institutional changes in structural support for these women (Hochschild 1989, 1997)

Juggling between “shifts” and within “time binds”, these women, especially working mothers find themselves shouldering tri-dimensional demands at work and home with both childcare and elder care. Although “work and life balance” has being promoted as being among key strategic corporate policies, even at the national level, this has been more a bland slogan than a realistic solution. (Hochschild 1996).

A recent Pew Research Center (2007) survey concluded
“In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers. This trend holds both for mothers who have such jobs and those who don't.”

Stone was puzzled, especially by recent trends of well-educated, elite career women quitting their careers and heading home to be stay-at-home mums. These groups of high educated and high achieving women were mostly in professional and managerial positions with high degrees of autonomy; who would appear to have choices to be better “work and life balanced”. Unlike the traditionalist explanation often portrayed in the media, Stone found that these former professional women, now at home moms, quit only as a last resort for the reasons mostly of work, not of family as the paramount and deciding factors. Instead of having choices, the study revealed, they were facing a choice gap, arising from a double bind created primarily by the conditions of work in the gilded cages of elite professions.

Stone was among the first to conduct such a series of extensive in-depth interviews of 54 women in this category to gain an insightful understanding of the reasons for their quitting the workforce. The study includes documenting the nature of their lives at home, and their plans for the future in order to better understand the meaning of their actions for the women themselves and their families, the workplace and society.

The women in Stone’s study were well educated, (most hold MBA degrees), had a high status professional career and at least 10 years working experience, were married with children and left their career to be at home. Their decisions of homeward bound were partly the financial security (provided by their husband’s above average income). They averaged two children at the time of quitting. For comparative purposes, Stone divided these women into two age groups, 30 to 40 (n=25) and 41 and above (n=29).

According to Stone, 40 percent of women in this study quit work when they had only one child, while 60 percent of women (33) who did return to work after their first child, three-quarters did so on a full-time basis and the rest, part-time. Among them, 80 percent continued to work past their second child’s infancy, and half continued until their younger child was school-age, finally dropping out when their older child was between 6 and 15 years old and their second 5 to 11. Over the course of their entire work lives prior to quitting, two-thirds of the retuning working mothers worked on a part-time schedule at some point of time. Stone discovered that older women were more likely to have worked part-time than younger women. This was not however because of the preference of younger women but rather of their inability to obtain a reduced-hours schedule. Stone found that younger women had fewer options than their older, more experienced counterparts.

There were also discrepancies between formal policies (which appeared to be family friendly or promote work and life balance) and the informal practices that make up organizational culture. Many of these women found while it was easy to negotiate prolonged maternity leave, they found themselves upon their return to work in uncharted, often hostile territory, no longer able to rely on the formal policies; and were marginalized, stigmatized and negatively reinforced for trying to hold on to their careers after becoming mothers. The failure to achieve or obtain sustainable flexible work arrangement was the main reason for quitting. This finding is consistent with Hochschild (1996)’s finding that intensified global competition had forced many companies to focus on bottom lines and to become more demanding in the workplace.

Many of them also concluded that gender expectations and social norms play important roles in the mindset of top managements, a majority of whom being male with stay-at-home wives. The Patriarchal ideal family notion (Parsons 1955) in fact reinforced the women’s decisions of quitting, as demonstrated by the weak efforts of these women’s bosses in trying to keep them; most of them instead “congratulating” them for “finally” making up their mind (of quitting).
Though being a privileged elite group, these women constantly had to make double trades-offs: kids versus careers and their own careers versus their husbands’. Their apparent “choices” turn out to be “forced choices” and “illusion of choices”. Stone further suggested that the “choices” rhetoric was a status symbol reflecting their husbands’ career success, as well as a second wave of feminism (all about choices), and concluded that this is not a return to traditionalism.

It is not women who are open to nature’s calling; rather it is the workplace, stuck in an anachronistic time warp that ignores the reality of the lives of high-achieving women. What we are seeing in these women’s experience by virtue of their leaving and telling the tale - the cost of these workplace and nature of the cost, which are personal and professional, and ultimately, societal and economic.

Stone further reviewed the “half full and half empty” reality of the lives of these women after their quitting. While many of them spoke of improved quality of life, less stress, better engaged social and family lives, they also expressed loss of identity, loss of status and bonding with business associates resulting in some degree of isolation. Some lamented the devaluation process from work to home, but took it as “leap of faith”; others found renewed enthusiasm and redirected their passion to their motherhood and other community services as a second career. Though being seen as going back to the “traditional role”, these mothers by no means resembled their own mothers’ motherhood experience. Today’s intensified motherhood has pushed the mother’s work to be more instrumental and goal orientated. These mothers are involved in their children’s extracurricular activities on top of their academic and emotional development while planning and overseeing the entire domestic planning and operations. In doing this, they appeared to be realizing and transferring their professional skills and training into their new mothering and domestic spheres.

Speaking of the future, though many of them expressed plans to re-enter the workplace, these wishes were mixed with much uncertainty; with many stating that they would switch careers. Strikingly, most of the women who had a sense of which new fields they wanted to enter planned to go into teaching and education, with most of remainder were undecided. It shows that once home, these women were willing to forego the considerable investments they made in their prior career and to walk away from the considerable success they’d enjoyed in order to begin anew on careers that they felt would be more compatible with their families and their changing values. This achievement of compatibility primarily was via traditionally female-dominated professions. The burden of accommodation is borne exclusively by women themselves.

Stone’s study helps fill a void, given the lack of prior coverage and studies in this one, very interesting area of research on women and family. She insightfully uncovers the reality in women’s lives under the double whims of work and family demands. Her study shows it was rather more due to the workplace than the motherhood call that caused these high achievement women to give up their careers and head home. It is the high time that companies stop paying lip service about creating family-friendly and flexible arrangements and stop marginalizing and victimizing married women? However, without changes in the social construct, gender nurture and institutionalized family support, it remains challenging for improvements in the women’s situation to be ever achieved.

The possible limitation of Stone’s study is the lack of comparative data to understand other similarly qualified married women who continue working. There is also missing some critical statistical studies to determine a demographic picture to better understand to what extent women, particularly well-educated women, are heading home. Finally, there may be scope also to do further comparative studies delineated by countries, comparing how these women fare in Western cultures and settings vis-à-vis in Eastern cultures and settings.

REFERENCE

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1989. The second shift. New York: Viking.
-------. 1997. Time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work. New York: Metropolitan Books.
------- 1996. The emotional geographic of work and family life in “Gender relationship in public and private” eds. Lydia Morris & E Staina Lyon. St. Martin’s Press LLC.
Parsons, Talcott, and Robert F. Bales. 1955. Family, socialization and interactions process. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Pew Research Centre .2007. “Few mother prefer to full time work”
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/536/working-womensearch Centre
Spain, D.; & Bianchi, S.M. 1996. Balancing act: Motherhood, marriage and employment among American women. New York. Russell Sage Foundation

Women in power

An interesting article in today's The Straits Times:

Jan 7, 2008
WOMEN IN POWER
A familial pattern
By Kerry Howley
WASHINGTON - SOME women, even progressive ones, are surely celebrating Mrs Hillary Clinton's third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
Those of us who think 43 male presidents in a row is quite enough, thank you, still sometimes question whether a woman whose greatest political move was her marriage deserves to be the first woman in the White House.

But while there are plenty of reasons not to vote for Mrs Clinton (as an anti-war libertarian, I could happily list them for you at length), her marital journey to power is not one of them. The uncomfortable truth is that political nepotism has often served feminism's cause well.

In 1924, Miriam Ferguson, a Texas Democrat known as Ma, became the first woman elected to a full term as a governor. Her husband, James Edward Ferguson, had been elected, impeached and removed from the same office.

Mrs Ferguson ran on a platform of 'two governors for the price of one' - a package that included a convicted extortionist and an untested woman.

Eight decades later, the first woman who is a serious contender for the presidential nomination of one of the two major political parties in the United States is, once again, a woman who ascended to office on the back of her impeached husband.

Like it or not, the road to female advancement often begins at the altar. History books are thick with examples of women who broke political barriers because their family connections afforded them the opportunity.

If you've ever wondered why India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan and the Philippines seem readier to elect women than does the US, here's your answer: Societies that value a candidate's family affiliation, and thus have a history of nepotistic succession, are often open to female leadership so long as it bears the right brand.

Ms Benazir Bhutto, Mrs Indira Gandhi and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, among many others, slashed through gender barriers on the strength of their family names.

In the US, where a recent poll found 14 per cent of people admitting they would not vote for a woman, nepotistic advancement for women in politics was most common in the early 20th century. As the feminist political scientist Jo Freeman has pointed out, six of the first 14 women elected to Congress were widows of incumbents. Three more were the daughters of politicians.

The first three women to serve full Senate terms all succeeded their husbands. Only with the 1978 election of Nancy Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican, did a woman finally achieve a full Senate term without first following her husband into office. (Mrs Kassebaum is the daughter of ex-Kansas governor Alf Landon.)

To some voters, Mrs Clinton's husband provides reassurance that the 'calculating' senator from New York will not degenerate into a feminine hysteric if she is elected to the White House. Yet she still has to work overtime to prove herself non-threatening. She clings to the political centre like a life raft and rarely ventures from the shallow waters of establishment predictability.

Social psychologists have found that women in leadership roles are typically seen as either warm, likeable and incompetent, or cold, distant and competent.

To be a strong, competent woman is to be something culturally unattractive, which probably says something about why few American women even aspire to political office.

Worldwide, even popular female politicians - Mrs Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Golda Meir, Dr Angela Merkel - are slapped with the moniker 'iron lady'.

Granted, women who rely on their last names to ascend to power are not very likely to pursue explicitly feminist policies. They may even be less likely to do so, in order to seem worthy of office.

But their chief function to the cause is outside of policy. By their very existence, these women attack the norms and assumptions that bar other women from ascending to power on their own.

Women like Lindy Boggs of Louisiana, who lost her husband in a plane crash in 1972 and then assumed his vacant office in the House of Representatives, showed us they could lead as well as their husbands did - even if they never would have been given the chance otherwise.

The best way to convince voters that women leaders are fully human - likeable and competent at times, unlikeable and incompetent at others - is to fill the world with more of them.

No mother wants to tell her daughter she can aspire to be president only if she snags the most gifted politician of her generation.

But Mrs Clinton's rise to power, unsettling as it is, follows a time-tested pattern for the breaking of gender barriers.


The writer is a senior editor at Reason magazine.


Copyright: New York Times Syndicate

Book review on “Time Bind” – when work becomes home and home becomes work

By Arlie Russell Hochschild
Call No:HQ536 H685

After “second shift”, where Hochschild observed the working mother had her first shift at work, second shift at home, she conducted an intensive research on one of Fortune 500 companies, Amerco, a highly profitable, innovative company with reputation of “family friendly”, on its “work and life” balance programme.

The “work/life balance” polices the company offered were rather standard:

Flexible work hour arrangement
Flexible place
Part time
Share job
Maternity leave and Father’s maternity leave

Her research results were surprising. Though it was appeared that all the right policies were in place, top management also full hearted supported the scheme, there were not many people to make use of these polices. The program of work/life balance did not achieve its goal to balance their employees'work and life.

For various reasons:

1. One factor contributed the failure of program could be the company hierarchy: Top management, who had power and authority to engineer a new family-friendly work culture, may not have deep interest in doing so, in any way, it is not the chief interest of a company; the middle management who were advocated of family friendly polices, have strong interest but little power to implement; Even if the workers who could have benefited from such programs had demanded them, the resistance from their supervisors and head of department would still have stymied their efforts.
2. What about the working parents, did they fight for their “right?”

• 1) For men, there were only two father had ever applied and been granted to father’s maternity leave. The traditional mindset was rooted. One worker even complained that “why those are polices only open to working mothers, we, from traditional family, without additional income, will be prejudiced.”


• 2) For women, Part time job was the most utilized polices for minority mothers with young children.


• 3) For many women, however, they prefer work to home; “women’s uneasy love affair with capitalism; They fear losing their places at work, and having such a place has become a source of security, pride and a powerful sense of being valued


• 4) The intensified competition with globalization made people unsecured for their job. The benefits of these polices erode by the fear of demotion and loss of job.

3. These polices were not flexible to be applied, especially when child sick or other families related emergencies occurred.

The conclusion:

“People generally have the urge to spend more time on what they value most and on what they are most valued for. This tendency may help explain the historic decline in time devoted to private social relations, a decline that has taken on a distinctive cultural form at Amerco. The valued realm of work is registering its gains in part by incorporating the best aspects of home. The devalued realm, the home, is meanwhile taking on what were once considered the most alienating attributes of work. However one explains the failure of Amerco to create a good program of work-family balance, though, the fact is that in a cultural contest between work and home, working parents are voting with their feet, and the working place is winning.”

The consequences when “work becomes home and home becomes work”
1. Time bind, the evading of work to home, that leads to more families break down,
2. Children left alone, suffer from emotional asceticism. A study of nearly five thousand eighth-graders and their parents found that children who were home alone for eleven or more hours a week were three times more likely than other children to abuse alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana. This was as true for upper-class as for working – class children . Research on adults who had been left home alone as children suggested that they run a far high risk a “developing substantial fear responses- recurring nightmares, fear of noises, fear of dark, fear for personal safety.”


After reading the book, we can see, the corporate world, including global economic environment has become a powerful time sucking apparatus sucking every family, every parent’s time away from home, from their children and loved one.

Can work and life balance really exist? If the fundamental economic superstructure does not change, can any individual, any company, and any nation escape from this “time sucking apparatus”? I doubt so, the individual parent will say, I need money to give my children better living condition, better education; the company will say, we need making profit to stay competitive in order to survive, so that we can be countable to shareholders; the nation will say, we need extra economic active workforce to keep our nation GDP growing so that we can provide more benefits to the people.

The reality behind all these economic excuses is that there is an unintended consequence with every stage of economic advancement, which is of great social cost, It will be too painful for family, too costly for company and too great for a nation to pay. It is always to easier to prevent than to heal. The action needed is NOW by every conscious parent, every social responsible corporate and every long term vision the nation. If not, when these social disasters transfer into economic disasters, it will be too later.

Book review on "The two income trap"

by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren

This book is " a startling account of the elusiveness of American Dream", the subtitle of this book "why middle class parents are going broke?"

Remembering we saw the film "our house we live" talking about institutionalized discrimination, lies accumulation of wealth of the Whites and disaccumulation of the colors. The cruel reality revealed in this book, even the middle-class White families with children, are under institutionalization stress and undergoing more bankruptcies even more than before.

What are the "Two income traps":

Comparing with one generation ago, when the single income families were as norm of society, today, two income families are overtaken as majority. However, the discretionary income of a single income family a generation ago is more than two income family today. How come? where did all the money go? the answer is:

- over-consumerism, over bidding for better housing, education, health insurance, higher taxes etc.( if you have watched the above movie, you will understand why American families are willing to/ even forced to pay "premium" price for certain neighbourhood, certain school. It is all part of parcels in institutionalized discrimination, however, the side effects of it has spilled over to the Whites middle class as well)
- the risk of the two income family in financial terms are higher than single income family. The single income family on the other hand has a safety net, is relatively well protected from uncertainty and emergency, like divorce, or lose of job.

Therefore, in last ten years, many middle class two income parents have filed bankruptcy. the number increased was 662%


- Children from these two income families will be the first victims when the family went through bankruptcy
- The price for family, especially for children, seems to be too expensive, many have to make life choice, like a commercial one, simply "cannot afford", many have choice not to have children.

We see here an ironic situation, while two income certainly bring in more money than one income, yet, the collective pressure on family has causing the two income families broke.

Can we do something about it? At the end of book, She states;" So long as the costs of preschool remains a family's responsibility rather than a public duty, parents will continue to struggle. So long as colleges can get away with doubling tuition every generation to pay for sports terms and armies of new administrators, families will be stretched even further, and so long the government refuses to impose some basic interest rate regulations, credit card companies and mortgage lenders will continue to drain tens of millions of dollars out of the pockets of middle class families." "Politicians who have taken millions of dollars to protect the giant bands will pointedly ignore the book while they would loudly reaffirm that they are "pro-family". And there will be no shortage of people who will continue to denounce the financially unlucky as more failures."

What we will lost, if the state, government and institutions do not act collectively, American dream will soon smashes,

The book was published in 2003, call no. HQ 536 W287
Singaporen, are we better than it?