Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer is a novel that is tough to review without spoiling. I wouldn’t say that it is an essential read, but I wanted to clip and save a few passages. Here they are…
Parenthood:
[child talking to an adult] “Babies kick you from the inside, and then they come out and kick you some more.” “It’s been my experience,” Julia said, her hand moving to her belly. “I read it in one of my parents’ parenting books.” “Why on earth do you read those?” “To try to understand them.”
Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like “Reading in bed,” and “Giving a bath,” and “Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.” Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn’t them. It’s cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.
On Jews in America:
But instead of driving, Irv turned to press the point from which he’d strayed: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.”
Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.
On Israel:
All Tamir wanted to talk about was money—the average Israeli income, the size of his own easy fortune, the unrivaled quality of life in that fingernail clipping of oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies.
A child on his home life:
Sam knew that everything would collapse, he just didn’t know exactly how or when. His parents were going to get divorced and ultimately hate each other and spread destruction like that Japanese reactor. That much was clear, if not to them. He tried not to notice their lives, but it was impossible to ignore how often his dad fell asleep in front of the absence of news, how often his mom retreated into pruning the trees of her architectural models, how his dad started serving dessert every night, how his mom told Argus she “needed space” whenever he licked her, how devoted his mom had become to the Travel section, how his dad’s search history was all real estate sites, how his mom would put Benjy on her lap whenever his dad was in the room, the violence with which his dad began to hate spoiled athletes who don’t even try, how his mom gave three thousand dollars to the fall NPR drive, how his dad bought a Vespa in retaliation, the end of appetizers in restaurants, the end of the third bedtime story for Benjy, the end of eye contact.
[This is not a novel about divorce litigation. Foer describes a woman divorcing her husband in the winner-take-all jurisdiction of the District of Columbia but without striving to be the winner.]
A rich guy on his impending divorce:
“You’re right. We’re resolutely young. If we were seventy it would be different. Maybe even if we were sixty or fifty. Maybe then I’d say, This is who I am. This is my lot. But I’m forty-four. A huge portion of my life hasn’t happened. And the same is true for Jennifer. We realized we would be happier living other lives. That’s a good thing. Certainly better than pretending, or repressing, or just being so consumed with the responsibility of playing a part that you never question if it’s the part you would choose. I’m still young, Julia, and I want to choose happiness.” “Happiness?” “Happiness.” “Whose happiness?” “My happiness. Jennifer’s, too. Our happiness, but separately.” “While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.” “Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn’t with me.” “Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?” “In fact, under her French tutor.” “Holy shit,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she’d intended. “I don’t know why you’re having this reaction to good news.” “She doesn’t even speak French.” “And now we know why.”
Again, there is no litigation. This couple is together. Then they are divorced. (The French tutor idea is not original to Foer; a wife having sex with her language tutor instead of learning the language is in the 2000 remake of Bedazzled.)
The book is not as antic as Everything is Illuminated.
I was often very annoyed – but not quite to the point of quitting the novel – by the dialogue from the oldest son (13), who was preternaturally neurotic and cynical. And he didn’t even feel essential to the story beyond perhaps some sort of tortured symbolic purpose.
Why would anyone have children if the only “fulfillment” consisted of changing diapers and driving them to soccer practice? Having children gives you (1) the possibility of receiving “naches” from them and (2) a shot at immortality – after you are dead, a little bit of you will live on.
For a people who are a “rounding error”, the Jews sure do show up in a lot of places (e.g. 6 of the last 4 Federal Reserve Chairmen, etc.). Jewish identity without Jewish religion (outside of Israel) is not a long term viable strategy and the non-Orthodox Jewish community of America is in process of dissolving itself. A couple of generations more and pure blooded non-Orthodox American Jews will be as rare as Patagonian Indians.
As for Tamir, the only people who don’t like to talk about money or take pride in their country are snooty, filthy rich liberal novelists – Foer’s description of Tamir says more about Foer than it does about Israelis. “oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies” – I didn’t know that Tamir was from Texas.
More dessert but no appetizers – what does this symbolize?
As for the French tutor, humans have a propensity to screw whoever is nearby. I just saw an item about some couple who is getting divorced who have a reality show about “house flipping” – Tarek and somebody. I’ve seen the show a few times – for some reason my son likes to watch it. The bleached blond wife was always showing up at construction sites in high heeled sandals. According to the gossip columns, Tarek was screwing the 23 year old nanny and Mrs. Tarek was screwing the general contractor. My cousins got a really good deal on their house because the wife of the previous owner was screwing the GC (childless marriage).
>Foer describes a woman divorcing her
>husband in the winner-take-all jurisdiction
>of the District of Columbia but without
>striving to be the winner.
@philg: I have been privy to the details of very few divorces, but the disposition of those few that I do know something about could be described as “not unfair” to either party. That is, maybe not perfect, maybe not optimum, but not really unfair to either party either. These were dual income middle class families (most wealth was equity in their still mortgaged primary residence and retirement accounts). What fraction of divorces would you estimate fall into this “not unfair” category and on what basis do you make that estimate?
Neal: All divorces are “fair” and “just” by definition, since they are decided by judges. So with the same facts you would have lifetime alimony in Florida and no alimony in Germany. Both would be “not unfair.” Given identical parental income, a child might yield $2 million in tax-free profits in Massachusetts, $200,000 in Nevada, and $50,000 in Sweden. All of those outcomes are “fair”.
See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Connecticut for how an attorney who has handled winner-take-all battles for nearly 50 years and would call the outcomes “fair”. It just so happens that there was a winner and a loser. The Super Bowl will have a winner and a loser, but that doesn’t mean it is unfair. And we would expect both teams to strive to be the winner rather than the loser.
(Separately, folks who are going to be attending the Super Bowl this year and partying might want to look at http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Texas beforehand.)
@philg: By “not unfair”, I mean that an impartial “reasonable person” (without detailed knowledge of the divorce system) would conclude that the outcome was “not unfair” to both parties. This was true for the very tiny sample of divorces I have some knowledge of, but based on your writing I am forced to conclude it is not true for all divorces. If it is easier to think about the inverse, then in what fraction of divorces would an impartial “reasonable person” conclude, “wow; that outcome was just not fair to the man, the woman, or the children” (we can omit consideration of gay and transgendered divorce for simplicity sake).
Neal, I think that your personal knowledge among your small circle of friends and family does not equip you to make a judgment on whether divorces are usually “fair” – for that you would need to do some research or read a book by someone who has, like Phil. As Phil points out, the amount that a female partner (most of the time it’s the male paying the female) could expect to gain from a divorce and/or child custody varies widely, even wildly, between states and countries, so either (depending on your POV) women are getting screwed by the divorce/child custody system in some places or else men are getting screwed in other places, but it’s impossible for such widely varying outcomes to all be “fair” unless you stretch “fair” to mean whatever the law and a judge say it is.
@Jack D: I have made no claim about the prevalence of unfair divorces beyond asserting from personal experience that “not unfair” divorces do occur. I have asked for philg’s opinion (which I do consider more expert than my own) based on a “reasonable person” definition of “unfair” rather than the standard philg used in comment #4 (divorce outcomes are “fair” by definition because they involve a judge).
Neal: What Jack considers to be a stretch is in fact how attorneys reconcile the fact that outcomes vary wildly from judge to judge or from courthouse to courthouse. “Justice” is by definition what a judge decides.
How often are outcomes “just not fair” to children, you ask? If you think that children should have two parents, either following a divorce or a one-night encounter, then nearly all decisions in winner-take-all (primary/second parent) states are “unfair” because the child’s relationship with the parent deemed secondary typically withers away (the primary parent keeps cashing the checks, though). If you think that the most important thing for a child is to have a single primary residence, and spend every other weekend (at most) “visiting” a former parent, then nearly all decisions in the 50/50 shared parenting states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska) and countries are “unfair”. Psychology research tends to support that 50/50 shared parenting is best for children, but “the science is settled” is not always a persuasive argument in politics, especially when $50+ billion in cashflow is at stake.
(See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildrenMothersFathers for references to some of the academic papers.)
Same deal on child support. Should having sex with a high-income person lead to personal wealth? An attorney in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/California makes a persuasive argument for “yes”. Citizens of Germany, Nevada, Minnesota, Texas, Sweden, etc. say “no; if you want to make real money you need to get a job or get married and stay married, at least for a while.”
Attorneys interviewed thought that marriage was a mostly meaningless concept in an era of no-fault divorce. Therefore divorce profits are a creature of the state and it doesn’t make sense to talk about what is “fair” any more than it would make sense to talk about the “fair” term of a synthetic right such as copyright or patent. Would it be “unfair” if patents lasted 19 or 21 years from filing instead of 20?
@philg: The fact that outcomes vary widely by jurisdiction is suspicious but does not by itself indicate outcomes are unfair. Consider a parent who encounters their two children arguing over a pie. The parent may split the pie giving each child a piece (fair), take the pie away so neither child gets any (fair), or give the pie to one child (unfair). Therefore, when comparing families who have experienced this event, the fact that the children experienced different outcomes does not by itself tell us that they were treated unfairly.
I have seen families make both single primary residence/visitation and 50/50 shared parenting work reasonably well (I don’t live in one of the 50/50 states you listed). While I don’t doubt the science you cite, I suspect that what is best depends a lot on the particulars of a given situation. I have met a few single mothers over the years, but none of them were on the child support gravy train.
Same deal on child support. I can imagine situations where someone acquiring wealth after having/conceiving a child with a high-income person would be unfair, and I can imagine other situations where it would not be. However, I’m not sure how important this scenario is since I suspect its prevalence is smaller than the error bars around the estimate I am asking for.
Clearly, “unfair” is the wrong word to use here so let me rephrase and refine my question: In what fraction of divorce/child support cases would an impartial “reasonable person” from outside the divorce/child support system with god-like access to the true facts of the case conclude that the outcome was unreasonable/mistaken/wrong. In what fraction of the cases would such an observer conclude that the outcome was fairly close to the optimum possible. If the answers vary widely by jurisdiction, then by all means provide a segmented answer.
Neal: “The fact that outcomes vary widely by jurisdiction is suspicious but does not by itself indicate outcomes are unfair.”
You were the one who brought up the word “unfair,” so I’m not exactly sure what you mean. But, as Jack D notes above, given that the same lawsuit (with the same facts) will produce millions of dollars of profit in one jurisdiction and $0 in another, it is hard to see how both can be considered “fair” except to the attorneys and judges who are getting paid to handle these matters.
The U.S. system of financial incentives may produce roughly 1.5-2X the number of children living without two parents (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/InOurEconomy , though it is hard to separate cultural factors) compared to comparably developed European countries that also offer no-fault divorce, but without the profits. Divorce plaintiffs in the U.S. would say that is “fair” to children because it is better to have just one winner/primary parent and occasional phone calls with the loser/secondary parent than to live with two adults who aren’t in love with each other. Academic researchers would say that is “unfair” to children because, unless the parents are physically hitting each other, the children are better off with daily access to both. It is not like you can run a physics experiment and say definitively that the successful plaintiffs or the eggheads at universities are correct.
Your statement that “I have met a few single mothers over the years, but none of them were on the child support gravy train.” is itself revealing of how fairness is a cultural construct. If you live in a poor neighborhood in the U.S., nearly all of the single parents you know are getting welfare benefits that cost taxpayers about $60,000 per year (free house, food stamps, free health care). If you live in a middle-class or upper-middle-class neighborhood, nearly all of the single parents would be entitled to child support at 2X-100X the Swedish maximum, for example, and we never heard of someone who had the opportunity to get significant child support cash but turned it down. The successful child support plaintiffs that we talked to all thought that they were not “on the gravy train” because, e.g., a lawyer told them they were entitled to $150,000 per year and they got only $50,000 per year after $1 million in legal fees had been expended. If they settled, e.g., for $75,000 per year they considered themselves to be completely indifferent to the cash profits available from obtaining custody.
So if you’re an American it is guaranteed that you’ve had direct exposure to adults who are profiting substantially from having had children. But you apparently have some kind of expectation that children should be profitable and therefore it strikes you as “fair”. Most Europeans, on the other hand, don’t have an expectation that having children should be profitable and therefore they would consider these outcomes to be “unfair.” There is no way to say that you are right and they are wrong or vice versa.
(We could maybe translate this to the minimum wage debate. Plenty of Americans think it is “unfair” for someone to get paid less than $15 per hour. There are some who think it is “unfair” for someone to get paid less than a different number, e.g., $8 per hour. There are some who think that any market-clearing wage to which an employer and employee agree is “fair”. There is no scientific method for determining which of these groups is correct. All that one can do is (a) inform consumers where they should move in order to benefit from the minimum wage laws in various jurisdictions, and (b) calculate the likely effects on the economy and folks’ behavior (e.g., point out that Puerto Rico already has the equivalent of $15/hour minimum wage and their labor force participation rate is consequently much lower than on the mainland).)
>So if you’re an American it is guaranteed
>that you’ve had direct exposure to adults
>who are profiting substantially from having had children.
I can say with certainty that for the small number of cases where I know the details this was not the case. Furthermore, I am pretty sure there was no child support in the picture for any of the single parents I have known. For most of the divorced parents I know, I don’t know if there is child support involved but they both work and live similar lifestyles. I can think of one shared parenting couple where the woman may very well collect some child support, but she nonetheless works and lives a modest lifestyle which is substantially inferior to her former husband who has remarried to a woman who works. I don’t know the details but it hard to believe she is really “profiting” all that much. I can think of one family where (decades ago) the father continued to support his wife and their three children in their rather nice family home after he left for another woman and substantially upgraded his lifestyle. I suppose one could say the ex-wife was “profiting”, but it’s hard to see this particular case as “unfair” since he was the one who left, he was uninterested in raising the children, it would have been impossible for her to raise the children in anything like their existing lifestyle without his support, if she had worked (which she didn’t) her income would not have made a significant contribution to what was required to support their (her and 3 children) existing lifestyle, and he still ended up with the nicer lifestyle.
I don’t live in a poor area and I don’t know anyone who receives $60,000 per year in welfare benefits. I know and have known poor, very poor, and working people. All of them live modest lifestyles and work (most of them work hard). To the extent that they receive government benefits (many do not), those benefits are modest and provide a modest supplement to a modest lifestyle.
>But you apparently have some kind of expectation that children
>should be profitable and therefore it strikes you as “fair”.
In fact it strikes me as unfair and destructive. However, it is not the only way in which divorce/child support outcomes can be unfair and destructive. You have provided compelling evidence that people do turn their children into profit centers, but I know from personal experience that everyone doesn’t do it. I am asking you for your opinion on the scope of the problems relative to the full “divorce/child support industry”.
>We could maybe translate this to the minimum
>wage debate. Plenty of Americans think it is
>“unfair” for someone to get paid less than $15
>per hour.
I agree that fairness isn’t a very compelling reason for a minimum wage, but that doesn’t mean that fairness isn’t a good standard for evaluating divorce outcomes. In any case, I’m willing to abandon the fairness criteria for something else like reasonableness.
Neal: I think “I don’t know the details” is the key to the above. We interviewed a lot of successful custody and child support plaintiffs who sincerely believed that they weren’t making a profit off their children because they had received, ultimately, less than their lawyer’s first estimate of what they were “entitled to.” It didn’t matter if the number banked was $10,000 per year or $100,000 per year. Occasionally we found someone who would gleefully relate the wonderful lifestyle and purchases that had been enabled via a successful child support lawsuit, but it was rare. The conventional attitude was that children were an enormous financial burden and that no amount of child support revenue could adequately compensate a winner parent for taking on the 2/3rds parenting-time responsibility that had been so avidly sought.
We calculate in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/InOurEconomy that there are about 4 million Americans profiting from child support. The number living off their children via means-tested and child-required welfare programs is no doubt higher. There are at least 15.5 million Americans who receive court-ordered child support. If they’re not making a profit on the child support per se they probably qualify for at least one welfare program.
You don’t know anyone who receives $60,000 per year in welfare benefits? That’s not inconsistent with what I said. About $1 trillion was spent in 2011. That’s over $60,000 per year in taxpayer cash (see http://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/america-spent-enough-on-federal-welfare-last-year-to-send-60-000-to-each-household-in-poverty ). If you think that the poor aren’t getting $60,000 per household in value that is a separate issue regarding the efficiency of the U.S. government.
My opinion “on the scope of the problems relative” to the family law industry? There aren’t any problems, as long as you don’t mind GDP being shrunk by 3 percent. If a foreigner comes to the U.S., gets pregnant, and goes home to receive $1-2 million tax-free, thus making her the wealthiest person in her hometown, that may not be a “problem” from her point of view.
So roughly 25% of divorces involving children produce a child support “profit” and 3% make a “significant” profit? I do have a question about the methodology described in “In Our Economy”. It seemed like the total adjusted child support amount (per child support order) is compared against the cost for a single child. Wouldn’t the average child support order include more than one child?
>You don’t know anyone who receives $60,000 per year
>in welfare benefits? That’s not inconsistent with what
>I said. About $1 trillion was spent in 2011. That’s over
>$60,000 per year in taxpayer cash
It is inconsistent with what you said which was “nearly all of the single parents you know are getting welfare benefits that cost taxpayers about $60,000 per year”.
Neal: “Wouldn’t the average child support order include more than one child?” There is no comprehensive nationwide data for this because loser parents who reliably pay what is ordered may never get into the state/federal enforcement system. But for the 15+ million orders that are enforced with your tax dollars, the typical order is for just one child.
As for your disputing the Congressional Budget Office’s arithmetic, I will only say that the document speaks for itself and that, if you want to qualify for welfare, “single parenthood” is the second best method (“single disabled parent” being the first best).
>But for the 15+ million orders that are enforced with your tax
>dollars, the typical order is for just one child.
The “average” family with children includes over 2 children. Does this mean that the typical typical child support recipient receives more than one child support order?
>As for your disputing the Congressional Budget Office’s
>arithmetic, I will only say that the document speaks
>for itself
Would you run back the quote where I dispute the CBO’s arithmetic, because I don’t remember saying anything about it. I only remember disputing a statement you made about the single parents I know.
The federal agency stats are linked to from Real World Divorce, Neal.
Certainly a child support profiteer would be unwise to have multiple children with the same defendant. It is twice as profitable in most states to have three children with three defendants than to have three children with one defendant (assuming all defendants have the same income).
From: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/InOurEconomy:
>we would use a threshold of about $4300 per year.
>The Census Bureau estimated that approximately
>2 million Americans are receiving more than that amount.
Should that that read “more than that amount per child”?
Neal: I think you are right that this estimate should be corrected for those plaintiffs who are collecting child support on more than one child (at least at any given moment, this seems to be a minority of plaintiffs, though it is quite possible that over a plaintiff’s lifetime there would be multiple cash-yielding kids). But the adjustment wouldn’t be $X/kid. If you look at Table 5 in
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yhrdropaftohkj7/The-Economic-Cost-of-Raising-Children_William-Comanor.pdf?dl=0
you’ll see that a 2nd or 3rd child leads to only slightly higher than the first one.
But remember that a “single parent” with two kids may not have two child support orders. The second kid may be from a current partner to whom the single parent is not married so as to remain eligible for various means-tested welfare benefits (low-end) or to keep the alimony flowing (high-end).
Also, remember that there is no nationwide comprehensive data set for the number of people who make money by selling abortions (no child support order gets put in place, just money transferred quietly at around the third month of pregnancy). Nor do we have good data on child support dollars transferred out of the U.S. to foreign plaintiffs (a foreign plaintiff isn’t around to be surveyed by U.S. Census).
I’m not an economist so I’ll defer to Dr. Comanor, but as a parent I will warn you that once she starts soccer, music, and art lessons you’ll blow through that $4,300 budget before even getting to the first of 20 gifts you’ll buy each year for the birthday parties she’s invited to. What he says about food costs… let’s just say it’s clear he’s never fed a teenage boy.