Stolzoff, a refugee from Silicon Valley who has found his way into some amalgam of journalism and self-help, acknowledges that "a job will first and foremost be an economic relationship." But he does not seem to grasp the finer points of supply and demand. The supply of people who want to be zookeepers—because they like animals or they think the job will be fun or at least more fun than delivering Amazon packages—is large enough that zoos can afford to pay people less than a UPS driver. In other words, being a zookeeper is one of the perks of being a zookeeper, and people will accept less money to do a job they love.

This is not to say that Stolzoff doesn't have some interesting thoughts about the culture of "workism" in America today and the way that employers are encouraging workers to think about their jobs. Before the folks at Google and Microsoft developed campuses with gourmet cafeterias, pods to nap in, and yoga studios, investment banks figured out that the key to getting employees to work long hours was to offer them dinner and a ride home. If they worked past 7 p.m., they could expense their takeout, and after 9 p.m., the company would give them a car service ride home. Even the BlackBerry, which was initially considered a workplace perk, was really a device to tether people to the office.

Stolzoff warns that it is not only these material benefits that get employees to center more of their lives on work. It is also the creation of a workplace culture. The proliferation of companies that say they are not in it just for the profit—the B corporations whose leaders promise to consider the social or environmental impact of their decisions—seem to have persuaded young people that they are not real companies.

Take Taylor, for instance, who joined Kickstarter as a receptionist in 2012:

"Once a week, Taylor started a happy hour tab with the company credit card at a local bar. He hosted a midnight movie club at the office where employees sipped negronis and watched cult classics. He played in a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game which … two of the company's founders regularly attended. Kickstarter became the center of Taylor's social scene. Coworkers weren't just colleagues; they were friends and bandmates, romantic partners, and political comrades."

These corporations refer to themselves as a "fampany" or, in the case of AirBNB, as an "Airfam." But as Stolzoff correctly notes, "families and businesses have fundamentally different goals." So when Kickstarter started making decisions that Taylor and his colleague disagreed with, they were shocked. And when they decided to form a union to push back against those decisions, the employees also seemed shocked that the leaders were hostile to the idea. "Never before had the divide between workers and management been so apparent." Things were a lot more clear when workers were mining coal or assembling cars on a factory line and management were the ones whose clothes didn't get dirty.

Companies want productive workers, and the research suggests that people who are happier at work will want to spend more time at work, and they will be more productive. But that may not be entirely true. Stolzoff cites a number of studies suggesting that reducing hours can boost productivity. A large-scale study in Iceland, for instance, found that when workers' hours were reduced from 40 to 36 hours a week, they were more productive across a wide number of industries. Other studies have suggested that after 50 hours or so of working, there is limited marginal benefit to working more.

Time at work, in other words, doesn't equal working more. Indeed, it's possible that all the distractions of the modern workplace—the meals, the exercise studios, the wellness seminars—may in fact be taking away from actual work. And what about when work is actually at home? The revolution in remote working over the past couple of years has confused people even more—both employees and employers. Neither is really sure when real work is being done. Work goes on at all hours, but productivity may be even more rare.

But this is the tradeoff that many of us are willing to make. As someone who was working from home long before the pandemic, I can say those tradeoffs are clear. Yes, you can go to the supermarket when it's not busy; you can exercise when there is daylight. You can work after everyone has gone to bed or before everyone has woken up. And you can attend all of your kids' school events or be home when they are sick. (More about them in a minute.) But you often have a feeling that you're not where you’re supposed to be. Or that you're pretending to do something that you're not actually doing.

Some of Stolzoff's solutions to the problem of workism feel, well, performative. Yes, of course, we could give people a universal basic income or forgive student loans. But the truth is that if their economic calculus were different, most people wouldn't end up working less. In fact, they might end up working more. Student loan forgiveness would free up more people to go into the kinds of low-earning public service jobs that Stolzoff tells us we should be wary of because of the way they exploit their workers.

Stolzoff's advice that we be more "clear-eyed" about work as an "economic contract" is well-taken. But the problem with work is not actually work. It's the rest of our lives. We do not value time as much as we value money. The young people he interviews who end up taking time off from work don't know what to do with it. They travel the world, smoke pot, and then end up coming up with ideas for new projects or books. But what most of them have in common is that they don't have other obligations as strong as their work obligations. They are single or at least childless. Not only does that mean that they are looking for meaning and connection in their jobs that they are not getting elsewhere. It also means that there is no one sitting there demanding their attention instead of their bosses. Nothing boosts efficiency like knowing a babysitter is about to leave.

Though Stolzoff writes enviously about other places and cultures where people seem to choose leisure over money, those people are rarely choosing to lie on a beach alone or take time to cook a meal for themselves. Rather, they are choosing time with family or a religious community over work. These other things pull at them as strongly as work does. Until younger Americans make those same kinds of commitments, they will be stuck playing Dungeons and Dragons with their fampanies.

The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work
by Simone Stolzoff
Portfolio, 239 pp., $28

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post When Office Perks Become Perils appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Tucker was born in 1985 in Chattanooga, Tenn., to an African-American mother who bore four other children and did not raise any of them. Her biological father did not know about her birth—he was a developmentally disabled man who lived on the streets and made money standing outside of bars selling flowers that were donated to him.

After a brief stint in foster care, Tucker was adopted by a white couple in Bellingham, Washington. By her own account, she had a wonderful childhood with loving siblings and parents. Despite being born partially deaf and with legs turned in such a way that doctors did not expect her to walk (both most likely the result of drug use by her mother), Tucker was a star athlete and musician. Over the years, people have told Tucker she should be "grateful," and she is. But she worries that people don’t really understand that adoption is complicated, that she also wished the circumstances of her birth parents were different.

Her adoptive parents share this view. As she writes: "They fearlessly understood and named the paradox that they were so happy I’d joined their family and also longed for a world in which Deborah could have kept me."

So who thinks adoption is a "simple recipe" where we take a child away from their birth parents and just throw them into another family? Certainly no one who has been adopted or who has placed a child for adoption or who has adopted. Of course, there are people who haven’t given the concept of adoption much thought at all. For them, Tucker’s vivid description of the complex emotions that accompanied her on the journey to finding her birth family will be an education. And maybe it will stop them from saying insensitive things to Tucker and others in her position. But there is a point in all of our lives when we accept that strangers make ignorant comments, and it’s not really worth losing sleep over all of them.

When I was pregnant with my first child, a stranger came up to me at a wedding and asked how I felt knowing that this child (who would presumably have dark skin like my husband) would be "totally alienated" from me. At some point you just shake your head or throw your drink, but you have to move on.

There are complexities to growing up black in a white family in a white town in a white state. But the ones Tucker points to suggest a bizarre understanding of racial identity. For instance, she notes that she was always louder and dressed more colorfully than other members of her adoptive family or people in her town. Is that because she’s black? Another black adoptee tells her that her tastes in food differed from her adoptive parents. And another says she felt at home with her birth parents because they shared her sense of humor and sarcasm. No one doubts these adoptive children sometimes felt out of place in their families. But is this because of their race?

And no one doubts that adoptive children sometimes adapt "people-pleasing behaviors" in order to fit in. But there are a lot of non-adoptive children who share the same race as their parents who also feel they don’t fit in with their families. In fact, for the demographic of mostly teenagers that Tucker is mentoring, one might assume that such discomfort is actually the norm—even among children raised by their biological parents. But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you view everything through the lens of adoption and race, then you lose sight of all the normal challenges young people face. Indeed, you lose sight of the fact that many people exist in this intersection of happiness and tragedy.

The parents who lose a child to cancer but then decide they want to have another one. The widower who finds love and marries again. There is not a day that these people don’t wish the world could be different, but then they also know that the joy they experience every day would not have been possible without the tragedy that preceded it.

Much of Tucker’s book is devoted to the ways she would fix the world so that Deborah could have kept her. And most of the problem in Tucker’s view is racism. Black people are held, she says, to a different standard than white people when it comes to their behavior, a white standard. She says that the nine children who integrated the elementary school in Little Rock were taught that "acting white" was essential to their success. This might have come as news to their parents and civil rights leaders at the time, who thought practicing nonviolence and acting respectfully was not the exclusive province of white people.

But you can tell where Tucker comes down on the civil rights movement when she describes Malcolm X as "a proponent of nonviolence." That picture of him with a rifle looking out his window is just an aberration?

The legacy of racism and "ancient historical trauma" have caused Deborah’s problems, she writes. When Tucker first approaches her birth mother and Deborah denies that Tucker is her daughter, she speculates that Deborah was experiencing "unmetabolized trauma from the past." This is a grown woman who travels with a doll that she talks about as if she were a real baby. There is no doubt that Deborah has experienced trauma—substance abuse, mental illness, perhaps even abuse and neglect when she was young—but one needn’t go back to ancient times to find it.

Though Tucker knows Deborah could not have raised her, she says she is angry at the child welfare system "that assumes black children must be saved from the social ills of their culture, which is quick to believe glossy social media posts that depict wokeness." She also blames the "war on drugs." Whether or not the war on drugs was a good thing generally has little to do with whether individual parents’ drug use made them incapable of caring for young children. Tucker knows that she was not removed from Deborah’s home because of black culture. She was removed because Deborah couldn’t care for her. One of Tucker’s sisters was initially left with Deborah but was actually raised by a grandmother briefly and then was just bouncing to different friends’ homes.

Much of the book describes her anger at not meeting her birth family sooner. She had what is called a "closed adoption," where information wasn’t provided to her family about her birth mother and she could not access it. But very few adoptions are closed anymore. She believes that open adoptions "end up looking closed" because once an adoption is finalized, the adoptive parents can decide how much contact their child will have with their biological parents.

Tucker dismisses "safety concerns" cited by adoptive parents in limiting the contact with biological parents. But frankly there are real issues here and though lawmakers in New York recently proposed mandating visitation for birth parents even after adoptions are finalized, this would seriously infringe on adoptive parents’ rights to be real parents to their children. And it would probably discourage adoption generally.

You Should Be Grateful is ultimately a mishmash of Tucker’s own story, which is both moving and fascinating, with "research" she has picked up from progressive academics. For instance, she touts "blind removals" whereby agencies decide whether to put a child in foster care without revealing the race of the child to the people making the decision. She says this dramatically altered racial disparities in foster care. In fact, the agency that was doing it just changed the way they were counting kids and when it compared apples to apples, the percentage of black kids removed went up and down in no discernible pattern.

Tucker is right that adoption is not neat. And any policy solutions to the problems of our child welfare system will have to recognize the complexity of these issues. Unfortunately, when Tucker turns from the personal to the political, all her nuance seems to go out the window.

You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity and Transracial Adoption
by Angela Tucker
Beacon Press, 196 pp., $25.95

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Race, Rights, and the Rules of Adoption appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In fairness, it is hard to be anything but outraged writing about the story of the six Hart children—Ciera (aged 12), Abigail (14), Jeremiah (14), Devonte (15), Hannah (16), and Markis (19)—who in the spring of 2018 were drugged and then driven off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway by their adoptive mothers. Asgarian is right that much of the reporting since then has focused on the "true crime" aspect of things—what would possess this white lesbian couple to adopt six black children, neglect them, abuse them, and then commit this horrific murder-suicide? A popular podcast called Broken Harts delved into the women's backgrounds and their social media posts to try to understand.

Asgarian, on the other hand, went to try to find the birth parents for the children to understand why Child Protective Services removed them from their families in the first place and how they came to be placed for adoption. In some ways, the story is not atypical. The tragic tale of Sherry Davis's life started early when her father murdered her mother in front of her and her sister. She was pregnant three years later, at age 15. She left her two children with a friend, and an abusive boyfriend kidnapped her. Those two boys were put into foster care. Then she had another child with a man who broke multiple bones in the child when he was three months old. CPS took that child away too.

Sherry went on to have three more boys and a girl—Dontay, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera. The children were fathered by different men who were not involved in their lives. Sherry continued using cocaine and CPS continued to monitor her situation. There was one stable influence in their lives, an older man, Nathaniel, whom Sherry lived with sometimes but who was not the father of any of the children. The children were eventually sent to live with an aunt, Priscilla. But Priscilla had a full-time job and would sometimes call Sherry to babysit for the kids. When CPS found out, the kids were removed from Priscilla's custody.

Some of the information Asgarian reports can be verified, but most of it cannot. When she writes that Sherry never used drugs around her children, that is Sherry's claim. Even after the deaths of the children, it is surprisingly hard to get any information from child welfare agencies or courts on these cases because records could reveal confidential information about the family. And as harsh as it might seem to remove children from Priscilla, who, by Asgarian's account, seemed responsible, the truth is that this is a common challenge with placing children in homes of relatives. If the situation was serious enough to separate them from their parents, what good does it do the children if the parents are allowed unfettered access to them?

Nevertheless, the caseworkers and agencies are rarely offered a perfect situation. Generally, the courts overwhelmingly favor placing children with relatives, but once Sherry voluntarily terminated her parental rights, the children became freed for adoption. Asgarian documents corrupt behavior on the part of the court that denied Priscilla custody. The old-boy network she describes in the local family court is not unique. The bizarre racist rantings of the judge are. And so is the judge's determination to push through cases quickly. Anyone who has witnessed or experienced family court will tell you that the one certainty is endless delays.

The other set of siblings—Markis, Hannah, and Abigail—were also placed into foster care. Their mother, Tammy Scheurich, was the victim of sexual abuse (possibly by her father) at a young age. She was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and acted out by having sex with older men she met on a "party line." She had three children with three different men by the time she was 18, whom she cared for sometimes with the help of her parents and grandparents. At one point, a doctor accused her of medical neglect because her child had ant bites, and then on another occasion she didn't take her daughter to a hospital despite a severe respiratory infection and the doctor's instructions to get her medical attention right away.

It is impossible to know whether Tammy's side of things is true: She didn't want to take her kids to a local hospital because she didn't trust the hospital; she couldn't get to the hospital an hour away because she didn't have a car; and she couldn't take an ambulance because it wouldn't transport the other kids and she had no one to leave them with.

But Asgarian reports this all as gospel truth. Because the biological parents are the people who do not have "power" in her formulation. It is absolutely true, of course, that these parents are victims—of poverty, of addiction, of abuse by their own family members, of a bureaucracy that is ill-equipped to fix any of this. "Mothers caught up in the child welfare system are usually already struggling, whether it be due to domestic violence or substance abuse or mental illness. When the state steps in and takes children from already struggling parents, that can feel like a death blow to their self-image." No doubt, but the question is whether we should leave children in dangerous situations to boost a parent's self-image.

Like so many advocates for abolishing the child welfare system or ending foster care, Asgarian suggests that most of these problems could simply be solved by giving parents more financial assistance. She argues that most of these child maltreatment cases involve "neglect," not abuse, and are therefore less dangerous. But most of the child maltreatment fatalities in this country each year are due to neglect, not abuse.

In reality, though, the people without any power are the children. The Hart children had no power to limit the damage from their biological families. It's possible that they could have found safety and stability in Texas with relatives in the case of the Davis siblings or with another foster family in the case of Tammy's children.

But they also had no power once they were adopted. There were plenty of red flags that Jennifer and Sarah Hart were not what they seemed to be. They had a teenaged foster child whom they summarily kicked out of their home with no notice. They had been reported by teachers for abusing the children before the adoption was finalized. In fact, they had been investigated for abuse in three different states, and Sarah was actually convicted for assaulting Abigail. They were two 25-year-old women with almost no parenting experience suddenly taking six children with varying degrees of trauma into their home at once. The state of Texas was sending them thousands of dollars in adoption subsidies for the care of these children, but no one was checking up on them.

Asgarian argues that caseworkers and others who could have done something treated the Harts differently because they were white women saving black children. Generally, this is the accusation launched against white conservative Christians who foster and adopt—everyone knows about the "white savior mentality." But the fact that these were progressive lesbians who spent their spare time going to concerts in the woods and posting on social media about their oppression and their environmental activism also probably sent signals to the nice liberal caseworkers who could pat themselves on the back over this placement.

Though Asgarian wants to make this a story about how the children never should have been removed from their homes and placed with the Harts, the truth is that the child welfare system fails to detect the abuse and neglect of children in birth homes and in foster and adoptive homes. But the former is significantly more common. More outrageously, it allows children to remain in homes where they have already been abused and neglected. There is not enough contact between states. A parent can kill a child in one state and then give birth in a neighboring state and no one will be alerted to this history.

Unfortunately, Asgarian has turned to a group of activists like Alan Dettlaff of the University of Houston and Dorothy Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania to give her context for this story. And she swallows their take whole: The system is racist; it discriminates against poor people; we are removing kids from their homes unnecessarily.

The statistics don't back up this story. Black children are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children, so it's not surprising that black families are investigated and their children removed at higher rates. Poor people are disproportionately caught up in the child welfare system, but most cases of neglect involve substance abuse, mental illness, or other problems besides poverty.

Even the statistics that Asgarian cites don't back up her case. She complains that black children in Texas "waited longer to be adopted" than their white counterparts. Which is why it's clear that the case of the Harts was such an aberration. In fact, black children do wait much longer to be adopted—not because of systemic racism, or at least not the way she means it—but because caseworkers and family court staffs want to give black birth parents as many chances as possible and are often staunchly opposed to transracial adoption.

Asgarian concludes that the solution to child welfare problems lies in "a release of the urge to judge and blame parents and of wanting to punish them for their failures." This kind of line will resonate with readers who are tired of being judged for letting their kids eat too much candy or walk to the park by themselves. But the truth is that we absolutely need to judge parents who are using cocaine and trying to supervise young children or who do not heed the advice of doctors to get their children who are having trouble breathing to a hospital or who allow their children to be physically and sexually abused by the men in their lives. And framing these judgments as a way of punishing parents instead of as a way of keeping children safe will only ensure that the powerless stay that way.

We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
by Roxanna Asgarian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $28

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Not Focused on the Family appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Robbins, whose previous book Nurses was subtitled "A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital," has found a formula she likes. But the general public may find her latest love letter a little hard to take. After a few years in which teachers refused to show up for work and students fell hopelessly behind and were subject to the most outrageous forms of political indoctrination, one wonders how many Americans are buying the "teachers are heroes" bit anymore.

Robbins is absolutely right to point out there is a teacher shortage now and that, for a variety of reasons, tens of thousands have left the profession and fewer and fewer want to go into it. But she fails to understand why.

The first complaint Robbins documents is the lack of time that teachers have. Take Rebecca, a 29-year-old elementary school teacher who couldn’t find time to date. Her last boyfriend "moved out because Rebecca, at 24, was always working. After they broke up, he told her he’d almost ended the relationship several times before that because she wasn’t home or paying attention to him." There is no doubt that dedicated teachers spend a lot of time working, but the idea that as a general rule elementary school teachers can’t find time to date seems belied by the fact that most elementary schools feature a rotating cast of maternity subs.

Where do teachers find the time to date, get married, and have children? Well, because school teachers have summers off, they occupy one of the few jobs well-suited to having a family. Robbins complains that a disproportionate share of teachers work more than one job. But with the whole summers off thing, that makes sense. Robbins complains also that teachers don’t get paid enough—an average salary of $40,000 a year. One veteran teacher complained to her, "I will be lucky to make what a friend’s son started out making as an accountant fresh out of a five-year bachelor’s program. I feel like a fool. I am bright. I am educated. I work hard. I can’t get ahead."

Given that education majors enter college with the lowest SAT scores of any major (and leave with the highest GPA), the paltry salaries are not unexpected, though in many districts teachers are quite well compensated, especially when defined-benefit pension plans are added in. Accounting is a pretty hard major by contrast. But let’s also stipulate that good accountants get paid more than bad accountants. Which is not true in most of our nation’s public schools. So if we are to take this veteran teacher at his word that he is bright and educated and works hard, maybe he should register his beef with the professional union that ensured he would never get rewarded for his talents or his efforts.

Teachers’ unions do not make much of an appearance in The Teachers, though one of the book’s storylines is the crusade of some good teachers against the transformation of their school into a "charter-school-like-academy," whatever that is. Presumably the proposed school wouldn’t have a union. Little surprise that the blurb on the cover of the book is from Diane Ravitch, the notorious former education reformer who became a mouthpiece for the unions.

About the person leading the charge for transforming the school (because of its declining test scores), Robbins writes: "Locals didn’t trust Chad Tucker, the school board member with gelled inky hair. … He was a young white elite and former investment banker whose exorbitant funding came from out of state. His educated inexperience, out-of-touch proposals, and seeming affinity for charter schools led some educators to refer to him as ‘Betsy DeVos, Jr.’" Ouch! Here’s hoping Marvel turns this man into its next supervillain. When Kirkus Reviews says Robbins has "a gift for writing fact like fiction," they weren’t kidding.

The teachers that Robbins profiles do seem to be hard-working, well-meaning types, even if one wonders about her characterization of one elementary school teacher as being able to "clear a Jeopardy board any night of the week." And there are good reasons they are having a difficult time.

Their first problem is that they are being forced to make up their jobs every day. They have to go online to find curricular materials and teaching strategies. Their years as education majors did not prepare them for what they would actually have to do in the classroom. And school administrators are not telling them what to teach or how to teach. It is enormously time-consuming and frustrating. And frankly it is absurd that we don’t tell teachers what to teach or how to teach and then we test them on how well they’ve done it.

Of course, if someone told teachers how or what to teach, Robbins and the teachers’ unions would object to their loss of autonomy. Teachers tell Robbins that kids just can’t learn the way they used to. One Texas high school English teacher says she was pleased a student thanked her for "keeping it real. … She said I had made her a stronger critical thinker and more ‘woke’ as a young lady of color. I did cry because what she said is what drives me to get out of bed every single morning."

And then there are other issues besides time that make teaching hard, like the colleagues. Robbins is at pains to explain how teachers can at once be saints and also the teachers she interviews are constantly complaining about other teachers. Some of them are unnecessarily harsh with kids. Or they don’t do any work. Or they spy on other teachers and tell their ex-husbands they are having affairs. "How can these hostile climates pervade a profession known for its nurturing and selflessness?" Robbins wonders.

The answer is "oppression." Because teachers are often from groups that are oppressed—like women—they are more likely to be treated badly by principals and superintendents. And this can lead teachers to behave badly. She cites research that "‘workplaces with high levels of job insecurity, low levels of autonomy, and high workloads’ correlate to higher levels of workplace bullying." There’s no explanation of why a profession where people can get lifetime tenure after three years has more job insecurity than, say, construction work or medicine or accounting.

Robbins also quotes one expert who notes that the teachers most likely to be bullied are "the best and the brightest. It’s the stars." So the profession that is supposed to be nurturing and altruistic is bullying the people who are at the top. Again, no mention of a union that is committed to not rewarding people at the top and ensuring that everyone is equally mediocre.

Another complaint that Robbins describes but does not accurately diagnose is the violence perpetrated against teachers. She chronicles how often teachers in recent years have been assaulted and berated by students, who are either never disciplined or who are quickly removed from the classroom and sent back. There is no mention of the so-called restorative justice practices that have led to the tolerance of this behavior. Instead, she blames these problems on—wait for it—too few teachers. She even cites Nikolas Cruz, who was responsible for the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, but instead of noting that his history did not result in his being expelled from school (let alone sent to a juvenile detention facility), she just notes that teachers don’t have enough resources and training to handle these matters.

Where are the unions on the issue of restorative justice? Why haven’t they done more to push back against this dangerous narrative that students don’t need serious discipline? Their "equity" agenda overrides even the safety of their members.

But it is hard to take Robbins’s complaints on behalf of the profession seriously since she mixes in the legitimate with the silly. At one point she bemoans the fact that people don’t appreciate P.E. teachers enough and that librarians are not recognized either. One tells her, "many schools celebrate National Assistant Principals Week without acknowledging National Library Week." The horror!

And then there are the complaints about how teachers were treated during COVID. She noted that "one in four teachers" had preexisting conditions. But then she doesn’t note that some estimates suggested that about 40 percent of Americans also had them. Teachers were probably less at risk because they tended to be younger and also tended to be women who were at less risk than men. She even cites a researcher from the University of Minnesota who says, "I know a number of teachers who died." Not to be cavalier, but there were more than a number of people in a lot of professions who died.

The question is how teachers behaved once it was clear that schools were really not posing much of a risk and that students were among the least likely to get sick or transmit COVID and that vaccination was widely available. And this is where Robbins will lose many readers who were perfectly willing to love her previous appreciation of nurses. The teachers in many large cities insisted on staying home, month after month, year after year, even as kids were falling behind, failing to learn how to read or talk or socialize. They threatened strikes if they were made to appear in person. They forced low-income families to leave kids home unattended as they went to work. They talked about the importance of racial equity even as the kids who suffered most tended to be black and brown.

Maybe for her next book Robbins can document a year in the life of America’s children. They’re the ones who suffered the most. And I hear they’re the future.

The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession
by Alexandra Robbins
Dutton, 384 pp., $29

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Class Dismissed appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Good Life is based on information (interviews, blood samples, etc.) collected by the Harvard Study of Adult Development on 724 men and more than 1,300 of their descendants starting in 1938. Some of the young men were once students at Harvard while the others were teenagers growing up in the poorer neighborhoods of Boston, Mass.

There is much conventional wisdom in The Good Life. The authors, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, describe how often people think that more money will make them happier, but in fact there is little evidence that this is true, at least past a certain point. "We are resilient, industrious, creative creatures who can survive incredible hardship, laugh our way through tough times, and come out stronger on the other end." But "we also get used to better circumstances. Our emotional well-being cannot improve to infinity. We settle in. We tend to take things for granted."

The authors contrast John and Leo, two of the original Harvard graduates from the study. Leo felt compelled to move home to Vermont after he graduated because his father died and mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. John was able to single-mindedly pursue his legal career. He earned a lot more than Leo and even ended up teaching some law classes at the University of Chicago. Leo married young, became a high school teacher, and had four children. John married twice and reported that he had a distant relationship with his children. Leo was much happier.

It wasn’t just that John wanted to earn more money. He wanted to achieve professional success. As the authors note, "There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held ‘dream jobs’—from medical researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner city participants who held ‘unimportant' or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them."

So while it is easy for people to acknowledge that money can’t buy happiness, it is harder for people to believe that great careers can’t guarantee personal fulfillment. A recent Pew survey for Time found that 88 percent of American parents want their children to have a job they enjoy doing. That’s compared with 21 percent who want them to get married and 20 percent who want their offspring to have children.

It is a paradox of modern liberal attitudes that on the one hand careers are supposed to provide fulfillment—all the fulfillment that maybe families and friends used to provide—but at the same time, menial jobs or jobs that are done by less educated people are considered a burden and to be avoided at all costs. Public policy seems shaped by this idea—debt forgiveness for college graduates so they can go into low-paying white-collar jobs while eliminating work requirements for the lower classes. The idea that having a set of responsibilities for supporting other people—whether it is coal-mining or caring for one’s children—and giving life meaning and purpose, does not seem to occur to these thinkers. Instead, careers are simply about freedom, autonomy, and self-fulfillment.

It is a shame that the original study did not sample women too—though the second generation interviews include daughters of the first set of participants—because nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the cultural messages women get. Pursuing their careers without hindrance from other forces seems to be the main memo that women receive from the media and academic elites.

It is a credit to the authors that though they briefly mention the structural factors—sexism, income inequality, etc.—that stall success for some adults, they also repeat over and over that these factors are not determinative and "it is never too late" to change them. They mention adverse childhood experiences, which are commonly understood now to affect children’s development, but they also note that childhood trauma is not determinative of future success. The Good Life sometimes has the feel of a self-help book except that instead of simply repeating mantras about thinking positive, they tell us about the data that have been collected over 80 years and intersperse them with stories of real people’s lives.

In the field of social science, such optimism is so rare these days it is worth noticing. Both academic researchers and more popular writers are committed to publishing books about the structural reasons that women, racial minorities, and poor people can never get ahead in life. From The New Jim Crow to Evicted to Caste to Screaming on the Inside, the message from our social science experts is that the system is rigged against you. The only alternative is moving to Scandinavia or instituting a vast scheme of reparations here in the United States.

Not only do the authors of The Good Life never mention their longing for living in another country or the sense that the federal government can fix people’s problems through tax policies or universal child care, they also suggest that there are important lessons for all people to learn from their survey, which is largely comprised of white men. They tell the story of Ananya, an Indian-born student of one of the authors who doubted that she could learn anything from the tales of the men in the study. After spending a couple of days with the files of one man, she thought differently. "Even though the particulars of this one participant’s life were so different from her own in so many ways—he came of age on a different continent, lived life with white rather than brown skin, identified as a man not a woman, never went to college, Ananya saw reflections of herself in his psychological experiences and challenges." This is basically social science heresy. How did these men reflect her "lived experience?"

Reading these files and understanding which people lived long lives and were relatively satisfied when they reached old age, the authors have no trouble finding the common denominator. Making money and landing your dream job are not predictors of happiness, the authors write, but the relationships you have are. They talk about interactions with colleagues at work, casual contact with baristas at your coffee shop, childhood friendships, marriage, and family. Having more regular, substantive, in-person interactions with people will improve your health and well-being. The Good Life encourages readers to engage with strangers, to ask people questions, to open themselves up to others, to be good listeners—all in order to avoid the loneliness that seems to plague more and more Americans.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make much of a distinction between different kinds of relationships people can have. There seems to be little curiosity about the difference in outcomes for people who grew up in homes with single parents compared with those who had fathers in the home. They don’t seem to make much distinction between marriage and cohabitation either in terms of the long-term happiness and security of the spouses. "The essential point is that close, nurturing units of people that have a formative effect on our lives can come from a variety of places, include a variety of people, and be called any number of things. What matters is not just who we consider to be family, but what our closest relationships mean to us over the course of our lives."

This is no doubt true on some level, but the research on the impact of marriage, not just "nurturing units of people," is quite clear, and it would be surprising if the study did not show some correlation between two-parent households and children’s happiness and success or the difference in happiness between people in cohabiting relationships versus marriages.  Nevertheless, Waldinger and Schulz’s book remains a countercultural work of social science, and if more people took up their advice, Americans would be more likely to live a good life.

The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz
Simon and Schuster, 352 pp., $28.99

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Study Shows You’re Nobody Until Somebody Loves You appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along "Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman." For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about "what white women do." White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being "angry" or "crazy." White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.

Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also "white supremacy," and the authors explain, "we are tired of it." The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you "see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free."

Too often, the authors explain, black and brown women have "provided free labor for you." It used to be slavery but now they are brought into boardrooms to discuss diversity, "tagged in Facebook conversations where white women are ‘listening and learning.’" And that’s basically just a different kind of slavery. But Rao and Jackson have had enough. They are no longer going to criticize you for free. They are going to be the McKinsey of diversity training. Only instead of coming to your workplace, they are going to partake of your red-pepper hummus and Pinot Grigio and lecture your friends in the privacy of your Restoration Hardware dining room.

But the money barely pays for the horrors that these two women have to endure. "We decided to write this book after more than a dozen dinners. Different White women, different dining rooms, different cities. SAME CONVERSATION. You are nothing if not consistently WHITE." Just suffering the tedium of the dialogues. I mean they are clearly not getting paid enough.

In that sense, I’m probably more sympathetic than I should be. I can’t imagine having to spend two hours with the kind of women who would pay these grifters. There is not enough wine in France to get me through all that virtue-signaling. Look at us. We have a "Hate Has No Home Here" sign; we posted pictures of our kids holding up Black Lives Matter signs on the school Facebook page. No matter what they say it will not satisfy Rao and Jackson because if it were enough then they’d be out of work.

The other reason they need to be well-compensated is because this work is dangerous. While the white women are "feverishly getting lunches ready and kids off to school, know that we are doing the same plus hoping one of the many white folks who have threatened to commit bodily harm to us and our families is not hiding in a bush outside, ready to shoot our kids and grandkids." Really Rao and Jackson are more like Navy SEALs than diversity consultants. Come on, though. I mean I get that they’re spoiling a lot of perfectly nice evenings for busy moms, but hiding in a bush with a shotgun? These people have pickleball matches to get to—who has the time for that kind of revenge?

Perhaps the most devastating part of Rao and Jackson’s critique for the attendees at Race2Dinners is the fact that their feminism is apparently part of the problem. "One of the reasons white feminism is so insidious—and why white feminists might more often claim colorblindness (compared with white women who don’t necessarily care about feminism)—is that white feminists like to think they live in a fantasy where ever women [sic] is equally oppressed. You like to believe you are fighting for the rights and well-being of all women, and want to consider all women as equitable in that fight. … Saying you are colorblind helps support your myth of equitability."

This is the kind of logic that will be devastating to anyone who owns a pussy hat. And Chelsea Handler, who blurbed the book, just cannot get enough of this flagellation. "I am always looking for ways to learn, grow, shut the F up and listen," she writes. Anyone who has watched one of the crudest and least funny women on television knows she is always looking for ways to learn and grow and listen.

But as everyone involved realizes or should, this is all part of an act. Rao and Jackson don’t really believe that all these women are racist or that attending Race2Dinners will make them any less racist. And the women attending these dinners don’t really believe they are racist either. And no one thinks Chelsea Handler can be made to shut the F up.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, Shelby Steele wrote: "White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities." Indeed, he explained, "White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this … pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity, and regret."

If the only effect of this guilt were rich liberal women wasting their money on this shallow etiquette, I would say, well that’s the free market at work. (And also there’s a sucker born every minute.) But unfortunately it’s not.

In what is perhaps the closest the authors come to grasping the real problems with what they are saying, Jackson tells the story of her son’s sixth grade teacher calling her to say "she could not get him to behave in class." When Jackson asked her son why he was giving his teacher a hard time, he said, "because she lets me." Jackson then explains, "From that point on I understood … white women educators have zero expectations of Black children. … What I know is that children live up to your expectations. If you expect nothing of them (as white teachers did), you will get nothing."

After years of explaining to white people that anything black children do wrong is the result of racism, that racial disparities in school discipline are the result of racism, that black students underperforming on tests is the result of racism, what are white teachers supposed to do? Their hands are tied. Disciplining a black student is, of course, white supremacy. And no doubt Jackson’s "gifted" son has figured that out. Jackson concludes that "white teachers don’t care about me." But the truth is that they care too much about you and what you will do to them and their reputations, and not enough about what your bigotry and shaming are doing to black people.

White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better
by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao
Penguin, 174 pp., $16

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Dinner Party From Hell appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

It is easy to see why Macy got an audience when Dopesick was published. She actually spent time in the parts of the country—particularly Appalachia—that were being overrun by opioids. (She had previously published a book called Factory Man about manufacturing jobs leaving America.) She interviewed users and dealers and chronicled the desperate lives that were destroyed by drugs. She wasn’t the first, but at a time when many readers were still trying to figure out what was behind Trump’s victory, Macy offered them a story. She grew up in this world and her own family and friends have been touched by the devastation.

She prides herself on her gritty reporting but unfortunately it’s full of banalities like, "I spoke with Bisch multiple times most weeks. … I know how he takes his coffee, that he calls sub sandwiches hoagies, that he pronounces the word huge ‘yu-u-ge.’" Talk about seeing into someone’s soul.

Or this: "Mathis vowed to meet drug users where they are—physically, spiritually, and emotionally. But working in the heart of the Bible Belt, she also knew she would have to build bridges before anyone could roll stones across them." Surely there is an easier way?

Macy tells us that in her "fourth decade as a journalist, I have always done my best storytelling when I follow what moves me, warts and all, relying on the long game to illuminate what the great Robert Caro means when he says, ‘Time equals truth.’" Robert Caro should sue to get his name out of this sentence.

Raising Lazarus is focused on finding the people who will solve the problem. And Macy interviews plenty of real-life saints, people who go into drug dens, persuade addicts to go to counseling, bring them food, get them to go to the hospital to be treated for HIV or hepatitis. They will call people every day for two straight months to get them to try some kind of rehab. It is hard work, not just because, as Macy suggests, there is not always enough funding or support from local authorities. But also because the lives of drug addicts are difficult and messy, and it’s hard not to get emotionally involved with them.

Macy is most interested in medically assisted treatment, helping substance users switch from opioids or heroin to Buprenorphine. And while there are plenty of folks in law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and the medical community who are worried about people trading one addiction for another, there is a lot of evidence in favor of using such treatments to help people combat the serious withdrawal effects of going off drugs. Time and again, "dopesickness" makes it all but impossible for some addicts to get clean.

The fact that there are physical symptoms associated with drug addiction and drug withdrawal means for Macy that addiction is just like any other physical ailment. She quotes one Mississippi lawyer who explains that "you ought to be able to go to the ER, just like if I broke my leg and they fix it up. Well, this is the same thing. It’s a disease and people ought to be able to go somewhere and be treated for it." A few pages later, she complains that drug addicts are treated differently from cancer patients. "Lisa had not been told to let her daughter ‘hit rock bottom’ before taking her to an oncologist. … No one suggested to Lisa that she simply lock up Amelia as treatment for her disease."

It does not take anything away from the fact that addiction is a physical problem to suggest that it is not the same as cancer or breaking a leg. But Macy has no room for such subtleties. She argues that there should be almost no requirements for addicts to get "bupe," as it’s commonly called, or even just clean needles to continue using. For Macy, meeting addicts where they are means a policy of all carrots and no sticks. They should get housing and food and not even be required to attend counseling. "Pizza parties and old-fashioned house calls were the carrots. Continued medicine was the carrot. So were clean needles for the 40 percent of people who use drugs and weren’t yet ready to stop using. The sticks were—as long as you didn’t turn the local Walgreens into a trap house—well, there shouldn’t be any sticks."

Macy has no sense that even addicts respond to incentives, and making addiction as comfortable as possible for them might have poor effects. Particularly since she believes that the solution to the opioid epidemic lies in greater government funding of health care. "Federal leaders should adopt Medicare for All so that basic health care, SUD [Substance Use Disorder] treatment, and mental health treatment with an emphasis on childhood trauma—arguably the biggest driver of SUD—can’t be so easily politicized." And, by the way, she concludes that the United States "will not reverse its declining life expectancy until we replace our current system of corporate socialism with one that puts the health and happiness of regular people ahead of billionaires."

If you want to know how she knows all these things, don’t look for any footnotes to studies or research, there aren’t any. Instead, she relies on a few academics and politicians, and, of course, "lived experience." She writes, "It took me more than a decade to fully grasp this, but people who use drugs are the real experts." What could go wrong with this strategy?

The other thread in Raising Lazarus is the problem with our billionaires, particularly the Sackler family who owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Macy clearly believes the Sacklers were out to get as many people addicted to their drug as possible from the beginning, and its members are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of so many people suffering.

Macy practically drools every time she sees a protest outside the courtroom where the Sackler bankruptcy is being discharged. She thrills to the sound of congressional hearings over their misdeeds, convinced that each clever jab by a lawyer or legislator is going to be the end of the company. She breathlessly recounts the story of activists who release thousands of fake prescriptions inside the Guggenheim to protest the use of the Sackler name in the museum. She calls it "mesmerizing theater, a camera-ready call out," and then recounts how two of the activists turned it into a first date, with sushi afterward. Heartwarming stuff.

Perhaps the saddest part of Raising Lazarus is how many of the family members of overdose victims are also hanging on the every turn of the Sacklers’ fortune. They have been persuaded that bringing these billionaires down will somehow change things for their families or even for others going forward. The truth of the matter is that the opioid crisis is nowhere near as simple as Macy makes it out to be. Sure manufacturing jobs were lost, sure there are problems with using the criminal justice system to deal with addiction. But the problems in these communities are complex.

They involve economic changes, educational failures, family breakdown, loss of religious institutions, and a failure of human connection. Macy is right that just trying to replicate the work of the saints she meets is not going to fix the system or the fundamental problems at the root of the crisis. Nor is ending the use of the word addict, by the way, another suggestion she offers.

In a book that purports to describe the "hope" from the personal connections people can make to those suffering from substance abuse, it is finally surprising how little Macy has to say about the lockdowns during COVID. While she does note that this seemed to interfere with people getting to rehab or counseling, and that many of the people she profiled were hampered in their work, and that the substance abuse and overdoses seemed to increase during the past couple of years, she cannot come up with anything to say about the legislators who set these policies in place. Faced with the idea that a progressive Democrat could come up with a bad plan, Macy is practically speechless. It’s a miracle perhaps only surpassed by the raising of Lazarus.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Little, Brown, and Company, 400 pp., $30

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post Comfortably Dumb appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Adding anything new to this literature is a tough hurdle in 2022. And, if anything, writing such a book has become more complicated. In an era when Supreme Court nominees can't define what a woman is, how does one write a book about how women are getting the short end of the stick?

So Kate Mangino has her work cut out for her. And either despite or because of the fact that she is a "gender expert who works with international organizations to promote gender equality and social change," her new book, Equal Partners, is deeply nonsensical.

At the beginning of Equal Partners, Mangino tells us she does "not believe in the gender binary, and I prefer to use language that includes all gender identities. … As much as possible I refrain from talking about what women do and what men do, and I choose to use the terms Female Role and Male Role."

Mangino notes that women, especially after a certain age, earn much less than their male counterparts. Meanwhile they are doing 65 percent of the work at home. And that doesn't include the "cognitive labor," for which the "laborer earns no money and is rarely rewarded." Later in the book, though, Mangino cites approvingly the words of fathers who share more of the housework and child care. And you know what they say? "You have to think about your self-worth versus the money that you make. It's different. There is value in taking care of your kids and not chasing a career. I am still providing for my family." So when men—or people who identify as men?—say that child care and housework are important that's okay, but when women do it, it's demeaning.

It's not just a strange double standard that is applied. One of the first couples Mangino describes is Frida and Miriam, two lesbians who disagree about how to share the cooking and cleaning. Miriam has a more demanding job outside the house. Frida has taken on most of the cooking and cleaning. In the days before Miriam's parents came to visit, Frida spent a lot of time making an elaborate dinner, including a tiramisu, which Miriam thought was unnecessary. They got into a big fight that night because Miriam wasn't being very helpful and went to bed.

Mangino tells us that Frida and Miriam are actually a "composite of many couples." She explains she has "personified Frida and Miriam as women. They could just as easily be two men, a different-sex couple, or a queer couple. The sex of these two characters is less important than the roles they play in their relationship." So two women have divided up their household responsibilities unevenly and now they are angry at each other. Remind me: Why should we care?

Because, Mangino tells us: "Gender inequality is not a women's issue. It is a human rights issue that is a social construct: an historic imbalance of power between men and women." Does that clear it up? Didn't think so.

For a book that seems unable to clearly diagnose the problem, it sure does offer a lot of solutions. For instance, readers might wonder "what is the non-breastfeeding parent going to do during breastfeeding hours?" Mangino shares the strategy of one of her colleagues. "He never sleeps while I feed the baby. He also got up, even in the middle of the night. He'd pick up around the house or bring me a cup of tea or a snack. Sometimes he would just rub my shoulders or sit next to me."

I'm trying to imagine a scenario under which this arrangement seems practical, in which both the mother and father (excuse me, breastfeeder and non-breastfeeder) can be up half the night with an infant. Does either of them work outside the house? Are they independently wealthy? There obviously aren't any other kids around who need attention during the day. What is the point of having two sleep-deprived parents?

It is this kind of impracticality that characterizes the book Equal Partners and the concept of "equal partners." There is a reason that couples don't divide their responsibilities inside and outside the home 50-50. In fact there are a bunch of reasons. First, it creates more work. Mothers and fathers could switch off bringing kids to doctor and dentist appointments, but at some point someone needs to be the emergency contact and keep track of all of the insurance claims and medication instructions. And they could divide all the cognitive labor of scheduling what the family is having for dinner each night. And they often do. The issue for Mangino is that it's not divided evenly.

The problem with her approach is most obvious when she gives readers advice on choosing an "equal partner." She wants women or "the Female Role" to ask, "Are you willing to sacrifice for me in the same way that I am willing to sacrifice for you?" The problem is that people, no matter their gender, have different priorities and are likely to consider different things to be a "sacrifice." There are many women who think staying home with young children while someone else is responsible for earning the bulk of the household income is a privilege. And many men who would consider taking years off from their careers to be a sacrifice. Sure, there are some who might think the opposite, but in poll after poll women are the ones who prefer working part-time when their kids are young.

When husbands make a sacrifice, Mangino also suggests, we should be wary of offering them too much credit. Doing so constitutes "himpathy." When Mangino's husband was willing to forgo a career opportunity so that she could take one, she says, "I was far more comfortable in the 'giving' role than the 'taking' role." I know self-care is a big thing right now, but relationship advice that tells people to have less empathy when their partner makes a sacrifice seems fundamentally unsound.

Again, if same-sex couples and different-sex couples and cisgender and transgender couples all divide work unevenly according to Mangino, what difference does it make? If we are not trying to solve some structurally unfair, discriminatory practice, why is this a public policy question at all?

Mangino offers up one final incorrect answer to show that her suggestions are beneficial. "Research … says that couples who have equal marriages tend to argue less, have lower divorce rates, and even better sex lives." There is exactly one footnote to support this claim, and it's to an Atlantic article that does not even mention frequency of arguments, sex, or divorce.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a 50-50 division of household labor is not the way to marital bliss. As one 2012 study on "men's participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency" found: "Both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency."

None of this evidence will stop Mangino's crusade. Or those of her many predecessors. Perhaps the news that anyone can be a woman—or in the recent words of singer Macy Gray, that being a woman is a "vibe"—will bring to a faster end the absurd campaign that sexual inequality is at the root of all of society's problems. But don't hold your breath. Mangino advises readers to "come back to Equal Partners in about 18 months." Leaving aside the chutzpah of an author telling you to reread their book when you get to the last page, I think Mangino might want to be careful. By that point her progressive colleagues may decide her work is retrograde or, fingers crossed, readers will come to their senses.

Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home
by Kate Mangino
St. Martin's Press, 344 pp., $29.99

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post How Does She Find the Time? With a Little Help From Her Non-Breastfeeding Partner. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The question of how we got to this point, though, is not as easily answered as it might seem. Though it is certainly true that population exodus during COVID and the retreat of law enforcement in the wake of the George Floyd protests contributed both to public disorder and violence in much of the country, the origins and expansion of homelessness in particular have a much longer and more complex history. (For instance, places like Detroit that have a much higher rate of crime also have much lower rates of homelessness.) Stephen Eide's new book, Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem, sheds new light on this issue.

The language is eminently readable; unfortunately the actual text is not. And it's not just my aging eyes. Do yourself a favor and get the e-book. I hate to harp on a problem that is not entirely the fault of the author, but this is a topic that deserves broad (not just academic) attention and I might have skipped the 30-page bibliography in favor of spacing out the 150 pages of miniscule font a little more.

To the substance: Eide first adds some important historical context to the debate. The homeless population has always been predominantly men as it is today, but other aspects of it were different. It used to be much larger, for instance. Nationwide estimates in the early 20th century ranged from 500,000 to 5 million. As Eide notes, "adjusted for population, any of those estimates would dwarf the current count of around 580,000." A researcher in the 1920s noted that the homeless population in Chicago alone was 30,000 in good times and 75,000 in hard times. In the late 19th century one historian estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of the populations had a family member who had used a homeless shelter.

Perhaps in part because homelessness was so common it was not thought of in the same way. In earlier eras, hobos, tramps, and bums were all the subjects of sometimes humorous, sometimes romanticized portrayals in movies and music. "These 'knights of the tie and rail' eschewed steady work for independence and adventure," Eide writes. "In our day homeless advocates strenuously deny that anyone chooses to be homeless. The hobos and tramps of the late nineteenth century took pride in having chosen to be homeless."

Indeed, the fact that these homeless of yore worked made them significantly different from today's homeless population, who are typically not employed. Today's population is disproportionately black, while the homeless used to be almost entirely white. In a legally segregated society black people could not safely wander from place to place without shelter. Alcoholism and substance abuse have always been problems among the homeless. Eide notes that "our focus on the connection between modern homelessness and drug addiction (crack was the concern in the 1980s, meth and opioids are now) can cause us to overlook how bad alcoholism was in former eras."

So what has changed? The first is the prevalence of serious mental illness among the homeless due in large part to the widespread deinstitutionalization of the 1960s and '70s. The idea originally was that those who were being served in psychiatric institutions would then make use of a new network of community mental health centers. Critics say that not enough of these were built, but Eide notes that CMHCs "served a different clientele with easier-to-treat maladies and, in some notable cases, didn't function as much of a medical facility but rather a center of political activism." While the number of mental health providers and spending on mental health vastly increased in the second half of the 20th century, much of this "went to people with milder mental health disorders."

While institutionalization is commonly thought of today as a draconian and needless process instigated by government bureaucrats, it was actually families who, often after years of trying to care for mentally ill at home, decided they had no other option but to commit a loved one. Unfortunately, this is all but impossible in today's environment. Not only is there a severe shortage of mental health beds, but meeting the legal threshold for involuntary commitment—even of someone who has previously shown violent tendencies—is extremely rare.

Eide describes a sector that has been plagued by a lot of poor thinking, including the elevation of "lived experience" as a means for deciding how to help the homeless. If a person with mental illness says that they prefer to live in a tent in Times Square and enjoy using opioids, does that mean that we have to let them? Sometimes, as Eide notes, listening to "lived experience" produces contradictory edicts. "Homeless people demand that shelters be made safer but also criticize shelters for restricting clients' personal freedom." Eide wisely recommends not just consulting the homeless themselves but also the families who care for them. "Families could explain to homeless policymakers what programs and reforms could have helped them better manage their homeless relative, and, thus, may have prevented their descent into the streets."

The policy that has unfortunately taken hold of the entire sector for the past few decades has been "Housing First," the idea that if we can just provide the homeless with some form of permanent shelter, then all the other problems will either be diminished or disappear entirely. If you just give people housing, then they will have an address to give an employer and they can get a job. If you give people housing then their health will improve and they won't be as likely to engage in alcohol or drug abuse.

Eide shows that there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of the Housing First approach, and in many cases offering housing with no strings attached merely serves to remove any incentive that the homeless might have to get their lives back on track. Supportive housing, though, that requires residents to attend sobriety programs or engage in some kind of work, is less popular but seems to produce better results. "To improve lives," Eide writes, "government should sometimes structure people's choices using material inducements."

A second change has been the lack of cheap single-room occupancy housing. While these kind of residences that were once found on Skid Row or in the Tenderloin District were hardly great places to live, they did provide a way for people who engaged in only casual labor or on subsistence level wages to find shelter. They may not have had a permanent place to stay but they were also not sleeping in a public park. Zoning laws have largely eliminated such housing. But in an effort to improve housing for the poor it is possible that we have effectively pushed some to choose between shelters and the street.

The final change has been that a larger percentage of the homeless today are families. One reason for this is that women are more willing and legally able to leave abusive relationships. Unfortunately, they often don't have the financial wherewithal to set up their own household right away. Families are still not a large portion of the homeless population and Eide is right to point out that the stories reporting thousands of homeless children are including children whose families are "doubling up," that is, they are living with relatives.

It is true that the conditions may be cramped and not up to the standards that we are used to, but as Eide notes, "the doubled-up population is much less at risk of being victimized than the sheltered and unsheltered homeless population."

Doubling up is, writes Eide, "a 'fix-it-first'-style solution to homelessness, a way to work with what we've got. … Maybe instead of citing statistics on doubling up as evidence for a broader homelessness crisis that merits increased investment in affordable housing, we could explore ways to make doubling up more tolerable."

Like many of the social problems plaguing urban areas, homelessness has suffered from advocates who put ideology over practical solutions. Demands for more money and more sensitivity to lived experience have not actually done much to help those who are most vulnerable. The tide may be turning. New York mayor Eric Adams has been systematically taking down some of the tent cities that have been erected around town. But Eide points out that "no American city has ever brought unsheltered homelessness permanently under control after first allowing it to get out of control." For anyone interested in the ounce of prevention approach, Homelessness in America is a good place to start.

Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem
by Stephen Eide
Rowman & Littlefield, 258 pp., $35

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum and the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

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