Time for a grown-up debate on early years education

Do we take the issue of early years education seriously enough? We should do, because according to Tom Chivers in the Telegraph, it can make an enduring difference to the life chances of disadvantaged children:

• “...we shouldn't be talking about getting children in school later – we should talk about getting them in school, or rather preschool, earlier. If the research is to be believed, it is one of the most cost-effective ways of changing the course of deprived children's lives…”

Some of the most compelling evidence comes from longitudinal studies that follow the progress of children from their pre-school years all the way into adulthood:

• “The Perry programme was one such trial. Between 1962 and 1967, 123 poor children, aged three and four, were randomly assigned to two groups: one group received high-quality preschool education, and the other did not. The trial then followed those two groups of children throughout their lives.”

The American study found that compared to the control group, the average benefit to the public for each child that went through the pre-school programme was valued at nearly $200,000. This was composed of later savings to the education system, taxes on earnings, welfare savings and crime savings: 

• “A similar study was carried out in the 1970s in Carolina, the Abecedarian Project, and found similar results, as did other trials, including the Effective Provision of Preschool Education in the UK... Early education, it seems, changes the lives of poor children, for the better.”

Tom Chivers then veers off into a discussion as to whether earlier years education should be overtly focused on the 3Rs or whether it should be about learning through play. Citing further research, he favours the more liberal approach:

• “...it may well be that Michael Gove's education reforms, if they are intended to make children learn the Three Rs at preschool rather than letting them run around outside and hit each other with toys, are counterproductive.”

This is simplifying matters somewhat. Formal education is almost certainly not appropriate for pre-school children, but that doesn’t mean that the prospects of disadvantaged toddlers are going to improved by enhanced opportunities to “hit each other with toys.” Unstructured learning environments – whether in the home or elsewhere – are all about giving children the fundamental things they need in order thrive when they do go to school i.e. emotional security, basic vocabulary and the rudiments of civilised behaviour. If children from deprived backgrounds aren’t getting these things at home then it is vital that they get them from pre-school programmes.

Liberals often question the reality of widespread social breakdown. Yet the fact that they consider pre-school intervention by the state to be so necessary would suggest that a significant proportion of families do not provide the material, intellectual and spiritual nourishment that their children need in their early years. If that isn't evidence of widespread social breakdown, then what is?

Population decline is real and happening in Europe right now

Until recently, German house prices were remarkably flat. In fact, it wasn’t until the collapse of property bubbles elsewhere in Europe that investors began to look to the German market. There are various explanations as to why the Germans should be so out of step on this matter. These range from a comparatively low rate of home ownership to the accommodating nature of local planning policies.

There’s another possible cause – in Britain there aren’t enough houses for people to live in, but in many parts of Germany there aren’t enough people to live in the houses. Reporting for the New York Times, Suzanne Daley and Nicholas Kulish describe the impact of depopulation in the town of Sonneberg: 

• “At first glance, this town in central Germany, with rows of large houses built when it was a thriving center of toy manufacturing, looks tidy and prosperous. But Heiko Voigt, the deputy mayor here, can point out dozens of vacant homes that he doubts will ever be sold.
• “The reality is that the German population is shrinking and towns like this one are working hard to hide the emptiness. Mr. Voigt has already supervised the demolition of 60 houses and 12 apartment blocs, strategically injecting grassy patches into once-dense complexes.”

This isn’t an isolated example. The cause is a national decline in fertility rates, a problem which Germany shares with several other European countries:

• “There is perhaps nowhere better than the German countryside to see the dawning impact of Europe’s plunge in fertility rates over the decades, a problem that has frightening implications for the economy and the psyche of the Continent. In some areas, there are now abundant overgrown yards, boarded-up windows and concerns about sewage systems too empty to work properly. The work force is rapidly graying, and assembly lines are being redesigned to minimize bending and lifting.”

For once, Germany has failed to set an example for the rest of Europe to follow:

• “Germany… an island of prosperity, is spending heavily to find ways out of the doom-and-gloom predictions, and it would seem ideally placed to show the Continent the way. So far, though, even while spending $265 billion a year on family subsidies, Germany has proved only how hard it can be.”

Daley and Kulish identify cultural factors as a big part of the problem. Germany is a country that has “long glorified stay-at-home mothers,” they say. What they don’t mention are the inflexibilities of the German labour market. Workers enjoy strong employment protections, but that can make it very hard for women to get back into the jobs market after having left it to have children.

It is a similar story in southern European countries like Spain and Italy – only here there is a big additional threat to fertility rates:

• “Several recent studies show that historically high unemployment rates — in excess of 50 percent among youths — in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain are further discouraging young people from having children. According to the European Union, the total number of live births in 31 European countries fell by 3.5 percent, to 5.4 million from 5.6 million, between 2008 and 2011. In 1960 about 7.5 million children were born in 27 European countries.”

This doesn’t quite add up to the “demographic death spiral” that some commentators foresee. But to a large extent demography really is destiny. Europe’s future can only be diminished by the shrinking size of each new generation.

Do governments actually want their people to do the right thing?

In economics, the theory of ‘revealed preference’ asserts that the best of way of telling what consumers prefer (given a choice) is to observe what they actually buy. This seems reasonable enough, so reasonable, in fact, that we should apply the same analysis to governments.

Politicians say all sorts of things about the kind of choices they’d like the rest of us to make – sometimes in a moralising way, more usually in merely urging us to be productive, responsible citizens. But once they’ve done with their pep talks, their real preferences for our behaviour are revealed by the economic incentives – and disincentives – that governments create through the tax system and other policy frameworks.

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Justin Fox takes at what the American system effectively wants of its people. These are some of his conclusions:

• “We don't want our fellow citizens to have kids. It's not just the high cost of childbirth. In general, U.S. families get less help with the cost of child-rearing (in the form of tax breaks, government services, and cash handouts) than those in almost any other affluent nation. On the OECD's list, only Mexico and South Korea devote a smaller percentage of GDP to family benefits…  the financial incentives are beginning to win — the U.S. fertility rate is now barely above the OECD average, and some surprising countries — Sweden, Norway, France, Great Britain — are now producing more babies per capita than we are.”

America’s notoriously expensive healthcare arrangements are another consequence of the incentives created by the tax system:

• “We want our fellow citizens to get their health care through their employers... The country's single biggest 'tax expenditure,' by far, is the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. If your employer subsidizes your health insurance, all that spending is tax deductible (for your employer). If you pay for your own, the tax breaks are much more limited. The result is a subsidy that delivers the bulk of its benefits to high-paid workers, incentivizes high spending on health care, discourages self-employment, and encourages companies to get themselves into trouble (GM was the most dramatic example of this) by overpromising on health benefits.”

Americans will be needing their healthcare, because it seems that their government also wants them to eat their way into sickness:

• “We want our fellow citizens to be fat. Corn is the most heavily subsidized crop in the U.S. It's of limited nutritional value. It's used to fatten up cattle, in the process making their meat far less healthy to eat. And it's used to sweeten soft drinks, a big contributor to America's skyrocketing obesity rates... U.S. farm policy is geared toward encouraging the production of grains, soybeans, cotton, meat, and dairy — not the fruits and vegetables we're supposed to be eating more of.

So what about Britain? Weighing up the incentives, is there anything that our system obviously does or doesn’t want us to do? Well, there’s one thing that stands out. Our government doesn’t want us to be married. Unlike many other countries, there’s little recognition of marriage in the tax system (at least, not until you’re dead). Furthermore, the benefits system, not to mention housing policy, provides various disincentives to getting married or forming stable cohabiting relationships. And if you’re a married couple where one spouse stays at home to look after young children, then you’ll have your child benefit withdrawn long before a two-earner couple with a higher household income.

Of course, British politicians protest that they want stable families (David Cameron even promised to make Britain the “most family friendly country in Europe”). But if they really mean it, why do they punish people for doing the right thing?

Young people can’t afford to get on to the housing ladder, but why would they want to and why should we care?

Provocative stuff from Fraser Nelson in the Spectator – casting doubt, as he does, on that ultimate Thatcherite aspiration, home ownership:

• “In her seminal book The Anatomy of Thatcherism, Shirley Letwin famously argued that home ownership released the ‘vigorous virtue’ and made someone more inclined to see the world from a Conservative point of view. The Thatcher right-to-buy scheme (opposed by Labour) was a huge success – emblematic of her bond with the working class voters. It was a success from which the Tories have never recovered.”

Nelson’s argument is that property booms have been exacerbated by government policies, doing great damage to the economy in the process:

• “Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have pursued home ownership… with mixed results. The Bush government was much taken with this (I once saw Karl Rove quote aloud from Letwin’s book) and hawked underpriced debt. Mortgages were given to young couples who had not a cent of deposit and no means of paying the money back. The subprime crisis was born. We all know how that movie ended.”

Nelson goes on to suggest that young people are now deliberately staying away from the housing market – and, refering to George Osborne’s help-to-buy scheme, says that we should do nothing to tempt them into what could be a trap:

• “It’s not hard to understand why teenagers growing up in houses that have lost a quarter of their value will be more suspicious of the idea of house ownership as a no-brainer financial investment.
• “It’s nice to own your own place. But how much borrowed money would you risk in pursuit of that goal? How sure can you be that another crash is not just around the corner? And what happens, even up north, when rates head back to the 5pc norm?”

Is the reluctance of today’s young people to become homeowners a mere matter of high prices, stagnant wages and tight credit? Apparently not. There’s also polling evidence of a change in basic attitudes:

• “MORI has been publishing fascinating research into the attitudes of Generation Y, the under-31s. They are the least likely to recommend that a young couple buys a house. And why? This question does not involve affordability (homes are, anyway, as affordable as they were ten years ago outside London). They seem unconvinced that it represents a sound long-term investment.”

This could be bad news for the Conservative Party. It, is after all, a well established fact that home owners are more likely to vote blue. Yet, many other countries with lower levels of home ownership still manage to elect rightwing governments and maintain prosperous market economies:

• "...the majority rent in Austria, Denmark the Netherlands, Korea, Sweden and the Netherlands as well as France and Germany. All of these countries get along just fine.”

Thus Fraser Nelson concludes on an optimistic note:

• “...if young Brits prefer to rent, then there’s no reason they should not get along fine too.”

Ah, but here’s the problem: Renting in this country, especially London and the South East, is much more expensive than in, say, Germany. A shift away from home ownership may increase the supply of rental properties, but it may increase the demand for them too. Unless we build more homes, whether for rent or purchase, young people will be paying more for less and with little left over at the end of the month to build up assets of any kind.

Family values will die without economic opportunities for the young

Yesterday’s Deep End was all about using research evidence to achieve a better understanding of social issues. In an insightful article for Slate, William Saletan provides a compelling example.

The issue at stake is whether people are “becoming more liberal about marriage, parenthood, and working women?”:

• “A survey released last week by the Pew Research Center suggests we are. The survey showed big gaps between younger and older Americans on several questions: whether working moms make it harder to sustain successful marriages and raise children, whether kids are better off if their mothers stay home, and whether the increasing number of unwed mothers is a big problem.”

On all of these questions, the opinions of younger people were significantly less conservative than those of older people – suggesting an inevitable ongoing decline in traditional values. 

But as Saletan points out there is an alternative interpretation of the research findings:

• “Maybe the difference between under-30s and their elders isn’t the era in which they grew up. Maybe it’s a lack of life experience. As young people pass from their 20s to their 30s, they get married and have kids. They lose their naïvete about self-realization, having it all, the equality of family structures, and the interchangeability of moms and dads. According to this theory, the reason why older people are more likely to believe that unwed motherhood is a big problem, or that kids do better with stay-at-home moms, is that beyond the age of 30, you discover that these things are true.”

So, what’s the real explanation – a generational shift in values or differences in life experience?

Saletan went back to the original data – cross-referencing what people had said on the issues with answers to two further questions:

• “One question was: ‘Are you currently married, living with a partner, divorced, separated, widowed, or have you never been married?’ The other question was: ‘Do you have any children under age 18?’ I wanted to see whether marital or parental experience influenced the respondents’ attitudes about wives and mothers.”

The results were inconclusive:

• “Parental status made some difference, but not a lot, and not consistently. Marital status made a bigger difference, but the patterns weren’t clear.”

At this point a lesser man might have given up. But Saletan noticed that questions about parental and marital status confused the issue of life experience: 

• “People who had no kids under 18 might be nonparents, or they might be empty-nesters. People who weren’t married might never have had a spouse, or they might have lost one... I asked the researchers at Pew to separate the respondents without minor children into two subcategories: those over 50, who were more likely to be empty-nesters, and those under 50, who were more likely to be childless.  I also requested three marital categories: married, never-married, and an ‘ex-married’ group consisting of respondents who were separated, divorced, or widowed.”

Applying these clearer categories to the data revealed big differences based on life experience:

• “...people under 50 who didn’t have minor children—the true nonparents—diverged sharply from those who had kids...
• “...the gap between marrieds and never-marrieds was bigger than the gap between the youngest age group (18–29) and the oldest (65+).”

It’s worth reading the whole article to fully understand all the ins-and-outs, but there are two immediate lessons to be learned. The first is that careful interpretation of polling data is all important (especially when pollsters who are less scrupulous than Pew have so much scope for misrepresenting their figures). The second is that if we want conservative values to be transmitted to the younger generation then we have to give them the economic opportunities they need to get married and have children. That means decent jobs, further education that doesn’t cripple them with debt and affordable housing fit for raising a family.

Heresy of the week: The best place for old people is a trailer park

The baby boom generation is the biggest in history. In America, ten thousand baby boomers retire every day. Writing for the Pacific Standard, Lisa Margonelli wonders how they are going to cope – and how the rest of society is going to cope with them:

• “Baby boomers aren’t going to retire the way their parents did. They are poorer and more likely to live alone. They can’t depend on pensions, and the real-estate bubble destroyed almost 50 percent of their wealth. Today one in six seniors lives in poverty, and that proportion is rising; the generation of Americans now facing retirement is so financially ill prepared that half of them have less than $10,000 in the bank. The coming swell of retirees will strain our current system to its limits—in terms of not only health care, but also incidental things like road signs, which are hard for drivers over 65 to read in a majority of American cities and towns.”

Living arrangements will be crucial:

• Seniors who can live on their own cost the country relatively little—they even contribute to the economy. But those who move into nursing homes start to run up a significant tab—starting at $52,000 a year. People who are isolated and lonely end up in nursing homes sooner. Hence, finding ways to keep people living on their own, socially engaged, healthy, happy, and out of care isn’t just a personal or family goal—it’s a national priority.

Margonelli’s proposed solution to the issue of housing for older people is a provocative one. She thinks that trailer parks are the answer.

In Britain, mobile homes are associated with holiday accommodation more than anything else, but to the American mind to live in a trailer is to be poor – dirt poor.  Nasty epithets like ‘trailer trash’ only add to the social stigma.

So, given the choice, why would senior citizens even consider such an option? Value for money is one reason:

• “Units built since 1976, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development started regulating their construction, can last as long as site-built homes when they’re well built and maintained. Yet they cost far less: $41 per square foot versus $85 per square foot and up… In one survey, nine out of 10 owners of manufactured homes said they were satisfied with their dwellings.”

But as well as providing affordability and manageability, mobile homes also lend themselves to the creation of purpose-designed retirement communities – and that could be very important indeed:

• “Most places in America make it hard to grow old. Older people in neighborhoods with high crime, lots of traffic, and poor lighting have been found to ‘lose functioning’ (in other words, need nursing homes) earlier than those who live where they can walk. Those who live in the suburbs lose their social networks when they stop driving and become isolated. Loneliness is a killer: Over a six-year period, lonely seniors are 45 percent more likely to die and 59 percent more likely to decline than those who aren’t lonely.”

One thing is for sure: As their baby boomers get old, the nations of the west will need to find entirely new ways of dealing with unprecedented demographic pressures. Imagination will be required, because things cannot go on as they are. Few people want to go to a nursing home before they have to, and we’ll run out of money if, as a rule, they do. 

Liberalism, post-liberalism and loneliness

Killer by Adamski and Seal was one of the biggest and most influential hits of the 1990s. Its title might suggest a pre-occupation with criminal violence, but actually the song is about loneliness – as made clear in the lyric “it’s loneliness that’s the killer.”

It turns out that Messrs Adamski and Seal were on to something. A growing body of research suggests that loneliness – and specifically the feeling of being lonely – is detrimental to both body and mind.

Writing in the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz summarises the latest research:

• “...loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.”

If that is the case, then we have a problem because loneliness is on the increase: 

• “In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that. With baby-boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day, the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.”

It's not just the greying of the population that’s driving the loneliness epidemic; family breakdown is another contributory factor:

• “As nearly half of all marriages continue to end in divorce, as marriage itself floats further out of reach for the undereducated and financially strapped, childhood has become a more solitary and chaotic experience. Single mothers don’t have a lot of time to spend with their children, nor, in most cases, money for emotionally enriching social activities.”

Furthermore, scientists are confirming what should be intuitively obvious, which is that emotional deprivation in childhood has lifelong effects:

• “Deprive us of the attention of a loving, reliable parent, and, if nothing happens to make up for that lack, we’ll tend toward loneliness for the rest of our lives. Not only that, but our loneliness will probably make us moody, self-doubting, angry, pessimistic, shy, and hypersensitive to criticism.”

This isn’t just a matter outward behaviour, the effects of emotional isolation have been detected in the wiring of the brain and even gene expression. The good news is that much of the impact of loneliness – even the physical impacts – are reversible. 

Shulevitz concludes her article by quoting Steve Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at UCLA:

• “Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls ‘molecular remodeling.’ ‘One message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that counts,’’ he says. ‘We have to choose our life well.’”

“Choose our life well” – what better slogan for a liberal society! And yet the choice that liberalism (both social and economic) gives us, is the freedom to break the personal ties that define a traditional society. Mobility, divorce, abortion, euthanasia, secularism, immigration, offshoring, tax avoidance – the things that all these features of modern life have in common is the severing of previous connections. Of course, for many people, this works out to their satisfaction, but other people get left behind – and alone.

For libertarians this is just the price has to be paid for freedom. The liberal approach, however, is to try and compensate through state intervention. Early years intervention programmes like Sure Start are a key example of this approach:

• “James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago who tabulates the costs of early childhood deprivation, speaks bitterly of ‘silos’ in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease. As far as he’s concerned, these are, in too many cases, symptoms of the same social disorder: the failure to help families raise their children.” 

But, surely, the fundamental problem here is is not the failure to help families raise their children, but the failure of families to raise their children.

There is no clearer illustration of the difference between liberalism and the emerging politics of post-liberalism. Liberalism is about substituting for family and community; post-liberalism is about restoring  family and community.

Heresy of the week: Never mind UKIP, it’s young voters Conservatives should watch out for

One reason for UKIP’s success is that the party has a particular appeal to older people – who are more likely to turn up at the polling station than younger voters. Thus, on the face of it, this is one more reason why the Conservative Party should pay particular attention to the grey vote.

But here’s the thing. While older people are more likely to vote at elections, they’re also more likely to die between elections. A party that fails to appeal to younger people is itself doomed to die out.

Of course, as the years go by, younger people become older people – and there’s a complacent assumption that as they do so they’ll become more conservative too. But will they? It isn’t the mere passage of time that changes a person’s political outlook, but the taking-up of opportunities and the taking-on of responsibilities. 

That’s why we should be deeply concerned that for the generation that came of age around the year 2000 – the so-called ‘millennials’ or ‘generation Y’ – opportunities are hard to find and responsibilities are being delayed. 

Writing from a US perspective, Derek Thompson sets out the situation in a piece for the Atlantic: 

• “Generation Y is the most educated in American history, but its education came at a price. Average debt for graduates of public universities doubled between 1996 and 2006. Students chose to take it on because they expected to find a job that paid it off; instead, they found themselves stranded in the worst economy in 80 years. Young people who skipped college altogether have faced something worse: depressed wages in a global economy that finds it easier than ever to replace jobs with technology or to move them overseas.
• “Finding a good job as a young adult has always been a game of chance. But more and more, the rules have changed: Heads, you lose; tails, you're disqualified. The unemployment rate for young people scraped 18 percent in 2010, and in the past five years, real wages have fallen for millennials – and only for millennials.”

Saddled with student debt and facing poor prospects, millennials have responded by practicing a kind of personal austerity:

• “...Americans ages 21-34 bought only 27 percent of the new vehicles sold in the United States in 2010, compared with 38 percent in 1985; from 2008 to '11, only half as many young Americans as a decade earlier acquired their first mortgage. Having been rejected by the economy, millennials are in turn rejecting cars and houses – the pillars of the modern consumer economy.”

This isn’t just about consumerism, but family life too:

• “More than one in five Americans ages 18-34 told Pew Research Center pollsters last year that they've postponed having a baby "because of the bad economy." The same proportion said they were holding off marriage until the economy recovered.”

In fact, rather than progressing to the next stage of life, many young adults seem to be going backwards:

• “More than a third of 25- to 29-year-olds had moved back in with their parents. Millennials have been scorned as perma-children, forever postponing adulthood, or labeled with that most un-American of character flaws: helplessness.”

It’s all very easy to be scornful of these “perma-children”, but after the wages of the young have been taxed to pay the unfunded pensions and benefits of the retired, taxed again to service public sector debt their parents voted for and further reduced by student loan repayments their parents never had to make, that doesn’t leave much over for a deposit on some monstrously over-priced one-bedroom flat.

Moreover, the very policies that might give young people a fighting chance – such as building more houses, means-testing pensioner benefits to reduce the deficit and transferring resources from healthcare to education – would be politically impossible. Even if the Conservative Party were brave enough to act in the long-term interests of the country, UKIP would swoop in to feast on the immediate anger of older voters.

Thus millions of younger people will be left to fester in resentment and dependency – and which party do you think will benefit most from that?

Heresy of the week: For social liberals, there’s now no reason not to legalise polygamous marriage

Will legalising same sex marriage lead to the legalisation of polygamous marriage? Claims that it might are typically met with accusations of scare-mongering. 

However, in a provocative article for Slate, Jillian Keenan – an enthusiastic support of same sex marriage – not only accepts the legal recognition of polygamy as a possibility, but regards it as one to be welcomed.

• “While the Supreme Court and the rest of us are all focused on the human right of marriage equality, let’s not forget that the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage. We need to legalize polygamy, too. Legalized polygamy in the United States is the constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive choice.”

In defence of her position, she applies a number of standard-issue socially liberal arguments – such as the principle of harm-reduction:

• “...legalizing consensual adult polygamy wouldn’t legalize rape or child abuse. In fact, it would make those crimes easier to combat… Right now, all polygamous families, including the healthy, responsible ones, are driven into hiding... In the resulting isolation, crime and abuse can flourish unimpeded.”

Then there’s the appeal to diversity:

• “Most polygamous families are motivated by religious faith, such as fundamentalist Mormonism or Islam… there is no constitutional reason why they shouldn’t be able to express that faith in their marriages. Legalized polygamous marriage would also be good for immigrant families, some of whom have legally polygamous marriages in their home countries that get ripped apart during the immigration process.”

And also the appeal to liberty:

• “If a woman wants to marry a man, that’s great. If she wants to marry another woman, that’s great too… And if she wants to marry a man with three other wives, that’s her damn choice.”

And not forgetting the appeal to equality:

• “Though polygamists are a minority—a tiny minority, in fact—freedom has no value unless it extends to even the smallest and most marginalized groups among us.”

Keenan rather understates her case here. Though the formal practice of polygamy may be rare in the west (outside of certain minority cultures), informal polygamy is relatively common – for instance, in the case of a man who maintains a long-term relationship with a partner other than his wife). Why should the ‘other woman’ in such a relationship be marginalised as a ‘mistress’ when she could enjoy equal rights within some form of modern marriage?

As for the interests of children, western societies already tolerate – and, in many respects, encourage – a variety of non-traditional family structures.

Admittedly, the recognition of polygamous marriage would raise a number of legal complications – due to there being more than two people and more than one relationship involved. However, as we’ve seen in this country, same sex marriage has also raised certain complications, which have been resolved in various ways (for instance, by having no legal concept of consummation).

Of course, if you were to ask those who support same sex marriage whether they’d also support polygamous marriage, then most of them would say no – especially the politicians. But on what grounds would they justify their opposition? Certainly, as Jillian Keenan makes clear, the socially liberal case for legalising polygamy is pretty watertight. So what other grounds does that leave?

Well, one could always assert a traditional cultural norm – but social liberals may want to think twice before pulling on that thread.

The staggering hypocrisy of America’s liberal elites

Last month, a woman by the name of Susan Patton wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian advising female undergraduates to use their time at university to find a suitable husband:

• “Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are... you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”

These are hardly the sentiments of someone who has a low opinion of women, but she was, of course, condemned as a traitor to the feminist cause – as if finding a husband was all that she had recommended that female undergraduates do at university (which she hadn’t).

Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat explains the real reason for the outraged reaction:

• “[Patton’s] betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

As Douthat notes, there’s nothing unusual about an upper class trying to perpetuate itself:

• “Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.”

Yet, for all that liberal distancing, marriage remains an excellent way of concentrating wealth and privilege. Indeed, the best educated Americans (and Britons) are more, not less, likely to marry one another than they were in the past – a process known as assortative mating. Moreover (and despite the fashionable academic talk of diverse family structures) people with higher qualifications are more likely to get married and stay married than people with fewer qualifications.

As old fashioned aristocrats would also recognise, property is another excellent way of keeping the riff-raff at arm’s length:

• “...elite collegians… move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made…What Richard Florida called ‘the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places’ is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.”

It is, of course, a good thing that deliberate discrimination on the grounds of race or gender is no longer acceptable in polite society. However, the super-sensitivity of the liberal elites to these old evils serves an ulterior purpose – to distract from newer, more slippery, forms of inequality:

• “...the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.”