Articles

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has changed numerous things about our daily lives. Much of the public focus has naturally been on the health and safety of individuals, families, and society. Others have focused on the economic impact of both the virus and the various policies implemented to slow its spread and “flatten the curve.” Social distancing has changed almost all aspects of our daily interactions.

Tens of thousands of public and private schools have closed their doors to over 425 million students because of the Coronavirus – and these numbers continue to rise. Teachers and administrators are scrambling to figure out how to instruct students in this new reality.

We’ve all seen the headline: “Money is the leading cause of divorce.” In fact, it isn’t money itself, but disagreement about it that makes financial conflict the strongest predictor of divorce. Financial disagreements “last longer, are harder to resolve, and are more important to spouses than other types of disagreements.” Indeed, one reason financial issues appear to be so important to marital quality is because they reflect deeper, more serious marital processes and challenges.

"In the end, the questions and doubts that generate so many crises of faith for so many can be met by sustained and careful reflection on the premises and perspectives from which such struggles spring."

In 1992, New York became the 18th state to ban paid surrogacy[1](Belkin B1). At that time an estimated “40 percent of all surrogate births in the United States [occurred] in New York” (B1). But in the U.S., the trend towards banning surrogacy has now reversed.

Most sex education, however well-meaning, has failed to achieve its dual purpose: 1) Promote the understanding that personal growth, development, character, relationships and sexual interaction all relate to the quality of life most people long to experience; and 2) prevent negative, harmful, self-destructive choices which undermine the quality of an adolescent’s family relationships and future opportunities.

Originally published in the Institute for Family Studies Blog Key Findings.

I work with Dan Lichter and Jeff Swigert. We have been examining the degree to which there is a structural mismatch in the marriage market. We have data on about 4% of Americans where we match single women in the survey to married women that otherwise have similar characteristics. We use the characteristics of the husbands of those matches to determine the likely characteristics of each single woman’s husband if she were married, which we call her “synthetic husband.” These synthetic husbands answer important questions about why there is such an imbalance in the marriage market and what the imbalance looks like.

In the 1920 book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (“Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life”), jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Höche coined the phrase Lebensunwertes Leben or “life unworthy of life.” The book was a pseudoscientific argument for the systematic elimination from society of those who were deemed to be unfit, disabled, mentally defective, and racially suspect. It was not an unusual work for the times, nor was it outside the mainstream of thinking in the worldwide eugenics movement that began in earnest with the writings of Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Binding and Höche’s book did serve, however, as a mainstay resource for Nazi racial science over the following two decades.