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The Silent Partner in Family Decline / Artikel mises.org

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http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1524
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The Silent Partner in Family Decline
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By Per
Henrik Hansen

[Posted June 8, 2004]

<img alt src="http://www.mises.org/images3/family.jpg" align="right" border="0" width="210" height="209">The
traditional family has for many centuries and in most countries been the core
unit of society. It has been the foundation and even the ultimate purpose in
many people's lives. It has provided a stable framework to bring children into
the world, to raise them, to teach them manners and how to become productive
and happy human beings. It has been relied upon for emotional and financial
support, and in many other regards.

All this is
changing now.

Below are some
statistical facts about the Danish family, a country with an advanced welfare
state and advanced decline in family life. It is a useful study as an
archetype of many developed countries.

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Fewer people are getting married
and when they do marry it is later in life. 88 percent of 30-year old
women were married in 1970. In 2002 the number was 47 percent.
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The average age of first
marriage has risen for women from 22.8 years old in 1970 to 30.3 years
old in 2002. For men it has risen from 25.1 years in 1970 to 32.8 years
in 2002.
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More and more people live
together without getting married, but more than a third of all adults
are not married and do not live in any other kind of relationship. They
live alone.
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More of the marriages end in
divorce. In 1975, 18 percent of all the marriages from 1950 had ended in
divorce. In 2000, 37 percent of all the marriages from 1975 had ended in
divorce.
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Women are getting older before
they become mothers. The average age of women giving birth in 2002 was
29.9 years, which had increased from 26.7 years in 1970. The average age
of first time mothers was 23.7 years in 1970, in 1996 it was 27.7 years.
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Fewer women get to be mothers.
The childlessness for 40 year old women has increased from 9 percent in
1985, to 13.3 percent in 2002.
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The fertility rate has fallen
from 2.6 children in 1965 to 1.7 children in 2002.
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More children experience
breaking families. In 1981 a little less than one in every five children
did not live with both his parents. Today this number has increased to
one in every four children that do not live with both his parents.
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The families with children where
both parents have full time jobs have increased from 50 percent in 1980
to 83 percent in 1998. In families without any children the number has
only increased from 68 percent to 75 percent.
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The share of children between
0-6 years of age, who were in day nursery, day care or kindergarten
was 7.3 percent in 1965. In 2000 the share was 76.6 percent.
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More families with children
receive welfare payments. In 1980, the families with children that
received welfare benefits were 33 percent, today it is 38 percent (not
counting child benefits of appx. USD 500 every three months per child,
which all families receive, both rich and poor).
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94 percent of the families of 17
year olds (you are a child until you are 18 years old) have today
received welfare payments at one point in time. Only 6 percent of the
families had never received any welfare payments during the life of the
child.
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On average the families with
children only save 4.1 percent of their disposable income. Families
without any children save in average 14.4 percent of their disposable
income. More than three times as much.
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Some of the
explanations that have been suggested to account for these important
transformations are:

<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoBodyText">society has
become more affluent and people do not need to stay together out of necessity
anymore;  
<li class="MsoBodyText">more people
and especially more women are spending time in their twenties getting a
higher education;
<li class="MsoBodyText">more women
today are participating in the workforce;
<li class="MsoBodyText">people today
have more opportunities that they wish to explore, which sometimes are not
in harmony with the obligations that family life involves, i.e. the
changes are a life style choice;
<li class="MsoBodyText">along with
the increased affluence people have become more individualistic and
selfish;
<li class="MsoBodyText">secularization
and liberation from tradition have set people free to follow their own
desires and not necessarily what society"dictates."</li>
</ul>
The changes
probably have multiple causes but it would be an incomplete picture not to
mention the ways that the welfare state directly and indirectly influences the
family.

We can cite
several channels through which the welfare state affects the family.

Generous
welfare programs and benefits

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The welfare
programs and benefits imply that the family's role as a financial support
unit has significantly decreased. A single parent will be provided well for
by the government. Likewise people will be provided for by the government if
they are sick, handicapped, on maternity, getting old, unemployed etc. These
are all circumstances where the family previously played an important role.

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Very
high taxes

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The high
level of taxes in Denmark, which already have been discussed in a previous
article: Denmark:
Potemkin Village, have made it very
difficult to provide for a family with only one household income. Very few
people in Denmark can afford to have a house and one or two cars on only one
household income. That means that both parents today normally have to work
full time and even then there is still very little money left for most
people when the fixed expenses are paid for. This is substantiated by the
low average saving rate in families with children, and by the very high
percentage of families with children where both parents work full time today.
The tight economic situation put a lot of stress on the family. The family
is also being stressed timewise with both parents working full-time
jobs.

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Nurseries,
day care centers and kindergartens are subsidized by the government

<blockquote dir="ltr">
The subsidies
to these government institutions of course favor their use. Together with
the almost impossibility of one-income families this can probably account
for the spectacular increase there has been in the institutionalization of
the caring of children.

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Strong
encouragement to use public instead of private transportation

<blockquote dir="ltr">
For most
families with children it is a great help in their daily lives to have a car.
Unfortunately it is a specific goal of the Danish welfare state to encourage
people to use public transportation in which the government has invested a
lot of money. People are being encouraged in many ways. There are very high
taxes on cars, gasoline and car insurance. Car prices in Denmark are
approximately three times the level that they are in the USA and so are
gasoline prices. These taxes are in themselves preventive for many young
families.

At the same
time public transportation is significantly subsidized. Other encouragements
to shift to public transportation have been car traffic hampering devices
such as extensive use of roundabouts, road bumps, narrowing of roads,
closing down of second lanes to make more room for bicycles and pedestrians,
not investing in new roads, electronic speed controls in many places,
abolishment of parking spaces, huge increases in parking fees, huge
increases in traffic violation fees, hiring of a lot of parking-ticket
controllers and traffic police and lowering of the allowed level of alcohol
in the blood when driving to practically nothing.

Not being
able to have the convenience of a car when you have small children, or if
you do have a car then to be financially severely burdened and also hampered
in its use adds further stress to the modern Danish family, living in a
world of specialization and the division of labor, where not all activities
can be expected to take place in the close neighborhood.

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The
welfare state involves group antagonistic rhetoric

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A welfare
state is characterized by special interest groups fighting for government
power in order to bestow political privileges on their own members.
This subverts the harmony of interests that exists on the free market and
often times lead to group hostility. One group's gain becomes another
group's loss.

There are
many special interests: Rich and poor, employers and employees, citizens and
immigrants, young and old, and also men and women. You can very often hear
stories in the Danish news about a new study that shows that women are not
being equally treated in this or that industry, in academia, or in the
government sector. You will be told that there are not as many women
managers or professors as there are men, and if there are, then they are not
being paid the same level of salary. No other explanatory factors are
mentioned than discrimination.

All this is
accompanied with demands for government intervention. Unfortunately this
type of rhetoric and demand for special privilege cannot avoid creating
resentment which in turn affects behavior: Why marry the enemy?

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These are all
channels through which it is not unreasonable to claim that the welfare state
directly and indirectly plays an important role in the gradual disintegration
of the Danish family. So when the welfare statists claim that they are
providing safety, security and quality of life for the citizens, it seems
obvious that this coerced public service is crowding out the voluntary private
alternative.

_______________________________

Per Henrik Hansen teaches economics at the
Copenhagen Business School. Send him MAIL.
See his archive.
Comment on the Blog.