Cry If You Want To, Then Vote

The Times reports that “Men are fuming; women are despairing” about the state of the nation – and the economy – which means the men will vote and the women won’t. Such behavior skews the results toward the fumers, natch. Which could, down the line, mean that women have even more to despair about, if the representatives the fumers choose then go on to do further damage to the economy and the frayed social safety net.

The way out? Vote ladies! Time to stand up for our sorry selves, before we’re sorrier still.

Pull Your Socks Up

And sit up straight! These homely mottoes are generally preparation for getting things done.

Here’s Elizabeth Warren using the socks image in her post for today on the White House blog:

Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.

The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started—right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.

President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them—way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.

If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field, we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families. But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything. Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings—there’s a lot of work to be done.

When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush. Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back. When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression. She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same: she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.

It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work.

Warren is following in her grandma’s footsteps as she pioneers the new consumer financial protection agency. Can we give her a hand in solving our problems one at a time?

Elizabeth Warren to Lead Consumer Agency, Pocket Appointment

After lots of pressure from unions, middle class types, and progressives like Arianna Huffington, the President is apparently appointing University of Houston alum and former UH law school prof (now at Harvard) as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency she proposed. Here’s the rather downplayed Times story.
A bone to the base? A chance for some real discussion in the White House economic sector? Or maybe some change in policy beyond the pre-election stir? Could be exciting.
Reminds me of a song from my childhood by Garnet Mimms:
Lady, lady, lady — why do you holler? Nobody’s seen your Johnny Dollar… Tell me where do you go / when you ain’t got no dough / there must be a way out of here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C89xeTRL-pM

Women’s Work

Part of this woman’s workload these days is keeping up with the blog. How does that intersect with family holidaying (also a part of the job)? Not well. But the blog’s focus on Women’s Work makes a Labor Day post seems really apropos. Fortunately, it has in the past as well. This year, I’ll turn back the clock and offer you these click throughs to earlier ruminations on the theme:

Never Done and Under Paid

Women’s Labor and Infertility

Now we have to bake a lemon cake. More to come on Women’s Work when we’re not so busy.

Post-Fertile Boomers and the Birth Rate Drop

New data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that both the US crude birthrate and the fertility rate fell in 2009, hand in hand with the falling economy, continuing the trend begun in 2008. People don’t want to have kids they can’t afford – basically a responsible and predicted decision.

It happens that the crude birth rate—at 13.5*— is the lowest in a century (so basically it’s the lowest ever in the US) – and that’s making headlines and summoning images of a baby-less, unstable future. But that’s not what’s happening. The wire story tells us:

The United States birthrate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a century as many people apparently decided they could not afford more mouths to feed….The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than in any other year in the nation’s history. The recession
began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.

Connections like these confuse the birth rate, the fertility rate, and the number of births. The birthrate (the number of births per 1000 people in the population) is not the important indicator here – what matters is the fertility rate (the number of births per 1000 fertile women [ages 15 to 44]) – which is also sometimes confusingly called a birth rate. The fertility rate did drop a bit last year, but not to record low levels.

So you’re not crazy. Those babies you saw in the park (or took to the park) this weekend were not figments of your imagination. And hospital delivery rooms are not suddenly empty. As you’ll recall, the fertility rate in 2007 was way up (to 69.5)† – higher than it had been since 1990 (70.9), so having it fall a bit now (down to 66.8) just means that we’re back where we were four years ago before the economic boom (which turned out to be pretty pseudo) led some folks to have more kids than they might otherwise.

In spite of the recession, in spite of the headlines, and in spite of the fact that fewer kids are arriving lately, we are not seeing record low numbers of women having kids. But we are seeing record numbers of older people. As the last boomers move out of their fertility years into that 45 to 64 year-old age band, and as older folks continue to stick around longer and longer, it negatively affects the birth rate because the proportion of no-longer-fertile people is increasing. Even if the fertility rate stays steady, when the proportion of old folks grows, the share of the overall population represented by fertile women necessarily decreases, and so the crude birth rate does too. Like crude oil, the crude birth rate needs some refining to be useful.

As noted, in 2009 the fertility rate did also decline (from the recent high of 69.5 in 2007 to 66.8) but it’s still in the narrow range it’s shimmered in for the past forty years, and apart from the past three years, higher than it’s been since 1993, when it was 67.0. The record bottomed out in 1997, at 63.6.

As you can see in the first graph above, the real story of fertility decline happened most recently in the 60s and 70s, and before that between the world wars. The ups and downs of our era are miniscule in comparison. Contra the needs of the news cycle, nothing drastic or frightening is happening on the fertility front this year. It’s just plain family planning.

This post first appeared on RH Reality Check.

*The rate in 1800 was about 55 births / 1000 population; in 1900 it was about 30, in 1929 it had declined to 21.2; by 1936 at the low point in the depression it was 18.6. After the war it boomed back up into the mid twenties, but headed down after that to 15.9 in 1980, 14.0 in 2000, and the new low of 13.5 in 2009.

†2007 was also the year we had a record high number of babies—outdoing the baby boom high in 1957, raised because the number of people having babies in 2007 was much bigger, though the fertility rate in 2007 was much lower than in 1957 (69.5 compared to 122.7)—along with stories of rising total fertility rates (numbers of babies a person would have over her lifetime at the current rate) over the year prior.

Happy Suffrage Anniversary today

RAISING CONCERNS: MaryScott Hagle, left, talks with developer Michael Ainbinder, right, about her concerns regarding the proposed Heights-area Walmart development during Wednesday’s public hearing at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

90 years of talking back to power, ladies! 162, if you’re counting since 1848. And a bit of talking before that too. Voting adds to the effect.
Go MaryScott!
NY Times Op Ed connects suffrage fight to the contemporary scene
Wal-Mart Asks Supreme Court to Hear Bias Suit – involving more than one million female workers

Pay for Delay

A program in the Satara district of the Indian state of Maharashtra pays newlyweds to wait at least two years before having their first child. (click for NY TIMES article)

Reproduction is a big issue in India, where the Times reports that roughly half of India’s population is under 25. That means they’ve got a big workforce, and a big group of people on track to start having kids of their own:

“… if youth is India’s [workforce] advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be. Estimates range from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion people, and Indian leaders recognize that that must be avoided.”

Currently families in India average 2.6 kids, where 2.1 would sustain the current population level long term (it’s 2.06 in the US today). (Family planning generally happens after rather than before in India– where “many women [opt] for sterilization after their second child” — paralleling the US, where about 50% of married women are surgically sterile by the time they’re 40.)

Overall goal of the pay-to-delay program: to reduce population growth.
And the ripple effects extend much beyond the population cut.

Collateral upsides: the ladies get more education; down the line the kids they have later are more educated; then both the more educated moms and their more educated kids participate more robustly in the national economy. Dads benefit too when families are smaller and mom contributes more to the family income.

Further upsides: More educated women = more women’s voices are heard and more women participate in policy making.

The dynamic again parallels the US, where delay also leads to more education for women and to an increase in their participation in policy-making roles and in public discourse.

Unlike in China, no rules are set on the numbers of kids families may have under this program, but educated families tend to have fewer kids and to educate those kids more, due to increased means as well as increased awareness of educational ops.

In the US, delay of family is a common means of raising income – so as to have more to raise kids on when they do arrive. In the Indian program, the program adds a direct payment to the raised income that delay brings on its own.

Right now it’s a small program, but if it’s successful it may spread to other districts and states. Paying for delay at the front end could lead to big gains — social and individual — for the long haul.

Domestic Product

Later Motherhood and the Politics & Economics of Women's Work