What's the great economic engine? You might be surprised.

It's marriage.  That's the theme of this article by researcher Patrick Fagan of the Family Research Council.  Sadly, there's little to no discussion of the importance of marriage and family.  Many people are too busy trying to deal with the symptoms of the problem, redefining it, or simply ignoring it.

Family, church, and school are the three basic people-forming institutions, and it is no wonder that they produce the best results—including economic and political ones—when they cooperate.

Even if all the market reforms of the Washington think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine were enacted, we’d still need to kiss the Great American Economy goodbye. Below the level of economic policy lies a society that is producing fewer people capable of hard work, especially married men with children. As the retreat from marriage continues apace, there are fewer and fewer of these men, resulting in a slowly, permanently decelerating economy.

When men get married, their sense of responsibility and drive to provide gives them the incentive to work much harder. This translates into an average 27-percent increase in their productivity and income. With the retreat from marriage, instead of this “marriage premium,” we get more single men (who work the least), more cohabiting men (who work less than married men), and more divorced men (who fall between the singles and cohabiters).

All this is visible in the changing work patterns of our country, resulting in real macro-economic consequences. Fifty years ago family life and the economy were quite different.

Around 1960, just prior to the sexual revolution, the United States was the world’s heavyweight champion in economic productivity and earnings. Today we can still lift a lot, but, to extend the metaphor, we are moving down to the middleweight class. My colleague Dr. Henry Potrykus has shown that divorce alone has reduced the annual growth rate of the economy by at least one sixth since the mid-1980s, which with its compounding effect is by now quite significant.

No matter which way you look at it—through the lens of income, savings, or poverty—marriage is the great engine of the economy, with every household a building block that either contributes or takes away, millions of times over. Put all these families together, and we have the team that runs the American economy.

Work, morality, politicians and the church

Here's an interesting discussion on the role of work, morality and character.  It's an interesting discussion because for many, most people there's a disconnect between morality and work and the economy.  As a result work either isn't meaningful or it becomes an end in itself.

Noonan sees the link but this blog post by Greg Forster believes she neglects the important role the church should play.

Over the Labor Day weekend, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote about “Work and the American Character.” Her column points to the critical connection between the spiritual value of work and the moral strength of our culture. Unfortunately, in her search for a beacon of hope that can point us back toward the dignity of work, she neglects the church in favor of less promising possibilities.

Noonan begins by highlighting the meaningfulness of work as the critical foundation of culture:

A job isn't only a means to a paycheck, it's more. "To work is to pray," the old priests used to say. God made us as many things, including as workers. When you work you serve and take part. To work is to be integrated into the daily life of the nation. There is pride and satisfaction in doing work well, in working with others and learning a discipline or a craft or an art. To work is to grow and to find out who you are.

In return for performing your duties, whatever they are, you receive money that you can use freely and in accordance with your highest desire. A job allows you the satisfaction of supporting yourself or your family, or starting a family. Work allows you to renew your life, which is part of the renewing of civilization.

Work gives us purpose, stability, integration, shared mission. And so to be unable to work—unable to find or hold a job—is a kind of catastrophe for a human being…This is the real reason jobs and employment are the No. 1 issue in America's domestic life.

In the rest of her column, she connects the economic crisis to the American people’s sense of anxiety about declining moral character. What kind of people are we? People who find meaning in our lives as we “serve and take part,” or people who think the good life is found in narcissistic self-expression and indulgence?

It’s no coincidence that the culture has increased its celebration of immorality at the same time it has decreased its emphasis on the intrinsic dignity and meaning of work. In two lectures he gave in January on “economic wisdom” and the role of the pastor, Dallas Willard outlined in detail the common thread between these two developments: we value work less and we value immorality more because, increasingly, we have lost the ability to “say no to our desires” when moral goodness requires it (c.f. Titus 2:12).

God didn’t create us just to sit back and think good thoughts. He made us to go out and love our neighbors – to love our neighbors in action, not just with cheap talk (c.f. I John 3:18). That means rolling up our sleeves and getting to work! Our work is how we serve others and shape ourselves into the kind of people God wants us to be.

Also notice the seamless connection Noonan draws between our obedience to God through our work and our participation in the life of the civil community. Work isn’t an isolated experience. It takes place in community and it is designed for community. As Noonan says, “to work is to be integrated into the daily life of the nation” – and of the state, county, city, town, and neighborhood.

That’s why work is not just central to each individual’s life; it’s central to the life of society. A jobs crisis is a spiritual crisis. To lack the opportunity to work isn’t simply a financial hardship, it’s a “catastrophe for a human being.” That is, it strikes a blow to the heart of our humanity.

Economic systems are part of a nation’s shared spiritual life. As Willard argued in his lectures, there is a seamless connection between the values embodied in an economic system and the character of individuals within that system. The system and the individual are two sides of the same coin. An economic system embodying the cultural belief that all people can and should support themselves and make a contribution to society through their work will be associated with people who have dignity, honesty, self-control, diligence, social solidarity, concern for the needs of others, and generosity – because those are the qualities of fruitful workers. Meanwhile, an economic system embodying the cultural belief that happiness comes from satisfying your natural desires will be associated with individuals who are greedy, slothful, self-indulgent, cynical, and resentful.

Willard also argued that an economic system focused on satisfying our desires instead of on productive work inevitably leads to catastrophic political conflict. This is why the role of the pastor is so critical. Pastors have a prophetic mission to speak to us as citizens about the guiding moral values, principles, and practices of our civil community, yet at the same time it is not the calling of pastors to participate in electoral politics. This positions them – almost alone – as people who are able to equip and empower our culture to turn back from the rising tide of materialism and narcissism.

Forster says Noonan misses the important role pastors need to play in elevating the virtue of work and instead she points to politicans and what they can and need to do.

Here Noonan could learn something from Willard. In her column, she argues that to restore dignity and hope to our culture, we need politicians who celebrate – sincerely, not as a focus-group-tested messaging gimmick – the extraordinary possibilities of work, enterprise, and entrepreneurship to transform our lives and our culture for the better. I think she’s right that politicians who did that would be a positive cultural force. However, turning to politicians as our primary cultural hope is a mistake.

 Philosopher Dallas Willard says this turn to politicians is a sign we're not turning to God.

 As Willard pointed out, the very fact that we mostly turn to politicians to tell us what the good life is – and to provide it for us – is itself a sign that we’ve turned away from God. We will never get away from catastrophic political conflict as long as people turn mainly to politicians when they seek hope. Government has an important social role to play, of course, and not just in forbidding force and fraud – libertarianism is as much a false hope as socialism. But “the American character” will never recover until we look to pastors as our primary guides and teachers in building a culture (which includes the economic system) that provides hope, dignity, and flourishing.

Noonan herself laments that “the old priests used to say” that “to work is to pray.” Why then does she now look only for politicians to say it? Are there no more pastors? Are today’s pastors incapable of saying it, mired in a truncated vision of their role in our lives, permanently stricken with prophetic laryngitis? Or is it that we no longer believe pastors matter?

Supermajorities of Americans say they don’t have a sense that their work is meaningful. How would Christianity be positioned to influence the culture if Christians became known as the people who know why work is meaningful, and who have wisdom on how businesses and economic systems should run? Pastors have the power to equip them with that knowledge. It’s a big job, but that’s all the more reason to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Certainly politicians have a role to play in the economy and society but I think their role in society becomes improperly elevated as people turn from God.  People look to politicians rather than God and His ways for their answers and security.  Politicians and by extension the state have a God ordained jurisdiction they're supposed to operate in.  It's limited.  The same is true for the other, primaryGod ordained institutions in society, e.g. family and church.  People look for the state to take over family responsibilities.  For instance our social welfare system makes fathers in many instances superfluous through generous benefits.  As a result it often facilitates irresponsible behavior.

The crisis of too few babies and what that means for Minnesota. Slower economic growth. And abortion.

Jonathan Last, writer for Weekly Standard, has come out a with a new book on the demographic winter hitting the world and the West in particular.  Here's an excerpt from one of his recent emails talking about his new book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting...What to Expect."

We aren't having enough babies.

And we're doomed.

That's the short version of my book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting... What to Expect has a pretty simple premise, but the details are, to me at least, fascinating.

Because the story is not as simple as it looks. There are lots of obvious reasons why people don't have as many babies as they used to: Infant mortality, which was once a scourge, has been nearly eliminated. Urbanization and industrialization moved people out of rural farming life (where kids were useful) and into cities (where kids couldn’t work and cost more to raise). When the government started providing Social Security and Medicare benefits, it essentially set up an operation to compete with adult children in the job of caring for aging parents. And as our society accepted—and mastered—contraception (especially the birth control pill), people were able to delay childbearing indefinitely.

Those are the usual suspects.

But what shocked me, as I delved deeper into the data, was the possibility that it wasn’t just this economic change or that logistical shift that was pushing people into having fewer babies. It was that this global baby bust might be a product of modern life itself.

In academic circles, this Grand Unified Theory is called the Theory of the Second Demographic Transition.

SDT theory holds that human beings are evolving into a higher state of being, where their individual desires—for validation and expression and freedom—make having children unnecessary. Think of it as a kind of reverse Darwinism, where the wealthiest, best-educated, highest elites decide that they no longer need to reproduce in order to attain a full life. The final irony, of course, that SDT-type behavior is most pronounced in the cultural groups who are most devoted to "Darwinism," not as an evolutionary precept, but as a theological (or anti-theological, as the case may be) worldview. Go figure.

The effects of this Second Demographic Transition range from the comic to the tragic. Germany, for instance, is perhaps 30 years ahead of America on the road to demographic ruin. Over in Deutschland the field of urban planning has shifted to figuring out how to "right-size" depopulated cities by demolishing abandoned schools and buildings and turning city blocks into parks and "green space."

Japan is a bit further ahead of Germany and is set to lose perhaps half of its population by the end of this century. Last year, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than they did diapers for babies, and by 2040, there will be one Japanese citizen over the age of 100 for every Japanese newborn. All of which has set up clash of the generations, where the young and the elderly are locked in a zero-sum arrangement concerning their futures. Think I’m exaggerating? A few days ago Japan's finance minister said that the country's elderly need to "hurry up and die already."

And he didn't lose his job.

All of which is to say that the old Trotskyite trope is true: You may not be interested in demography, but demography is interested in you...

How is this relevant to Minnesota?  I sat in on a state legislative hearing where Minnesota's economist Tom Stinson talked about the "new normal" for Minnesota and the US's economies.  That new normal is slower economic growth.  Why?  A key reason is an aging population and smaller labor population.  He pointed to numbers from the state demographer showing Minnesota's total labor force barely keeping above zero growth over the next 20 years or so.  Fewer workers, growing welfare system, slower economic growth means big problems.

Where does abortion come in to play?  Nationally there are 55 million fewer Americans because of the number of lives taken by abortion over the past 40 years. That means millions fewer workers to keep our economy chugging along.

Education like Health Care is in Trouble. Part of answer. More Competition.

A well known college drop out says there are enough jobs but not enough qualified people to fill them.  The problem is our education system.  Most people would give this comment a second thought except the source is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, a multi-billionaire.

The tech billionaire and philanthropist singled out exclusive universities for caring more about their acceptance rates than the quality of the education they offer. Gates, who dropped out of Harvard University, said federal money should go to those who look to teach.

“Who takes the people with the low SAT and educates them very well?” Gates said. “That should be rewarded."

Gates also expressed concern about state funding for education, given that health care expenses are increasing.

“State budgets are pretty easy to describe: They are spending more on medical costs, and a lot of that is coming from reducing their education spending,” Gates said.

I think he sees a legitimate problem with education and growth of health care expenses.  We're spending tons of money but not getting back the return we want.

An important part of the answer?  Empowering consumers rather than just pouring more money into the status quo.

Gates argued that the high unemployment rate — 7.9 percent, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor statistics — is the result of deficiencies in the educational system, rather than an absence of available jobs.

There are currently three million more jobs than there are people with the degrees to fill them, and Gates said the American system needs to start supplying workers or risk losing these opportunities to other countries.

“Many people want jobs, and there are a lot of open jobs,” Gates said. “It is up to the education system to equilibrate that.”

Whether that's totally accurate, I don't know the answer to that.  But even if it is correct, the education system isn't THE answer.  Part of the solution but not the whole.  The breakdown of the family, loss of character are also key parts of the problem.

The day of reckoning is fast approaching, because the money is running out to throw at education, health care and other social problems.

Who won the debate and what difference will it make?

The debate left partisans feeling like their man won the debate.  In boxing terms, each of them got shots in but no knockouts.  Obama was clearly more energized and aggressive while Romney calmly got in his talking points in a cool, articulate manner.  Some give a slight edge to Obama overall.

I think overall Romney was the winner because the debate didn't change the arc of the campaign which is in his direction.  I think this is because people, independents, undecideds are trying to figure out whether Romney is up to the job of being president.  Nothing happened last night to say he isn't.  He was able to go toe to toe with the president and came off better in terms of giving a forward looking vision.  Obama doesn't give a clear, hopeful vision for where he wants to take the nation over the next for years.  Romney also seemed fresher.

The most telling commentary was this focus group of undecideds and former Obama voters convened by Frank Luntz, the pollster.  A number of past Obama voters said they were changing their votes.  If they are representative of other, past Obama voters, then Obama is in trouble.

Obama has a poor record on the economy which everyone can see and experience on a personal level.   That's why he's trying to make Romney the issue at every turn.

Bad News for President Obama - Majority of likely voters say nation is worse off than four years ago and only 40% believe he deserves re-election.

The Hill, a nonpartisan, political news source, did a poll on what Americans think about the economy and whether President Obama deserves to be re-elected.  The news was not good for the Obama campaign.

They found that a majority of voters believe we're worse off than we were four years ago and just 40% of voters believe President Obama deserves re-election.

A majority of voters believe the country is worse off today than it was four years ago and that President Obama does not deserve reelection, according to a new poll for The Hill.

Fifty-two percent of likely voters say the nation is in “worse condition” now than in September 2008, while 54 percent say Obama does not deserve reelection based solely on his job performance.

Only 31 percent of voters believe the nation is in “better condition,” while 15 percent say it is “about the same,” the poll found. Just 40 percent of voters said Obama deserves reelection.

The results highlight the depth of voter dissatisfaction confronting Obama as he makes his case for a second term at this week’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.

They also strongly suggest Democrats need to convince voters the election should be a choice between Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, rather than a referendum on the president.
Obama’s biggest problem remains voter unhappiness with his handling of the economy.

I've felt that the race is ultimately Romney's to lose.  Can Romney lose?  Certainly.  A lot can happen between now and November 6th.

What issues are Americans concerned about? Economy, ethics and corruption, health care, and taxes.

What issues are Americans concerned about? According to a Rasmussen Poll, number one, not surprisingly, is the economy at 85%. Next is government ethics & corruption at 72%. Then health care 70%. Then taxes at 66%. Interestingly, terrorism and national security came in 7th at 57%.

Rasmussen notes that interest in taxes has jumped 10 points from May.

The number of U.S. Voters who view the issue of Taxes as Very Important has jumped 10 points from May to its highest level ever in Rasmussen Reports tracking. Still, Taxes rank fourth on a list of 10 issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports.

The economy (85%), government ethics and corruption (72%), and health care (70%) are the top three issues....

Just below government ethics and corruption is the issue of health care, with 70% of voters placing this issue at the top of the list.....

Sixty-one percent (61%) of voters nationwide now expect the cost of health care to go up under the new health care reform law, the highest level of pessimism measured since the law was passed in March. Most want the law repealed.

The tax issue will continue to rise in importance if Congress lets taxes rise with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

I think it's interesting that ethics and government corruption are very important to people; rated number 12. While terrorism is way down the list.

The importance of the family in the economy.

Here's an interesting piece by Joel Kotkin at the family and the importance it plays in the economy and in the minds of Americans.

He looks at its role in the economy.

Americans, with good reason, increasingly distrust the big, impersonal forces that loom over their lives: Wall Street, federal bureaucracy, Congress and big corporations. But the one thing they still trust is that most basic expression of our mammalian essence: the family.

Family ties dominate our economic life far more than commonly believed. Despite the power of public companies, family businesses control roughly 50% of the country's gross domestic product, according to the research firm Gaebler.com. Some 35% of the Fortune 500 are family businesses, but so too are the vast majority of smaller firms. Family companies represent 60% of the nation's employment and almost 80% of all new jobs.

And despite the glowering about impersonal corporate agriculture and the overall decline in the number of farms since the 1950s, almost 96% of the 2.2 million remaining farms are family-owned. Even among the largest 2% of farms, 84% are family-owned. The recent surge in smaller, specialized farming may actually increase this percentage in the future.

It reduces the likelihood of poverty.

Family life also often determines the economic success of individuals--something widely understood since the controversial 1965 Moynihan Report linked poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. Today more than half of black children live in households with a single mother, a number that has doubled since the 1960s, and they are much more likely to live in poverty than non-blacks. When you consider intact African-American families the so-called "racial gap" diminishes markedly.

The confluence between upward mobility and strong family networks remains extraordinary not only among African-Americans but among all groups. Only 6% of married-couple families live in poverty, and most of them, like previous generations of newcomers, are likely to climb out of that state. "Families," suggests Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, "are the major source of inequality in American social and economic life."

The family continues to be importance to Americans.

Yet despite these predictions, our mammalian instinct to trust family first has remained very strong. Some 90% of Americans, notes social historian Stephanie Coontz, consider their parental relations close.

And younger generation view the family as important.

And then we have to consider the new generation. The millennials, note researchers Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, are very family-oriented. Indeed three-quarters of 13-to-24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the greatest source of their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% think getting married will make them happy, and some 77% say they definitely or probably will want children.

Anyone looking into the future of the country’s economy cannot do so without considering the continued importance of the family. Americans' most important decisions--where to move, what to buy, whether to have children--will continue to revolve largely around the one institution most can still trust: the family.

As family breaks down, government becomes larger and more costly

“Why don’t you leave that stuff alone? What we’re really concerned about is the economy, big government, high taxes, the debt and deficit.”

“Let me let you in on a little secret,” said Gov. Mike Huckabee at MFC’s Annual dinner in April. “You can’t separate the character of a culture and the cost of a culture. You can’t separate what happens within a family and what is going to happen within the size of government.” Huckabee shared that as governor he learned that “the degree to which character and morality broke down in individual citizens and in family units, that would be the degree to which there would be a demand for more government and the demand for more taxes to pay for it.”

“And, when people come to me and say, ‘I wish you guys would stop talking about these moral and social issues,’” continued Huckabee, “I’m going to say we’ll quit talking about them when you can tell me how we can have an economically viable society without a sense of personal responsibility and morality and character - because the fact is we can’t.”

That's what we're afraid - somebody who wants to slow down our economy in the name of protecting the environment.

Barack Obama has appointed Carol Browner to be his global warming czar. It looks like he's appointed a true believer.

According to a story in the Washington Times, Mrs. Browner was:

one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization's action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

People view the socialist label as somewhat of a pejorative, except of course if you are proud of being a socialist. In this case the overseeing group she was a part of calls itself "Socialist International."

An effort to deliberately slow down economies to address greenhouse gases will make people poorer which will cost lives and I wonder if it will really reduce the greenhouse gas emission problem because poorer countries are usually worse polluters than advanced, economically developed countries. Again, ideas have consequences; one's we often don't want.