Ian Duncan Smith's social justice commission report advocates tax cuts for married couples. Here are two very different reactions to the report.
In the Blue corner, we have Peter Hitchens calling for a return to the sanctity of marriage but scornfully dismissive of the Tories:
'Will the Tories back marriage? No, of course they won't. It's too difficult and dangerous. They would be smeared, if they did so, as haters and persecutors of 'single mothers'. This wholly false, and in fact absurd, accusation is invariably made against anyone who stands up for marriage, and is equally invariably believed by large numbers of gullible people, many of them supposedly intelligent journalists. Often this is because they are afraid of being on the receiving end of the same intolerant persecution that will be visited on the person who has dared to speak in favour of marriage. The only way to challenge it would be to have the guts to be unapologetic about it, and the Tories just aren't like that. Wait and see, if you don't believe me.'
And in the Red corner, we have Polly Toynbee, progressive and proud, equally scornful of the Tories but for very different reasons:
'Cameron says married parents are far more likely to stay together, but it doesn't need a professor of logic to spot the flaw: making cohabitees marry to collect a bonus is unlikely to sprinkle fairy dust and turn them into the same people as those who are already married. Almost everyone wants a lifelong good relationship, yet many fail. Now the small-state party that says governments can't run a whelk stall suddenly imagines the state can control the most wayward of human behaviours and superglue parents together for ever.'
Personally I think one of the posters on Hitchens might have it right when he writes 'It was Charles Murray who said that governments should never get involved in people's personal relationships. It always cocks it up. We don't have to support marriage we just have to stop supporting all other forms of family (single or otherwise). When you do that, the clear financial benefits of the stable married relationship will always come out on top. Problem solved.'
2 comments:
My analysis, a la Freakonomics, is that the Tory policy is absed on a false assumption of causality... the kids of married parents do better, so therefore marriage is the cause.
Rubbish.
Stable relationships give kids a head start.
Now, in a society where there is no particular necessity to marriage, it stands to reason that an average of married couples will show greater stability than an average of non-married couples. Kids in long-term, stable, unmarried households might do just as well as their married counterparts, but the non-married group includes shorter term, ad hoc couplings, and so its average stability will inevitably be lower.. and if that is a determinant of kids' prospects, then of course the unmarried families will do worse.
In other words, marriage and children's outcomes are both effects, symptons of a common underlying advantage, that of a stable family unit.
So the logic behind the Haig report is utterly wrong.
By analogy: it is as if the report found that people with deeper suntans took more foreign holidays, and so advocated extensive sunbed sessions for those of palest complexion expecting an increase in the number of overseas holidays the whitest families experienced.
The irony is that encouraging marriage for financial reasons where legal union would not otherwise happen doesn not strengthen the sanctity of the institution of marriage... if anything, it undermines it, because it seeks to encourage people to enter into marriage who, all things being equal, would not otherwise do so. Marriage becomes a flag of convenience for tax reasons.
So: a misguided policy, founded on flawed reasoning, which ultimately will produce the opposite result of that which is intended.
Whether or not the reasoning is in fact flawed, the philosophical phrase for the accusation is: "correlation does not imply causation"
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