The US has the world’s highest rate of single parent households, per Pew. The world’s highest, in case you missed that.

And per the Census Dept., “Female-householder families were the only family type to experience a statistically significant decrease in poverty between 2017 and 2018.” Curious, no? But female-only homes do not produce good men.

Service employment is not desultory to any but the elite. Law, medicine, teaching, accounting are all service professions too. Service is gainful employment!

The breakdown is about 80 / 20.

A great recipe for failure.

The economic stratum you occupy is a positional good. If the distribution of family configurations was today what it was in 1948, the common life would be better in many respects and more leveled in, but you’d still have economic strata and a great many people relying on desultory service employment.

That parent is almost always a woman. A great recipe for failure. Family courts are prejudiced in favor of females; a divorced dad cannot get full custody of the kids unless his ex agrees, even if he can show her marginal qualities to the court. Because uterus, or something. I’ve been there. My ex’s brother, a psychiatrist, urged me to seek sole custody, and he was talking about his sister! No way, as long as she wanted joint custody.

Poverty level is defined by those inside the Beltway. The poor are mostly not-poor. they are culturally self-impoverished.

99% of the school administrators in America are ruining the reputations of the other 1%.

When my late brother-in-law was 12, he and his family emigrated from Germany to the US. He arrived in June, so had 3 months of exposure to English before beginning school. English total immersion. Did well in life as a businessman, as did his brother, who got a doctorate in Chemistry from Berkeley. My sister did say that her husband didn’t read as much as others at his level because reading English was – decades later- still a bit of a challenge for him. I never discussed this with my brother-in-law, but he did get an MBA, so he did have some competence. (And after 4 decades in East Mass, had a touch of Boston accent in his speech.)

Back in the ’90s, I read an article about Cleveland Indians slugger Manny Ramirez- who later plied his trade for the Red Sox. At the age of 25, he was taking English lessons, as his English wasn’t up to speed. He had been in the States for 12-13 years. It is insane that someone who arrives in the US at age 12-13 is not proficient in English after a dozen years here. His “bilingual” classes – better called monolingual Spanish classes- in NYC had not helped him.

In the ’90s, I did some substitute teaching in TX. Because I spoke Spanish, I was often placed in bilingual classes. At times I saw the same students over several years. In one 4th grade bilingual class, some students asked me- not a native Spanish speaker- what some Spanish words meant. My unvoiced thought was that if students are being taught Spanish vocabulary in class, it is time for them to change over into being taught in English. Guess what: I substituted for the same teacher the following year, and the class was in English.

In that class and in others I encountered some students who came to the US with several years less schooling than their age peers, and within several years had caught up to their age group. In English!

A friend moved from Puerto Rico to Florida with his family. He, his wife and their two oldest children were comfortably bilingual as they had all lived in the States and Puerto Rico during previous moves, the youngest primarily spoke Spanish as she had lived her entire, young life in Puerto Rico.

A few weeks into the school year he and his spouse noticed the youngest daughter wasn’t speaking much English and learned her school had placed her in Spanish speaking classrooms. They went to the school to ask that she be placed in English only classes and the school DENIED their request.