FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2011
SINGLED OUT
Less than half of U.S. households are headed by married couples
BY DEBORAH HASTINGS
For the first time, the percentage of households headed by married couples has dropped below 50 percent, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures released yesterday.
Husbands and wives represented 48.4 percent of all American households, slightly less than 2000 figures, and continuing a decades-long decline in “traditional” families, which in 1950 constituted 78 percent of all households.
Married couples with children under age 18 dropped to 20.2 percent, from 24.1 percent in 2000, and a long way from 40.3 percent in 1970.
The changing face of America’s nuclear family has many causes, and none is simplistic, experts said.
“We tend to focus on one cause when there are multiple causes,” professor Douglas Besharov at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs, told The Daily yesterday. “There are many social forces at work.”
One is that social norms have softened, and more ummarried couples are living together. Young adults get apartments and live on their own longer. Seniors live longer, often as widows or widowers. Another cause is the historical fallout of feminism.
“We’re now seeing the implications of the independence that was brought about by the women’s movement. Women are better educated. They’re much more independent and don’t feel they have to get married for financial stability,” said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.
“The idea of a ‘traditional’ family is a throwback,” Frey told The Daily. “Only one-fifth of all households anymore meet that definition and it just keeps shrinking.”
Besharov agreed, especially about the implications of the women’s movement.
“In the past, women thought they had to get married early on, or they would be spinsters,” he said. “That if they were married, they had to stay married. And if they got pregnant, they had to marry the bum. But that’s not happening now. And that’s a good thing.”
Another contributor is hard economic times.
“Non-marriage is more common among lower-income and minority populations,” Besharov said. “They’re more apt to live together than get married,” because of financial hardships and precarious employment issues.
SCREENED OUT
Beware! 60% of sun lotions let through rays with risk of cancer
You booze, you lose
Formulaic ‘The Hangover Part II’ harder to swallow the second time
BY PAUL HIEBERT
Generally, for a sequel to work it must incorporate the same elements that contributed to its predecessor’s success while introducing enough new material to convince a paying audience that what they’re about to watch is something they’ve never seen before.
In “The Hangover Part II,” director Todd Phillips doesn’t even pretend to attempt the latter. Instead, the second installment plays out like a carbon copy of the first, but in Thailand. The first “Hangover,” also directed by Phillips, was a mega-hit in 2009, earning more money than any R-rated comedy before it and receiving an approving nod from critics with a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical. So, as Phillips and co-writers Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong must have been thinking, why experiment with a beloved recipe that the public gorged on just two years prior? In this case, unfortunately, the freshness of the first film goes stale in the second.
Sure, there are some minor distinctions. This time around, the Wolfpack — whose official members include the dashing Phil (Bradley Cooper), the uptight Stu (Ed Helms), the dim-witted Alan (Zach Galifianakis), and, uh, Doug (Justin Bartha) — find themselves in Bangkok for Stu’s wedding to a graceful Thai woman (Jamie Chung), whose strict father disapproves of his future son-in-law. There’s a monkey instead of a baby, a kidnapped monk instead of a tiger, and a missing 16-year-old brother of the bride instead of a groom.
Despite the many precautions the gang takes to avoid repeating their (literally) sobering misadventures in Vegas — Stu insists on replacing the bachelor party with a bachelor brunch — they can’t seem to evade their cinematic fate. In one scene, they’re all enjoying a beer on the beach; in the next, Phil, Stu and Alan awake drenched in sweat and bloated with booze in a squalid hotel room somewhere in the inner city. From there, the plot and pacing proceed in a nearly identical fashion to the prequel. The tight rhythm of reveals and reversals that made “The Hangover” so unique and charming gets repeated, its form rendered into formula.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” says a hysteric Stu at one point during their endeavors to piece together what happened in the alleyways and strip clubs of Bangkok the night before. Well, Stu, for anyone watching, it’s not that difficult to accept.
Where acclaimed sequels such as “Aliens,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” and “The Godfather: Part II,” all expanded their horizons by adding novel dynamics and characters that together raised the stakes and advanced the story, “The Hangover Part II” ends up being a pasty, bleary-eyed imitation of its former self. But, then again, these are high standards to live up to. A comedy about a bunch of guys getting so wasted that their acts of debauchery can only be remembered by a camera probably isn’t aiming at eternal glory.
And yes, there are some laughs. Waiting for Alan to break the silence with a comment that both embraces a deep knowledge of useless pop-culture trivia, yet doesn’t fully comprehend the situation at hand, can be quite amusing. The flamboyant and mildly villainous Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) also gets a more prominent role, if you care for his high-pitched bursts of dialogue. The film also includes Paul Giamatti as a rival gangster and another cameo from Mike Tyson, who, it turns out, is a terrible singer.
Essentially, however, the film offers nothing new other than cruder jokes and more nudity. But no promises are broken, either. If you liked the first one, you’ll probably like this one too — just not as much.
TAGGED: The other social network
378 DAYS: Astronaut Mike Fincke broke the U.S. space duration record
America mellows with age
The demographics behind the great crime decline
BY REIHAN SALAM
Next month, rappers Eminem and Royce Da 5’9” are releasing a new Bad Meets Evil EP, their first collaboration in years. “Fast Lane,” their first single, was widely praised, and with good reason. Though the song’s lyrics are indescribably vile, they’re delivered with an energy and enthusiasm that one would expect from much younger men. Em is 39 and Royce is 33, which is shocking to those of us who grew up listening to them. Yet it might also explain why the two men “squashed their beef,” the long-running feud that led many to believe that they’d never record together again.
What’s particularly poignant about this reconciliation is that “beefs” of this kind didn’t always end so amicably. The deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G., remain shrouded in mystery. But the beef between them didn’t help. One wonders what might have happened had Tupac and Biggie survived. Tupac would be approaching his 40th birthday, perhaps with an Oscar or two under his belt. Known for his Afrocentric political convictions, I picture Tupac denouncing President Obama on MSNBC as a sellout. Biggie, who would have turned 39 last week, would have amassed billions of dollars, which he’d lavish on a growing retinue of ex-wives. Perhaps they’d collaborate on a blockbuster album that would change the game forever. We’ll never know.
What we do know is that urban violence has declined dramatically since Tupac and Biggie died in the mid-1990s. In 1991, there were 9.8 murders reported in the United States for every 100,000 inhabitants. By 2009, that number had fallen to five. The FBI has just released its Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2010, two days after Biggie’s birthday, and it found that murder declined by another 4.4 percent while the overall number of reported violent crimes dropped by 5.5 percent. In recent years, at least, the crime decline has been impressively steady. Last year was the fourth year in a row that the murder rate declined and the 10th year in a row that property crimes declined.
There is no definitive take on why crime is declining. Robbery declined by 9.5 percent, undermining the intuitive view that high unemployment contributes to property crime. The United States is more unequal in 2011 than it was in 1991, so the notion that crime flows from relative economic deprivation doesn’t seem to fit.
Could crime be declining because we lock up over 2 million Americans? That doesn’t appear to be the case. The incarceration rate began to increase in the mid-1970s, and it exploded between 1985 and 1993. During that latter period, which coincides with the height of the crack epidemic, murder and robbery skyrocketed. Moreover, recent declines in the incarceration rate haven’t prevented crime from continuing to fall.
It is natural to think that locking up criminals will reduce crime, and that logic does seem to apply to those who commit violence. But drug offenders, many of them nonviolent, comprise roughly 20 percent of state prison populations and half of the federal prison population. As dealers are sent to prison, they are simply replaced. At the same time, the stigma associated with doing jail time is undermined, as it comes to be seen as a commonplace rite of passage for young men in the most crime-plagued neighborhoods. Longer sentences mean that many prisoners are long past the age when their criminal careers would have drawn to a close. Taxpayers are thus paying for the meals and lodging of hundreds of thousands of harmless men who’ve been isolated for so long that they lack the social skills they’d need to make it in mainstream society.
A more convincing hypothesis is that an increase in the number of police officers has had a deterrent effect. The economists John Donohue and Jens Ludwig have argued that the federal COPS program, launched during the Clinton years, played an important role in the crime decline. Another pair of economists, John Klick and Alexander Tabarrok, found that increases in the terror alert level, which triggered a visible increase in the number of police officers in the heart of Washington, D.C., led to a significant decrease in the level of crime in that city. If these researchers are right, shifting resources from incarcerating aging nonviolent drug offenders to increasing police presence could yield enormous dividends.
And a big part of the story is that, like Em and Royce, Americans are aging. As Franklin Zemring observes in “The Great American Crime Decline,” Canada has experienced a crime decline in lockstep with that of the United States, yet Canadians didn’t increase incarceration rates or police presence as enthusiastically as we did. What our countries have in common is that the percentage of the population in the high-risk ages of 15 to 29 has fallen in both. We’ve grown mellow in our old age. One wishes that the thousands of young Americans who died violently during the crime explosion, Tupac and Biggie among them, had had the opportunity to do the same.
The demographics behind the great crime decline
BY REIHAN SALAM
Next month, rappers Eminem and Royce Da 5’9” are releasing a new Bad Meets Evil EP, their first collaboration in years. “Fast Lane,” their first single, was widely praised, and with good reason. Though the song’s lyrics are indescribably vile, they’re delivered with an energy and enthusiasm that one would expect from much younger men. Em is 39 and Royce is 33, which is shocking to those of us who grew up listening to them. Yet it might also explain why the two men “squashed their beef,” the long-running feud that led many to believe that they’d never record together again.
What’s particularly poignant about this reconciliation is that “beefs” of this kind didn’t always end so amicably. The deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G., remain shrouded in mystery. But the beef between them didn’t help. One wonders what might have happened had Tupac and Biggie survived. Tupac would be approaching his 40th birthday, perhaps with an Oscar or two under his belt. Known for his Afrocentric political convictions, I picture Tupac denouncing President Obama on MSNBC as a sellout. Biggie, who would have turned 39 last week, would have amassed billions of dollars, which he’d lavish on a growing retinue of ex-wives. Perhaps they’d collaborate on a blockbuster album that would change the game forever. We’ll never know.
What we do know is that urban violence has declined dramatically since Tupac and Biggie died in the mid-1990s. In 1991, there were 9.8 murders reported in the United States for every 100,000 inhabitants. By 2009, that number had fallen to five. The FBI has just released its Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2010, two days after Biggie’s birthday, and it found that murder declined by another 4.4 percent while the overall number of reported violent crimes dropped by 5.5 percent. In recent years, at least, the crime decline has been impressively steady. Last year was the fourth year in a row that the murder rate declined and the 10th year in a row that property crimes declined.
There is no definitive take on why crime is declining. Robbery declined by 9.5 percent, undermining the intuitive view that high unemployment contributes to property crime. The United States is more unequal in 2011 than it was in 1991, so the notion that crime flows from relative economic deprivation doesn’t seem to fit.
Could crime be declining because we lock up over 2 million Americans? That doesn’t appear to be the case. The incarceration rate began to increase in the mid-1970s, and it exploded between 1985 and 1993. During that latter period, which coincides with the height of the crack epidemic, murder and robbery skyrocketed. Moreover, recent declines in the incarceration rate haven’t prevented crime from continuing to fall.
It is natural to think that locking up criminals will reduce crime, and that logic does seem to apply to those who commit violence. But drug offenders, many of them nonviolent, comprise roughly 20 percent of state prison populations and half of the federal prison population. As dealers are sent to prison, they are simply replaced. At the same time, the stigma associated with doing jail time is undermined, as it comes to be seen as a commonplace rite of passage for young men in the most crime-plagued neighborhoods. Longer sentences mean that many prisoners are long past the age when their criminal careers would have drawn to a close. Taxpayers are thus paying for the meals and lodging of hundreds of thousands of harmless men who’ve been isolated for so long that they lack the social skills they’d need to make it in mainstream society.
A more convincing hypothesis is that an increase in the number of police officers has had a deterrent effect. The economists John Donohue and Jens Ludwig have argued that the federal COPS program, launched during the Clinton years, played an important role in the crime decline. Another pair of economists, John Klick and Alexander Tabarrok, found that increases in the terror alert level, which triggered a visible increase in the number of police officers in the heart of Washington, D.C., led to a significant decrease in the level of crime in that city. If these researchers are right, shifting resources from incarcerating aging nonviolent drug offenders to increasing police presence could yield enormous dividends.
And a big part of the story is that, like Em and Royce, Americans are aging. As Franklin Zemring observes in “The Great American Crime Decline,” Canada has experienced a crime decline in lockstep with that of the United States, yet Canadians didn’t increase incarceration rates or police presence as enthusiastically as we did. What our countries have in common is that the percentage of the population in the high-risk ages of 15 to 29 has fallen in both. We’ve grown mellow in our old age. One wishes that the thousands of young Americans who died violently during the crime explosion, Tupac and Biggie among them, had had the opportunity to do the same.
Dog's Incredible Survival Story
Mason — a terrier mix — was carried away by a tornado that ripped through Alabama nearly three weeks ago. Yet the dog managed to survive and make his way home.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
This blog began on september last year. Thank you for your appreciation.
ReplyDelete