
How Single Women Are Changing Society - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/how-single-women-are-changing-society
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jimmywanger
> So the democrats should be beating down their door, promising to wash their
> cars, watch their kids.

That's sort of your job. I don't see why the government should be involved in
subsidizing lifestyle choices.

If you're a single person of either gender why should the government carve out
special privileges for you?

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castle-bravo
I see a couple things at work here. One is the idea that the nuclear family is
a kind of holdover from the past, and that the state ought to subsidize people
choosing to live in novel family structures. Across society, the introduction
of new family types could conceivably improve fertility rates or other
outcomes that the state has an interest in improving. From the article, I
gathered that one favored model is multiple single mothers and children in one
household. I could easily imagine that model is more efficient and better for
kids than having one parent try to do everything themselves. By subsidizing
cohabitation of single mothers, the state could save money in the long term by
improving the income expectation of the children and reducing likelihood of
incarceration.

Another aspect is that the interviewee has started a business which caters to
single mothers who want to cohabitate, and most likely her business would
benefit from state subsidies to the kind of lifestyle she's trying to
facilitate.

I get a weird kind of futuristic vibe from this article, as though this kind
of multi-mother creche could be a step on the way to the parent-less,
homogeneous culture of Brave New World. With the right combination of
subsidies and persuasive media, I wonder if societies could be persuaded over
a few generations to abandon the concept of a family altogether, eventually
coming to see the nuclear family as another horror of the past.

