11/20/2008

Matthew Riesbeck A40938545 ISSUE 5, 8, 19 ISSUE 5 YES For most mothers and father, for that matter there is little choice but to persevere on both fronts to pay the bills. Indeed, 72% of mothers with children under 18 are in the work force-a figure that is up sharply from 47% in 1975 but has held steady since 1997. And thanks in part to a dodgy economy, there?s growth in another category, working women whose husbands are unemployed, which has risen to 6.4% of all married couples. But in the professional and managerial classes, where higher incomes permit more choices, a reluctant revolt is under way. Today?s women execs are less willing to play the juggler?s game, especially in its current high-speed mode, and more willing to sacrifice paychecks and prestige for time with their family. NO The US has moved slowly toward expanding conventional family-friendly arrangements in part because of ideological ambivalence in this area. Public sympathy for welfare programs that pay unmarried women to stay home and care for their children evaporated as the labor-force participation of married women with children younger than six years of age multiplied threefold, from under 20 percent in 1960 to over 60 percent in 2000. The increased public spending on day care is largely related to making it possible for welfare mothers to enter the labor force. Conservatives have long argued for strengthening work requirements in welfare programs. At the same time, many conservatives also support the idea of putting less emphasis on policies that free up parents to be better workers, and more emphasis on policies that free up workers to be better parents. ISSUE 8 YES All completely impressionistic that although the values of individualism, market values, and so forth, have taken on increased importance throughout the US as a whole, there is a way in which the professional middle class has been the carrier of these values. We live in a society that is rapidly dividing between those who make it to the top and those who fall to the bottom, and generally speaking, people in the professional middle class would much rather rise than fall. There is a kind of scramble going on, and we are in the sector of society that is engaged in that scramble rather than critical of it. The media image of feminists as careerists than other members of the same class. NO A well-respected study found that similar percentages of married women and men report that are very happy, rates that are far higher than for those who have never married or are divorced. The idea that women are happier if they are unmarried and men happier if they are married is blatantly untrue. The evidence is mountainous in the other direction. Unlike other liberal women engaged in research on family issues, Dr. Waite had no preconceived notions or ideological axes to grind when she began to look at the data on marital status and mortality ten years ago. She was aware of other researchers looking at earnings data and health issues, but no one had put together the big picture. ISSUE 19 YES The notion that a colossal unemployment crisis is looming began to grow popular in the mid 1970s. Since then, production has been streamlined and internationalized more than ever. Yet far more jobs have been created than have disappeared. We have more efficient production than ever before, but also more people at work. Between 1975 and 1998, employment in countries like the US, Canada and Australia rose by 50 percent. And it is in the most internationalized economies, making the most use of modern technology, that employment has grown fastest. NO During the 1960s and 1970s, most third world countries pursued state directed import-substitution industrialization strategies and financed their trade deficits with bank loans. This pattern ended suddenly in the early 1980s, when economic instabilities in the developed capitalist world, especially in the US, led to rising interest rates and global recession. Third world borrowing costs soared and export earnings plummeted, triggering the third world debt crisis. With debt repayment in question, banks greatly reduced there lending, leading to ever deepening third world economic and social problems. To overcome these problems, third world states sought new ways to boost exports and new sources of international funds. Increasingly, they came to see export-oriented foreign direct investment as the answer.