Something important. After reading this, my question is: What else has John Carlin written?
5 thoughts on “What Do Iceland and Sierra Leone Have in Common?”
Well, I took the hook and read the article. Ah, it sounds like a feminist fantasy land. The part about being pagan as the foundation of all this happiness forced me to read the Wikipedia entry about Greenland and it has had a history of Christianity, but I think that’s all behind them now. I’m glad all 316,00 of them have created government heaven on earth and I wish them success. Don’t think I’d care for the weather.
that’s fine as far as it goes, but the next time I find someone who went through a break up and found it emotionally easy, will be the first. He quotes Oddny who relates the positive experience of another woman for the proposition that there was no crisis as far as the children. That is highly unreliable evidence, at least as far as how that woman took it. And, there really is no way to measure that sort of thing anyway. Oddny said the divorce rate is not something to be proud of, which can be read as a tacit admission that the success of the country may be in spite of the divorce rate. The next witness to mention marriage credits the economic boon of World War II and seems to have stayed married and keeps care of his invalid wife. The remainder of the article credits the picking and choosing of the best policy structures that other countries have to offer and the power of the extended family. Seems pretty traditional to me. So, Iceland seems like a pretty nice place to live—-at least since 1939—-but the article has not necessarily proven that the success is because of they got over any “hang ups” which I am not sure what that even means.
I don’t think the article proves anything either – it’s just a journalist’s article, after all, not a scientific paper.
I agree that we have no hard social scientific evidence of the effects of divorce on children. Neither does it follow that divorce is good for children nor that it is bad. In which case you have to use anecdotal evidence, which is better than nothing. My anecdotal evidence says that I was relieved when my parents got a divorce. A friend of mine said the same. It’s just not much fun living in a household where you have to be constantly afraid that a fight is going to break out between your parents for no reason whatsoever any minute – even if it’s just a verbal fight.
“I agree that we have no hard social scientific evidence of the effects of divorce on children. Neither does it follow that divorce is good for children nor that it is bad. In which case you have to use anecdotal evidence, which is better than nothing. My anecdotal evidence says that I was relieved when my parents got a divorce.”
I think you’re understating the amount of research done in this area. It’s difficult, of course, to get “hard scientific evidence” in the sense of controlled experiments, but the effects of family structure on life outcomes for children has been studied extensively. One of the stronger conclusions seems to be that children’s experience tends to vary depending on the kind of marriage the parents had before their divorce. If there marriage was highly conflictual, the children tend to do better after divorce than their peers whose parents stay together. If the marriage was low-conflict, the children tend to do significantly worse than their peers. However, most divorces (something like 70 percent) occur in what sociologists rate as low-conflict marriages, so the net impact of divorce on children appears to be distinctly negative. There are the usual caveats about correlation and causality, but, as I’ve said, this topic has been studied extensively, so I doubt the researchers aren’t falling into any of usual traps for the naive or inexperienced.
Here’s a paper on the general issue – not the best I’ve seen, but the best I could Google up in a couple of minutes:
Well, I took the hook and read the article. Ah, it sounds like a feminist fantasy land. The part about being pagan as the foundation of all this happiness forced me to read the Wikipedia entry about Greenland and it has had a history of Christianity, but I think that’s all behind them now. I’m glad all 316,00 of them have created government heaven on earth and I wish them success. Don’t think I’d care for the weather.
that’s fine as far as it goes, but the next time I find someone who went through a break up and found it emotionally easy, will be the first. He quotes Oddny who relates the positive experience of another woman for the proposition that there was no crisis as far as the children. That is highly unreliable evidence, at least as far as how that woman took it. And, there really is no way to measure that sort of thing anyway. Oddny said the divorce rate is not something to be proud of, which can be read as a tacit admission that the success of the country may be in spite of the divorce rate. The next witness to mention marriage credits the economic boon of World War II and seems to have stayed married and keeps care of his invalid wife. The remainder of the article credits the picking and choosing of the best policy structures that other countries have to offer and the power of the extended family. Seems pretty traditional to me. So, Iceland seems like a pretty nice place to live—-at least since 1939—-but the article has not necessarily proven that the success is because of they got over any “hang ups” which I am not sure what that even means.
pd3,
I don’t think the article proves anything either – it’s just a journalist’s article, after all, not a scientific paper.
I agree that we have no hard social scientific evidence of the effects of divorce on children. Neither does it follow that divorce is good for children nor that it is bad. In which case you have to use anecdotal evidence, which is better than nothing. My anecdotal evidence says that I was relieved when my parents got a divorce. A friend of mine said the same. It’s just not much fun living in a household where you have to be constantly afraid that a fight is going to break out between your parents for no reason whatsoever any minute – even if it’s just a verbal fight.
This article is a cute puff piece but really makes some completely irrelevant and obfuscatory points.
it’s the only country in Nato with no armed forces (they were banned 700 years ago);
This is because, like the rest of Europe (with weak armies), their defense is completely subsidized by the USA.
LemmusLemmus wrote:
“I agree that we have no hard social scientific evidence of the effects of divorce on children. Neither does it follow that divorce is good for children nor that it is bad. In which case you have to use anecdotal evidence, which is better than nothing. My anecdotal evidence says that I was relieved when my parents got a divorce.”
I think you’re understating the amount of research done in this area. It’s difficult, of course, to get “hard scientific evidence” in the sense of controlled experiments, but the effects of family structure on life outcomes for children has been studied extensively. One of the stronger conclusions seems to be that children’s experience tends to vary depending on the kind of marriage the parents had before their divorce. If there marriage was highly conflictual, the children tend to do better after divorce than their peers whose parents stay together. If the marriage was low-conflict, the children tend to do significantly worse than their peers. However, most divorces (something like 70 percent) occur in what sociologists rate as low-conflict marriages, so the net impact of divorce on children appears to be distinctly negative. There are the usual caveats about correlation and causality, but, as I’ve said, this topic has been studied extensively, so I doubt the researchers aren’t falling into any of usual traps for the naive or inexperienced.
Here’s a paper on the general issue – not the best I’ve seen, but the best I could Google up in a couple of minutes:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=984487#PaperDownload