Today’s recommended reading: Merkel, religion and family life, and debt

Last updated on: December 15, 2015 at 9:02 am by Jane the Actuary

Today’s recommended reading: Merkel, religion and family life, and debt 2015-12-15T09:02:57-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yeah, three wholly unrelated topics for this morning that came across my twitter feed and/or the morning newspaper:

1) “Merkel Aced Her Most Important Speech,” as reported at Bloomberg View: Angela Merkel on Monday gave a key speech to party leaders (well, some 1,000 of them) setting out her policy with respect to the flood of asylum-seekers.

“We want to significantly reduce the number of refugees,” she said, arguing this would be for the good of Germany, given the difficulty of integrating so many people, and for the refugees themselves.

And, knowing full well she’d be quoted on it for years, she repeated her rejection of “Multikulti,” a derogatory term for multiculturalism. “Whoever seeks refuge with us, must respect our laws and traditions and he must learn German,” Merkel said. “Multikulti leads to parallel societies, and Multikulti thus means living a lie.” Merkel’s message to the newcomers is that those who fail to integrate won’t be tolerated. This is perhaps a grim promise of future clashes and deportations, but it’s also the inevitable flip side of “We can manage it.”

(Here’s Der Spiegel’s German reporting, which I haven’t yet read myself.)

Will Merkel achieve the integration agenda she’s set out? To say it’ll be a challenge is putting it mildly. But she is at least well aware of the difficulties ahead.

2) Via the Washington Post, “The latest social science is wrong. Religion is good for families and kids.” Key quote:

On average, religion is a clear force for good when it comes to family unity and the welfare of children — the most important aspects of our day-to-day lives. Research, some of it my own, indicates that on average Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.

The author cites further research on other metrics in which religious-service-attending families are, on average, better off than non-attenders, and children from those families have a greater degree of “prosocial” behavior.

3) Also via the Post, but appearing in the Chicago Tribune as a syndicated feature, “Don’t stress about your debt. Go ahead and go broke in your 20s. I didn’t wait for a grown-up job to finance the life I wanted.”

The title of the piece is an effective summary of the piece, in which the author, now in her 30s, describes a decade spent accruing debt while unemployed and travelling, with no regrets.

I had absolutely no time constraints, and no responsibilities to anyone. I figured as I got older, it would be harder for me to travel. Life would get in the way, so why not go now, and worry about the debt later? So I did just that.

Now, her story doesn’t hang together. Graduate school in Italy? Travel to Australia and Europe, and the beaches of California? Happy go lucky, until she maxed out her credit card, then paying down a debt of $14,000, while continuing to travel, and emerging debt-free at age 31? How can you fund your travel, plus your ordinary living expenses, with only $14,000 in debt? Was the bulk of the spending actually funded by the good ol’ Bank of Mom and Dad? Was there more work, and less fun, than she describes as the case? Heck, even if you let the interest accrue, there are still minimum monthly payments which are pretty tricky if you have no cash at all.

But this is one story of an emerging new genre — at least it seems to me that I’ve read something similar in Slate (bonus points if you can find it as I can’t at the moment): “don’t bother saving, at least not until you get to be older! Enjoy your youth!”, which is a Bad Thing even if I don’t have savings statistics at hand.

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