[Bret L]

Affordable Family Formation is a huge political issue in ... Iran


" Time reports:

Hekmati's experience is typical of young Iranians, who are finding
themselves increasingly priced out of the marriage market. During the
tenure of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, real estate prices have
soared across the country, but especially in Tehran, where they have
risen as much as 150%. Economists have blamed the spike on
Ahmadinejad's disastrous economic policies. The President flooded the
economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and
embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price
of building materials. Those changes prompted many investors to move
out of the stock market and the banking system and into real estate,
which was considered a safer bet. Apartment prices in the capital more
than doubled between 2006 and 2008. (See pictures of health care in
Iran.)

The real estate boom was a disaster for middle-income Iranians,
particularly young men seeking marriage partners. And many of those
who have married and moved in with in-laws are finding that inflation
is eating away at their savings, meaning it will take years, rather
than months, to get their own place. The resulting strains are
breaking up existing marriages - this past winter, local media
reported that a leading cause of Iran's high divorce rate is the
husband's inability to establish an independent household. Many others
are concluding that marriage is best avoided altogether. (See the Top
10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

Ahmadinejad's government response to the crisis included a plan,
unveiled in November 2008 by the National Youth Organization, called
"semi-independent marriage." It proposed that young people who cannot
afford to marry and move into their own place legally marry but
continue living apart in their parents' homes. The announcement
prompted swift outrage. Online news sites ran stories in which women
angrily denounced the scheme, arguing that it afforded men a legal and
pious route to easy sex while offering women nothing by way of
security or social respect. The government hastily dropped the plan.

As Iranians head to the polls on Friday, Ahmadinejad faces the
prospect that the very same broad discontent with the economy that
propelled him to victory in 2005 could now help unseat him. Samira, a
27-year-old who works in advertising, recently became engaged and is
among the millions of young Iranians who are eyeing the candidates
through the lens of their own marital concerns. "Ahmadinejad promised
he would bring housing prices down, but that didn't happen at all,"
she says. If left to their own salaries, she explains, she and her
fiance will never be able to afford their own place. That's a key
reason they're voting for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist
candidate, who has made the economy the center of his platform. Like
many young Iranians, they hope a new President will make marriage a
possibility once more.

It's striking how obvious the logic of what I call Affordable Family
Formation is to Iranians, while the vast majority of social analysts
in the U.S. remain oblivious to the obvious.

Different social norms mask the situation somewhat in the U.S. Here,
high housing prices tend to discourage child-bearing merely among the
prudent but not among the imprudent (as satirized in the opening scene
of "Idiocracy.") As I reported in VDARE.com: "From 2005 to 2007, the
number of babies born in the United States to married women declined
0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3
percent."
Still, you'd have to say (at least from this one example) that
political discourse in America compared to Iran, whether due to our
country's well-padded safety margins or due to greater indoctrination
by the media, is less in touch with the basic logic of human
existence.

P.S. Obviousl"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/06/a...n-is-huge.html