Newsweek: País desperta agressividade em vizinhos

Newsweek: País desperta agressividade em vizinhos

Brasil - Brazil
DEFESA@NET 20 Novembro 2008
Newsweek Novembro 2008

Newsweek

Newsweek: País desperta agressividade em vizinhos
(texto reportagem original na íntegra)

Defesa@Net

Mais uma vez Defesanet pautou a imprensa internacional sobre questões geopolíticas. Desta vez foi a revista norte-americana Newsweek, numa reportagem que aproveitou parte do conteúdo publicado aqui, principalmente as opiniões com relação ao Paraguai.


O desenvolvimento do Brasil como potência econômica mundial despertou animosidades em países vizinhos, diz um artigo da revista americana Newsweek desta semana.

"Na medida em que o Brasil se torna um país mais poderoso, seus vizinhos se tornam mais agressivos", diz a revista.

"Estes dias, os imperialistas falam português", diz o artigo, afirmando que agora o país "marca o passo econômico da América Latina e está se tornando cada vez mais o alvo nº 1" - posição que a Newsweek diz ter sido ocupada no passado pelos Estados Unidos.

"O rugido anti-brasileiro mais alto vem dos Andes, onde líderes populistas que marcham ao som dos tambores da 'revolução bolivariana' do homem forte venezuelano Hugo Chávez, tentam reconstruir suas nações através da redistribuição de riquezas e do aumento do poder dos grupos e minorias indígenas há muito negligenciados."

A revista diz que "nos últimos dois anos, os líderes de Venezuela, Equador e Bolívia lançaram insultos contra seu vizinho dominante, e ultimamente o clima tem se exaltado". Como exemplo, Newsweek cita o episódio da expulsão da construtora Odebrecht pelo governo do Equador.

E a reação anti-Brasil está chegando ao sul do continente, segundo o artigo. "No Paraguai, o presidente Fernando Lugo tomou posse em agosto sob a bandeira de 'independência energética' - código populista para extrair concessões do império'' do outro lado da fronteira."

"Ele (Lugo) está acusando o Brasil de pagar menos pela energia que importa da usina hidrelétrica de Itaipu, e quer liberdade para vender metade do total para qualquer país que desejar."

"Popular"

Apesar do antagonismo, o artigo diz que "ironicamente, o presidente brasileiro Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva continua popular na América Latina".

O presidente boliviano Evo Morales "se referia reverenciosamente a Lula como seu 'irmão maior'", "Chávez raramente perde uma oportunidade de foto com Lula" e "a primeira viagem internacional de Lugo como presidente foi para Brasília".

"Fazer dos brasileiros os novos gringos pode cair bem para a arquibancada, mas é arriscado política e economicamente", segundo Newsweek. "Até agora, o Brasil vinha sendo o maior investidor estrangeiro da Bolívia, enquanto o Paraguai se tornou o quinto maior exportador de soja graças à tecnologia brasileira", diz a revista.

A reação do Brasil tem sido "quase de penitência ante seus vizinhos pequenos, que cada vez mais representam os habitantes de Lilliput para o Gulliver do Brasil", diz o artigo, em uma referência aos seres minúsculos que o personagem Gulliver encontra na ilha de Lilliput no romance As Viagens de Gulliver, de Jonathan Swift.

"Embora o governo de Lula tenha sido rápido em enfrentar os países ricos - fazendo queixas formais contra os Estados Unidos e os europeus na Organização Mundial do Comércio sobre barreiras comerciais a etanol, algodão e açúcar - ofender os irmãos no hemisfério rende pouco mais do que uma repreensão", afirma Newsweek.

Mas "a tolerância brasileira pode estar acabando", conclui o artigo, que cita que o Brasil realizou "exercícios militares na fronteira com o Paraguai no mês passado - mensagem difícil de não se ver".

"Não espere uma versão tropical da guerra preventiva. Mas pode ser um sinal de que o Gulliver Latino não está mais querendo enfrentar as coisas deitado", disse o artigo da revista Newsweek.

TEXTO ORIGINAL

Cutting Things Down To Size

As Brazil becomes a more powerful player, its neighbors
are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Latin Americans have a long record of directing their often tempestuous nationalism at one prime target: the United States. But with Washington increasingly entangled in more volatile latitudes, regional battle lines are being redrawn. These days, the imperialistas speak Portuguese. Yes, Brazil, the onetime continental underachiever and now Latin America's economic pacesetter, is increasingly becoming target No. 1.

The loudest anti-Brazilian rumblings have come from the Andes, where populist leaders marching to the drumroll of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian revolution" are trying to remake their nations by redistributing wealth and empowering long-neglected indigenous groups and minorities. Over the past two years, the leaders of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia have hurled invective at their dominant neighbor, and lately the mood is getting ugly. In September, a power outage at an Ecuadoran hydroelectric plant built by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht blew up into an international incident when Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa ordered the army to circle all four Odebrecht projects, froze the company's assets and insinuated he might stop payment on a $243 million loan from Brazil's national development bank. Despite high-level negotiations with Brazil, Correa finally kicked Odebrecht out of the country last month, charging the Brazilians with "disrespecting national sovereignty." Correa is also threatening to oust other Brazilian firms, including the state-owned oil giant Petrobras.

Now the contagion is sweeping south. In Paraguay, President Fernando Lugo took office in August under the banner of "energy independence"—populist code for squeezing concessions from the "imperio" just over the border. He is charging that Brazil is underpaying for the power it imports from the giant Itaipu plant and wants a free hand to sell half the total to any country he chooses. The Brazilians have tried to negotiate, but Asuncíon seems unmoved. In September and October, angry peasants vowed to seize plots owned by resident Brazilian farmers. "BRAZILIANS, GO HOME" read the placards in San Pedro, the municipality where peasants are circling Brazilian farmers.

Ironically, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva remains popular in Latin America. Before nationalizing two Brazilian oil refineries in 2006, Bolivian President Evo Morales reverentially referred to Lula as his "big brother." Chávez rarely misses a photo op with Lula, even as he lashes out at the country's business executives (he just slapped Odebrecht with $282 million in "extra" taxes) or the Brazilian Congress, which he once dismissed as "Washington's parrot." The first international trip Lugo took as president was to Brasília.

But while leaders trade bearhugs with Lula, they seem just as ready to stick it to their neighbor—a direct response to Brazil's emergence in the region as a powerful economic player. With a $1.4 trillion economy and a global political agenda, Brazil stands out in a region hobbled by poverty and poor governance. Its industry eclipses that of its neighbors, assuring Brazil a fat regional trade surplus. Odebrecht is just one of a score of Brazilian multinationals prowling Latin America and beyond for opportunity. And as Brazil's fortunes soar, it casts a harsh spotlight on the shortcomings of its neighbors. The result: increased animosity from across its borders. "Vilification is part of the price of success," says Roberto Abdenur, a former senior Brazilian diplomat.

Making Brazilians the new gringos may play well to the gallery, but it is risky politically and economically. Until now, Brazil has been Bolivia's largest foreign investor, while Paraguay has become the world's fifth-largest exporter of soybeans thanks to Brazilian technology and the 300,000 "Brasiguayos" tilling Paraguayan soil. Their harvests have been a precious source of hard currency for this mostly poor, landlocked nation. The demonizing hurts Brazil, too. When Bolivia nationalized two oil refineries built by Petrobras two years ago, it forced the state-controlled oil and gas company to rewrite a key part of its energy strategy, scrap plans to double the gas pipeline and plow money instead into domestic exploration. The company is on safer ground because of the revamping but lost time and money in the process. Ecuador's ouster of Odebrecht interrupted four construction projects, worth $650 million. São Paulo is also highly dependent on the hydro plant in Paraguay, and some 300,000 Brazilian farmers now live in fear of having their land confiscated or invaded by Paraguayan peasants.

Yet for all its clout, Brazil seems almost penitential before its undersized neighbors, who increasingly play the Lilliputians to Brazil's Gulliver. While the Lula government has been quick to stand up to the rich countries—suing the United States and the Europeans before the World Trade Organization over trade barriers on ethanol, cotton and sugar—offending hermanos in the hemisphere get little more than a scolding. Rather than firing off a rebuke and invoking international law against Morales's attempts to seize Petrobras assets, Brasília basically turned the other cheek. Morales is only exercising his country's "sovereign right," officials said at the time. "What do you want us to do, invade Bolivia?" Lula asked rhetorically, in answer to critics. Big nations like Brazil, he argued, "must show solidarity with the poorer countries." Many Brazilians are now clamoring for Lula to assert himself, with sterner diplomatic protests or by filing suits in international courts over the confiscated property and broken contracts. "We're getting our butts kicked by mice," says Brazilian political analyst and foreign-policy expert Amaury de Souza.

Brazilian tolerance may finally be ending. In October, the national Defense Ministry, which has not always seen eye to eye with the olive-branch-wielding Brazilian diplomats, drafted a bold plan to regulate a new National Mobilization Strategy. Signed by Lula, the decree beefs up the country's rules of engagement with rogue nations and bluntly warns of a more energetic response to "actions that damage national sovereignty." No target countries were named, nor were possible actions spelled out. But as Brazil's military engaged in exercises along the border of Paraguay last month, the message was hard to miss. Don't expect a tropical version of pre-emptive war. But it may be a sign that the Latin Gulliver is no longer willing to take things lying down.

Deported in a coma, saved in the U.S.

Deported in a coma, saved in the U.S.

By Deborah Sontag

Sunday, November 9, 2008

 

Antonio Torres, a legal immigrant badly hurt in a crash, is back in Arizona after a hospital deported him to Mexico. (Josh Haner/The New York Times)

 

GILA BEND, Arizona: Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.
Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.
For days, Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.
By summer's end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.
"In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness," the elder Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. "But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!"
Antonio Torres's experience sharply illustrates the haphazard way in which the U.S. health care system handles cases involving uninsured immigrants who are gravely injured or seriously ill. Whether these patients receive sustained care in the United States or are privately deported by a hospital depends on what emergency room they initially visit.
There is only limited federal financing for these fragile patients, and no governmental oversight of what happens to them. Instead, it is left to individual hospitals, many of whom see themselves as stranded at the crossroads of a failed immigration policy and a failed health care system, to cut through a thicket of financial, legal and ethical concerns.
The two American hospitals treating Antonio Torres approached his case from distinctly different perspectives. St. Joseph's in Phoenix, with a focus on keeping down the rising cost of uncompensated care, repatriates about eight uninsured patients a month.
"We're trying to be good stewards of the resources we have," said Sister Margaret McBride, a hospital vice president. "We're trying to make sure that the acute-care hospital is available for individuals who need acute care. We can't keep someone forever."
By contrast, El Centro Regional Medical Center in California said it never sends an immigrant over the border. "We don't export patients," said David Green, its chief executive. "I can understand the frustrations of other hospitals, but the flip side is the human being element."
Hospitals are required to screen and treat all those who arrive at their emergency rooms. But they receive only partial compensation for illegal immigrants, and it ends when the patient is stabilized.
But hospitals are also required to discharge safely patients who need continuing care, leading to their quandary: They generally cannot find nursing homes to accept illegal immigrants, or legal ones with less than five years' residency, because long-term care is not covered by emergency Medicaid.
Hospitals in New York face dilemmas as complex as do their counterparts in the Southwest, with the added dimension of a more diverse immigrant population and prospective repatriations to Africa and Asia. The case of Kong Fong Yu has stymied a community hospital in Lower Manhattan.
Yu, 53, suffered a stroke on May 14, 2007. He awoke with slurred speech and then collapsed on his bathroom floor. By the time he arrived at New York Downtown Hospital, it was too late to try to reverse damage to the brain, the hospital said in court papers.
The hospital admitted Yu for tests and to regulate his high blood pressure, which he had been treating with Chinese herbs. Almost immediately, Yu was considered medically stable and ready for discharge to a skilled nursing home. But since he was uninsured and ineligible for Medicaid, no nursing home would take him. He had no relatives in the United States.
So he stayed, and stayed. And he was not the only one. Jeffrey Menkes, the hospital's president, said Downtown housed a few uninsured immigrants like Yu at any given moment, which costs the hospital $1.5 million to $2 million a year. It also costs patients like Yu the chance to receive the intensive rehabilitation that they need.
Yu, according to a hospital document, can "perform some independent activities of daily living, including turning in bed and feeding himself." But he is "dependent on staff for other daily necessities" and suffers from "limited cognition and limited independent judgment."
Yu said that he entered the United States legally 11 years ago and then overstayed his visa to work "on the black market" as a cook. Speaking in Mandarin that was translated by a hospital employee, Yu said he was grateful to Downtown. "American hospitals are very humane," he said. "I have no money. This hospital is giving me food, a bed and care."
But the hospital does not want him to stay indefinitely. Last winter, Menkes said, at a moment when he had patients "stacked up in the emergency room," he realized that he needed to find a way to discharge patients like Yu. Shortly thereafter, the hospital went to court to get a guardian appointed.
When Katherine Huang, a Chinese-American lawyer, was appointed his guardian last spring, the hospital planned to transfer Yu to a Brooklyn nursing home and support his stay.
But the hospital later changed course. In late September, Yu entered the courtroom of New York State Supreme Court Judge Lottie Wilkins on a taxi-yellow gurney. Dressed in a hospital gown, he smoothed his thin hair and saluted the judge in English. Squeezing a small rubber ball for exercise, he was then wheeled behind closed doors, accompanied by his guardian, for what Wilkins called a status conference, closed to the news media.
No record was made of the proceeding. But the guardian said that she learned then that the hospital was contemplating sending him back to his relatives in China.
"All of a sudden, it became, 'Great, the family wants him back,' after the hospital repeatedly told me the family did not," said Huang, the guardian.
The hospital declined to discuss the case, citing patient confidentiality. Menkes said, "We are not going to force people back" to their homelands.
After the September hearing, The New York Times contacted Yu's 30-year-old son in Ningbo, China. Cheng Jun Yu, the son, said he and his mother had been estranged from Yu since he left for the United States. "The family situation wasn't merry," he said.
"We do not wish for him to return," he continued. "He will be a burden for me, and I do not have the time or resources to care for him. My mother has established a new family, and I do not wish for this matter to disrupt her life. If they want to send him back, they will have to negotiate with the Chinese government to see if the government will care for him."
Antonio Torres's journey through the American - and Mexican - health care systems began at dawn on June 7, when the 19-year-old, driving to work across a rutted, gravelly dirt road on the ranch where his family lives, flipped his pickup truck. He was found, unconscious, about 150 feet, or 45 meters, from his vehicle by a ranch hand.
That June morning, the Torreses followed behind an ambulance that took Antonio to St. Joseph's, the flagship hospital of Catholic Healthcare West, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit with a severe traumatic brain injury, bruised lungs and abdominal injuries. Two days later, his parents were unprepared for a hospital social worker's frank assessment of their son's prognosis.
"She said there was no hope for our son and that it would be best to unplug him," Mr. Torres said. "She said, 'You have to think what kind of life this is, hooked up to a ventilator. And if he wakes up, he will not be able to do much.' When we said, 'No!' the social worker said that, well, then, without insurance, they couldn't keep him."
Five days after the accident, the social worker, using an interpreter, called the public hospital in Mexicali to arrange Antonio Torres's repatriation. "Patient accepted for admission," her notes say. The following day, the notes add, "Parents upset."
The hospital delayed the repatriation for a few days, giving the elder Torres time to search for a nursing home. He came up empty, so the hospital moved to repatriate his son even though he was not only comatose and dependent on a ventilator but also had a very high white blood cell count, indicating infection.
Antonio Torres had pneumonia. A hospital physician temporarily blocked his transfer.
Two days later, early on June 20, his white blood cell count was still too high to meet the physician's condition for transfer, according to the social worker's notes. Nonetheless, a few hours later, with the same physician's consent, Antonio Torres was placed on a portable ventilator for his departure.
He spent several days in an emergency room in Mexicali before a bed opened up in a crowded ward. His parents said Mexican doctors advised them to take their son back to the United States if possible. Through their church, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the parents made contact with a church leader in El Centro, California, who took them under his wing, introduced them to the local hospital and raised money for "the best ambulances in the border area," the elder Torres said.
Within a week, his son was on his way back to the United States, where the El Centro hospital was waiting to take him in and write off his care as charity.
"This was a kid who came to this country legally, worked here legally and had an accident," said Green, president of the city-owned hospital. "For God's sake, don't we take care of our folk? To me, this case shows one of the disastrously broken pieces of our health care system."
Torres arrived from Mexico in septic shock, a potentially fatal condition caused by overwhelming infection. After 18 days at El Centro, he woke forcefully from his coma. "They took out his trach tube, he cleared his throat and said, 'Where's my mom?"' his father said.
Told of the progress that the younger Torres had made, McBride said, "That's wonderful," adding that she thought it a testament to the emergency care at her hospital. "Maybe if he had been in a different setting, he may not have survived," she said.
The Torreses have filed a detailed complaint against St. Joseph's with the Arizona health department, and the matter is under investigation.
Now Torres walks with a cane and speaks slurred but comprehensible Spanish. He is itching to climb back onto a combine and cut alfalfa alongside his father. For the moment, though, he is commuting with his mother from Arizona to California for therapy.
Back in Arizona, his father sat stolidly for hours on a worn couch in the concrete barracks-style housing where his family lives, letting the conversation swirl around him.
"Imagine if I had said, 'O.K., disconnect him,"' Jesús Torres said.
Pilar Conci contributed reporting from New York and Tina Lee from Ningbo.

“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape

“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape

Over the past two years, I have developed a growing fascination with lawn signs.  Not the ones advertising politicians or plumbers, but the ones advertising websites.  Dating websites.
These signs are so prevalent in my area that I decided to launch a private investigation into who was behind them and just how far they stretched.  What I found started in my small home town and led me all the way to the secret guerilla marketing infrastructure of a multimillion-dollar company…

Background: 

In the fall of 2007, I was about a year into an Analyst gig at a large web-focused private equity firm.  My job description was simple: do whatever it takes to find interesting companies who are making lots of money on the internet.
During this time, every radio commercial, billboard, and t-shirt bearing a domain name held a special meaning: it represented an opportunity to find the next big deal.  As you can imagine, the same names kept popping up again and again.  I was looking for new deals everywhere.
One weekend, I trekked down to South Jersey to visit my parents in my hometown of Glassboro.  The town sits about 30 minutes southeast of Philadelphia and has a population of less than 20,000.  As I drove past my old high school, my deal-hunting subconscious noticed something bizarre.  Stuck in the grass by the curb was a white lawn sign about a foot tall with a very simple message in black Times New Roman: “Single? www.GlassboroSingles.ORG”
It looked like something the local contractor would ask to stick in your front yard while he replaced your roof.  Except… well, it was plugging a dating website.  I had about a million questions, but two immediately simmered to the top:

• Glassboro is a tiny market of nominal interest to even local advertisers.  Who would register a domain, let alone build a website, to target our tiny population?
• Who in their right mind advertises websites with lawn signs?

By the time I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I had convinced myself that the site was the product of some overzealous local entrepreneur.  I wrote off the lawn sign as an amateurish stab at guerilla marketing.  When I drove out of town the next day, the sign was gone.
Fast forward a few weeks.  I was back in New York, rushing up 5^th Avenue on my way to work in Midtown.  As I wedged myself through the usual crowd, something stopped me in my tracks.  Eight feet in the air, tied to a lamp post, was a white sign with black Times New Roman: “Single? www.FifthAvenueSingles.COM”
I promptly morphed into one of those sidewalk-obstructing idiots who stares up into the sky and infuriates the people who actually have to be somewhere.  Aside from the URL, this sign was identical to the one I had seen in Glassboro.  By the time I got to my work, I decided that there were four possibilities:

• This was a complete coincidence and these were the efforts of two completely separate businesses with identically unorthodox advertising methods (unlikely).
• The overzealous Glassboro entrepreneur had loaded up his car with lawn signs and decided to extend his guerilla marketing scheme to the Big Apple (less likely).
• Some NY-based business had done some marketing in the tri-state area and decided Glassboro was a ripe market (even less likely).
• There was something bigger going on.  This struck me as the most likely case, but raised a question that made my head hurt: if whoever is doing this has the ability to target New York City but somehow made their way down to Glassboro, how many of the towns in between have also been hit?

Not long after, I stumbled onto another clue.  I was in Central New Jersey on my way to give a guest lecture at Princeton University, which is about the geographical midpoint between New York and Glassboro.  As my cab rolled through neighboring West Windsor Township, I saw a familiar-looking lawn sign wedged in the grass alongside the road: “Single? www.WindsorSingles.ORG”.
That one did it for me.  At the absolute least, I was now convinced that this lawn sign business had its tentacles stretched into almost every town in the state of New Jersey. It was worth spending some time to learn more.

Industry Research:

In talking to a few colleagues about this fascinating business, I learned that most private equity shops shy away from dating sites for a number of reasons:

• Dating sites are known for tremendously high churn rates (if your product works, your customers never have to come back; if it doesn’t they see no reason to come back).  This means dating sites have to keep a steady flow of new customers coming into the top of the funnel in order to survive, let alone grow revenue and profit.
• High churn rates mean new customers have low, volatile expected lifetime values.  This has a negative impact on the equity value of each customer, making it difficult to justify the valuation multiples seen by membership-driven websites in other verticals.
• The need to keep more and more new customers coming in creates a necessity for massive marketing budgets that often involve aggressive affiliate marketing (i.e. paying third parties to bring you new customers).  This further damages the perceived value of the user base to a potential investor or acquirer.
• Like social networking, “online dating” is a natural monopoly (or, at best, a natural oligopoly).  A dating site’s quality is determined by the number and quality of matches it can provide a new user, which is directly tied to the size of its membership base.  This makes it extremely difficult to enter the market. 

However, just because something isn’t a great investment prospect doesn’t mean it’s a bad business.  Many, many people have become obscenely wealthy in this industry (both online and offline).  The technology required to connect two people is trivial, meaning your only real expense is the cost of customer acquisition.  If you are part of the natural oligopoly, your product quality will be high and people will seek you out.  This cycle lowers your costs and sends your margins skyrocketing.
Furthermore, the online dating industry has made a lot of secondary players wealthy thanks to affiliate marketing.  At times, online dating sites have paid as much as $100 per head for new paying customers, and routinely pay out at least a few dollars for new “free trial” users or other prospects.  This means anyone with the power to herd single internet users can potentially tap into a strong monetization engine.
With this information in-hand, I started to see some beauty in the lawn sign model.  Since virtually all dating sites are national, even ones with millions of members can under-serve certain geographic regions.  The “YourTownSingles.com” approach leads potential members to believe their area will be extremely well represented in the site’s population.  This creates the perception of high-quality matches, even if the total user base is small.
I had visited each of the URLs I saw on the lawn signs, and each contained a multi-step form asking for a bunch of personal contact information.  This led me to suspect that the business wasn’t running its own site, but was acting as an affiliate marketer.  Often times, an affiliate’s commission is tiered based on the level of pre-qualification of their referrals.  This means that an affiliate can make a lot more money selling my information to a third-party dating site if they have my name, e-mail, phone number, age and gender than if they simply have my e-mail address.
Given the large amount of information these pages required, I became fairly confident that I had figured out what was going on (for the most part).  The business makes a small investment ($50-100) in buying a domain name and a few dozen lawn signs for a given town.  Then they put up a form landing page at the URL, plant the signs, and see what kind of return they generate by luring the townsfolk to their site and then passing their information on to user-hungry dating websites.  If the ROI is positive, they keep at it.  If not, they try another town.
After reaching these unverified conclusions, the lawn sign business slipped out of my mind for quite some time.  When I quit my private equity job to found RJMetrics this past July, however, my interest was reignited.  The reason: I still see these signs everywhere.

Relapse

I seriously can’t take a ten minute drive without passing one of these signs.  What fascinates me more, however, is that they never seem to last more than a few days in one spot.  In most cases, I’ll see a “Single?” sign somewhere and the next time I drive by it will be gone.  I can only assume that these signs are being taken down by whomever maintains the property where they are placed (they are almost always stuck in the lawn of a public park or building).
The fact that these signs are still so prevalent today, more than a year after I saw the first, means two amazing things:

• Despite their short shelf-life (or, lawn-life), sticking these plastic signs into the ground in small towns has proven financially viable (I can’t imagine that a year’s worth of data to the contrary would result in the business continuing to print and plant these signs).
• Someone must be monitoring and replacing these signs as they are taken down.  When you consider the number of towns likely involved in this system, it’s clear that this is far from a one-man show.

Then, just this past Friday, I saw the most amazing sign yet.  A town not far from my house is called Haddon Heights, NJ.  It is a miniscule town that occupies just 1.6 square miles of land and has a population of barely 7,000 people.  Furthermore, 56% of the population is married and 25% is under the age of 18 (thanks Wikipedia!). Not exactly a ripe market for a dating business.  Nonetheless, as I drove through the town, I saw (no exaggeration) twenty signs that read “Single? www.HaddonHeightsDating.COM”
Since the town seemed to have such a surplus, I decided to pull over and pick up a souvenir:

My new souvenir on the RJMetrics couch

Stealing a lawn sign brought me to a realization: these signs are driving me insane and I have figure out who is behind them, how big this system is, and whether they are actually making any money by doing this.  It was time to do some real digging.

How Big Is It? 

First stop: Google.  Dozens and dozens of crafted queries designed to find the slightest mention of one of these yard signs anywhere on the internet turned up dry.  Absolutely no one out there seemed to be aware of these things (and those that were didn’t seem to care).
Maybe this was a smaller operation than I thought.  To answer that question, I set out to discover just how many of these websites were actually out there.  Since these sites are all just basic lead-gen landing pages, I speculated that the infrastructure of this system was a lot like a domain parking business, where a single web application feeds different content to a large number of domains based on which domain is accessed.  If this was the case, all of the domains would likely correspond to the same IP address.
I pinged each of the four websites I could recall to see what IP addresses were serving them.  Here are the results:

• GlassboroSingles.com: 200.46.241.132
• HaddonHeightsDating.com: 66.252.239.220
• FifthAvenueSingles.com: 69.41.228.6
• WindsorSingles.org: 66.252.239.220 

Four domains and three different IPs.  It appeared I might be wrong about the parking servers, but the fact that one of them showed up twice gave me some hope.  It was still possible that these domains were parked in massive batches on various servers.  However, they weren’t all in the exact same place.  To get a sense of where the servers are actually sitting, I used an IP lookup and traceroute tool.  As it turns out, here is where these servers reside:

• 69.41.228.6 is in Dallas, Texas
• 66.252.239.220 is in Miami, Florida
• 200.46.241.132 is in Panama 

Why the scattered infrastructure?  Is it possible these identical road signs that all appeared within 100 miles of each other are actually operated by different companies?
Regardless, I had the data I needed to size up the operation.  With the IPs in hand, I turned to the “Reverse IP” tool at domaintools.com.  The tool is simple: you provide an IP address and they tell you how many websites reside there.  If you want, you can buy a complete list for a few bucks.
The results:

• 66.252.239.220 hosts about 5,100 domains
• 200.46.241.132 hosts about 3,800 domains
• 69.41.228.6 hosts about 500 domains

Wow-is it really possible this lawn sign network includes so many domain names?  I whipped out my credit card and purchased the answer.  I stared in disbelief at an Excel file containing every domain name hosted across these three servers: 8,870 of them.  They all fit the formula: a town name and a dating keyword.
I wrote some Macros in Excel to pull out each domain’s TLD (i.e. .com, .net, .org), name scheme, and the name of the town it represented.  Here are the results:

• Unique Domains: 8,870
• Unique Town Names: 5,902  
• Top Level Domains:
  
  • .COM: 65.7%
  • .ORG: 29.6%
  • .NET: 4.4%
  • .US: 0.3%
  • .INFO: <0.1%
• Sign Text Patterns (____ is the name of a town or city):
  
  • ____SINGLES: 78.0%
  • ____DATING: 12.2%
  • ____MATCH: 3.0%
  • ____DATES: 2.0%
  • ____PERSONALS: 1.8%
  • SINGLEIN____: 1.0%
  • ____SINGLE: 0.5%
  • ____CHRISTIANSINGLES: 0.5%
  • ____GREATEXPECTATIONS: 0.4%
  • DATING____: 0.2%
  • SINGLES____: 0.2%
  • ____PERSONAL: <0.1%
  • ____ASIANS: <0.1%

It’s important to note that this massive list is almost certainly not the list in full.  I remembered four signs I had seen and they turned up three servers full of domains.  It’s extremely likely that more signs might yield more servers.
I remembered originally thinking that this business was something homegrown to South Jersey- clearly I was wrong.  However, now I had the information I needed to determine just how far these yard signs stretched.
I loaded a master list of every city in the country and wrote an algorithm to link each domain to a specific state.  Naturally, there are some town names that appear in multiple states (which are a jackpot to these guys, since one landing page can serve multiple markets), so in those cases I assigned the domain’s state as “multiple.”  Also some domains contained city nicknames or abbreviations, making it tricky to classify them in a quick batch process.  Despite these issues, I was able to classify over 80% of the domains.
As it turns out, there were domains corresponding to all 50 states and Puerto Rico.  Additionally, the names were distributed surprisingly evenly across the states.  No single state represented more than 8.4% of the domain population, and the top 20% of states only represented 54% of the domains (I would have guessed an 80/20 distribution or worse). The top ten most referenced states are listed below:

• Texas: 8.4%
• Wisconsin: 7.8%
• West Virginia: 5.7%
• Pennsylvania: 5.7%
• California: 5.6%
• New Jersey: 5.0%
• Virginia: 4.7%
• New York: 4.7%
• Washington: 3.3%
• Tennessee: 3.2%

Clearly, this effort isn’t isolated to my tri-state area (in fact it appears to be even more prevalent in states like Texas and Wisconsin).
Let’s take a moment to consider the potential scale of this operation.  Given the number of domains registered and the frequency with which signs appear to be replaced, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that whoever is responsible may have placed literally hundreds of thousands of signs into American soil over the past two years.

Who Is Behind It?

As I mentioned before, I was intrigued by the fact that these domains live on three separate web servers from separate hosting providers in separate geographic locations (Florida, Texas, and Panama).  In order to find out who is behind this operation, I first needed to confirm that these domains and servers were in fact managed by the same company.
I visited several of the landing pages across the separate servers searching for clues that could tie back to an owner.  I found nothing by way of contact information, but I did see enough to conclude that all three servers are related.  While the designs vary slightly from domain to domain, all of the sites end up asking you the same exact questions about yourself and offering the same exact drop-down lists of answer choices.

Every Site Asks the Same Questions

Since I couldn’t find contact information on the webpages themselves, I decided to go find it on my own.
My first stop: WHOIS.  The WHOIS database is designed to serve as a master directory of all domain name owners, although in my experience there are no controls enforcing the submission of valid information.  Moreover, most domain name registrars now allow registrants to register anonymously by serving as a proxy for the registrant.  Despite these shortcomings, it’s always a good place to start.
I looked up a random domain from my list and was disappointed to see it registered to “Domains by Proxy, Inc”-which is basically GoDaddy’s anonymous domain name registration service.  Disappointed, I decided to try a few more just in case.  Most were by Proxy, but eventually found some variations.
Many of the domains on the Panama server turned out to be registered to NuStar Solutions, S.A. of Panama City.  On the other servers, those that weren’t registered by proxy were registered to IMAT Group of Vadodara, India.
The records didn’t provide domain names for these companies (their e-mail addresses were Yahoo or Gmail).  However, Google was able to come to the rescue and turn up their sites: www.imatgroup.com and www.nustarsolutions.com.
The sites revealed that both companies are offshore development shops.  Both are centered around web design services, but offer additional services as well.  NuStar mentions “Sign/Banner Advertising,” while IMAT mentions a more exhaustive list that includes “Guerilla Marketing Services,” “Sign/Banner Marketing,” “Localized Campaigns,” and “Direct Response Lead Generation.”  Sound familiar?
At this point, I came to the realization that every question I answered seemed to introduce two more.  In this case, they were “did someone hire these firms or are they acting on their own?” and, more confusingly, “how did a web design firm in Panama or India get a lawn sign physically planted in the front lawn of my high school in South Jersey?”
To find the answer, I decided that I wasn’t done with my WHOIS search.  Back when I was cracking into companies in New York, I discovered a tried and true trick for getting a CEO’s cell phone number: historical WHOIS records.  Often, the original registrant of a company’s domain name is its founder.  As such, it’s common for the founder’s personal contact information to exist at some point in the WHOIS database.  As the company grows, they change the record, but by that time (often unbeknownst to them) companies like domaintools have already saved the old information in their archive.
I went back to the list of domains and did an exhaustive search of WHOIS records looking for domains with WHOIS record changes.  I quickly noticed that all of the Panama domains were registered in 2006, whereas the India names were registered from about the Summer of 2007 onward.  This might explain the different servers; if a company hired these firms to register the names and administer the websites, perhaps they switched providers in 2007, leaving their infrastructure split in half.
Pretty soon, I hit the jackpot.
CLINTONDATING.ORG, which sits on the Panama server, was not registered to NuStar Solutions or by proxy-instead, it was registered to Terry Fitzpatrick at a company called “The Right One” in Norwell, Massachusetts.   At long last, I had a company name.  A closer look revealed another little present: Terry’s email contained a company website: therightone.com.
I visited the site and began to find some answers.  “The Right One” is a matchmaking service.  You provide them with basic information about yourself and they use it to match you up with a prospective mate.  Clicking the “Get Started” link on their website leads you to a familiar sight: a web form asking you the same exact questions that appear on the domain landing pages.  These were definitely our guys.
With one more click, I learn that The Right One has franchise offices across the country.  Check out this map from the “Locations” page on their website:

The Right One Office/Franchise Locations

Look familiar?  If you need a hint, scroll up and look at the top 10 domains by state that I listed above.  It’s a perfect match.  Even more telling to my personal story are these particular franchise locations:

• Cherry Hill, NJ: Neighbors Haddon Heights, NJ and is a 20 minute drive from Glassboro, NJ
• Lawrenceville, NJ: Neighbors West Windsor Township in Central NJ
• New York, NY (420 Lexington): Midtown Manhattan, two blocks from my subway stop 

Some quick research on the company itself yields a pretty complex business structure. The Right One is owned by a company called PAFCO International, which is itself a subsidiary of Together Management Group, Inc, which goes by the aliases TD Management Group and Together Dating Services.  The combined company employs over 500 people in over 80 offices across the United States.  If you assume the headquarters has at least a few dozen employees, that implies that any given satellite office is just a handful of people.
A January Inc. article mentions Together Dating as a client of Texas-based Instinct Marketing, a response-based marketing company that specializes in “vertically-focused websites.”  Texas, as you may recall, is the home of one of the company’s three web servers.  However, while Instinct Marketing may be Together Dating’s partner on the technology side, I find it hard to believe they’re the ones putting the signs in the ground.  The geographic correlation between sign spottings and franchise offices is simply too strong.

Does Yard Sign Marketing Work?

Remember when I said that certain dating businesses can print money?  This is one of them.  A 2006 press release reveals that the company was then bringing in about $45 Million of revenue a year.  I also found an unverified claim from a disgruntled ex-employee on ripoffreport.com that claims the company charges their customers from $3,000 to over $15,000 for their matchmaking services.
At those prices, the economics of the yard sign strategy start to make sense.  Yard signs like those cost about $1 apiece to print and if franchise office has a slow day they can send out their extra “relationships experts” to plant lawn signs within a 50-mile radius.  One successful new lead can bankroll thousands of new signs.

Some Closure (and a Shameless Plug) 

In the end, I consider this mystery solved.  My years-long fascination with these bizarre signs that seemed to follow me up and down the east coast is over.  As a bonus, I discovered an interesting company with an even more interesting marketing strategy.
Regardless of how you feel about Together Dating’s industry or its methods, you have to appreciate their tremendous, low-profile marketing machine and the data-driven technological infrastructure that supports it.  This company brings in 8 solid figures of revenue every year using nothing but yard signs, some parked domains, and a firm grasp of the data that drives their growth.  CEO Paul Falzone explained the importance of such data in a recent interview.
Even in this offbeat corner of the business world, success is a function of intelligence, strategy, and analytical decision-making. The online business intelligence tools we provide here at RJMetrics are designed to empower all online businesses with these strengths.  Our tools provide new echelons of accessibility to your existing data, allowing your business to measure, manage, and monetize better. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us for a free discussion about how we can drive growth in your online business (no lawn signs required).

This entry was written by robertjmoore and posted on November 6, 2008 at 10:26 am and filed under Business Profiles with tags affiliate marketing, dating, dating websites, guerilla marketing, investigation, lawn signs, local advertising, marketing, response marketing, signs, single, street spam, together dating, yard signs. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: 

Immigration: No Correlation With Crime

By Kathleen Kingsbury Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008

A Los Angeles police officer leads a man suspected of kidnapping to a patrol car.

Robert Nickelserg / Getty

Despite our melting-pot roots, Americans have often been quick to blame the influx of immigrants for rising crime rates. But new research released Monday shows that immigrants in California are, in fact, far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California's adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. Indeed, among men ages 18 to 40 — the demographic most likely to be imprisoned — those born in the U.S. were 10 times more likely than foreign-born men to be incarcerated.
"From a public safety standpoint, there would be little reason to limit immigration," says Kristin Butcher, an economics professor at Wellesley College and one of the report's authors.
The new report even bolsters claims by some academics that increased immigration makes the United States safer. A second study, released earlier this month by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, found that on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period. The PPIC even determined that on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities such as Los Angeles that took in a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower influx of illegals.
Driving these statistics, researchers believe, are the same factors that drive immigration in the first place. "People who make the decision to come here from another country want to get ahead, establish a better life," says Harvard sociology professor Robert Sampson. "That dream is not something they're likely to risk by getting arrested."
Sampson and colleagues recently examined more than 3,000 violent acts committed in Chicago from 1995 to 2003, analyzing police records, census data and a survey of more than 8,000 residents. They discovered what Sampson calls the "Latino Paradox" — first-generation Mexican immigrants were 45% less likely to engage in violence than third-generation Americans. This pattern continued into the second generation, which was 22% less likely to be violent. Similar trends have been seen in New York and Miami, both of which have large immigrant enclaves. "Immigrant communities are often responsible for revitalizing the urban neighborhoods that they live in," Sampson says. The irony of people's popular misconceptions, he adds, is "that the longer one is exposed to American culture, the more likely you are to participate in violence."
Critics note that studies such as those mentioned above rarely distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Reliable data that separates the two groups is hard to find, but Indiana University economist Eric Rasmusen has culled figures from a 2005 GAO report on foreigners incarcerated in Federal and state prisons to calculate that illegal immigrants commit 21% of all crime in the United States, costing the country more than $84 billion. Rasmusen contends the distinction is important because immigrants with a green card or U.S. citizenship have already jumped through several legal hoops to live and work in the U.S., including a background check into any prior criminal record back home. "Legal immigrants are by definition unusually law-abiding," Rasmusen wrote last June. But Professor Daniel Mears, a Florida State University criminologist, argues that such reasoning can also be turned on its head. "If someone is here illegally," Mears asks, "why would they call attention to themselves by committing a crime?"
Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls, warns that even if immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, their children and grandchildren may be more likely to end up on the wrong side of the law. He points out that U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that Hispanics make up 20% of state and Federal prison populations in 2005, a rise of 43% since 1990. At that rate, one in every six Hispanic males born in the U.S. today can expect to be imprisoned during his lifetime — more than double the rate for non-Hispanic whites, but lower than that of African-Americans of the same age. "That means the children and grandchildren of immigrants are committing a lot of crime, making this a long-term problem," Camarota says, before adding, "That's much worse news."
Whatever the findings of the latest PPIC research, it will do little to cool the passions on either side of the issue. When debating immigration, says Mears, "it doesn't matter what the empirical evidence shows; people react with their gut feelings first."
The original version of this article stated that Daniel Mears is a professor of criminology at the University of Florida. In fact, Daniel Mears is a professor of criminology at Florida State University.

After Immigrant Raid, Iowans Ask Why

By Betsy Rubiner/Postville Tuesday, May. 27, 2008

Two women attend a press conference at Saint Bridget Parish in Postville, Iowa.

Jessica Reilly / Telegraph Herald / AP

In this small northeastern Iowan town surrounded by newly planted cornfields, a middle-aged white woman walks into the local Guatemalan restaurant with her arm around a Hispanic child who is sobbing because she can't find her mother. After conferring with a restaurant worker, the woman takes the child nearby to St. Bridget's, a small 1970s-era brick Catholic church on a quiet tree-lined street that has become command central for what people in this community of 2,273 describe as a "disaster relief response."

In the aftermath of the nation's largest single-site immigration raid — a May 12 raid of a Postville-based meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc. that took 389 workers into custody — Hispanic children and adults here remain fearful. And many white residents remain hard at work helping the people left behind — mostly women from Guatemala and Mexico and their children. To date, 270 illegal immigrant workers have pleaded guilty to unusually tough federal criminal charges of working with false documents and have received five-month prison sentences followed by deportation. About 40 female workers have been released temporarily to care for children. Suddenly without income, job prospects or spouses, they await court dates.
Many Hispanics, legal or not, fear that the immigration agents will return. (The original goal had been to arrest 697 of the plant's 968 workers.) On the first chaotic day of the raid, about 400 people fled to the church seeking safety, food, shelter, medical care and the whereabouts of family members. Now, Postville residents led by religious leaders have spontaneously stitched together a safety net. Their argument: if this were a natural disaster, FEMA would be here but instead it's a man-made tragedy and the government is providing little help. "It is my privilege to serve the needs of these people," says Sister Mary McCauley, a petite, white-haired woman with a kind smile who is St. Bridget's pastoral administrator. "[but] I don't know why they have left it to the faith community alone."
Responding with an outpouring of donated goods, money, time and caring, the volunteers are fueled by compassion, duty, and, increasingly, frustration and fury. They know too that immigrants have helped make Agriprocessors the nation's largest kosher meat processor and, in turn, helped Postville prosper while many small Iowa towns struggle. "They're being preyed upon," says John Schlee, 71, a volunteer wearing overalls and a farm implement company cap. "They're doing work that the American workers don't want to do. They're searching for a better life and now their families are being torn apart."
Anti-immigrant sentiment and ethnic tensions are not unknown in this unusually diverse Iowa small town, whose residents include descendants of German and Norwegian Lutherans and Irish Catholics as well as more recent arrivals — Latin Americans, Ukrainians and Hasidic Jews drawn here by the plant. A few angry people have called the church, complaining about its care of "criminals." But volunteers like Ardie Kuhse, 60, shrug this off. "Yes, they were illegal. But they were working. Is that a crime? They're a part of our community," says Kuhse, near tears as she recalls trying to calm children after the raid.
On the weekend before Memorial Day, St. Bridget's social hall bustled with Hispanic families seeking financial and legal advice, including Sylvia Ruiz, 40, and Marta Veronica, 32, Guatemalans who wore electronic ankle bracelets. "We can't work. We can't provide for our kids. God bless the church," says Veronica, speaking through a Spanish interpreter. She is looking after a daughter and two teen-age nephews, who were among several minors detained and later released. Cooking meals, making beds, unloading trucks and running errands, the volunteers include people from Postville, other Iowa communities and beyond — lawyers, religious leaders, staff from a nonprofit Latino aid center in Waterloo and students and faculty from Iowa colleges.
At one card table, a Cornell College student helped people locate family and friends. Above them hung an Iowa map pocked with post-it notes showing the locations of detention centers. Nearby, a Lutheran minister conferred with a Hasidic man who runs the local kosher grocery store. At another card table, two nuns filled out a raid "registration and care" form for two Hispanic men, assisted by two Luther College students acting as interpreters.
Donations are being used to help pay for necessities like rent and utilities. In the church rectory, lawyers met individually with immigrants struggling to understand criminal and immigration law. The unusually rapid court proceedings have raised concerns about violations of due process. There have been allegations that workers have been exploited. Some immigrants fear eviction as replacement workers arrive and need lodging. They have other questions: Where are the men and women serving their sentences? When will the temporarily released mothers face charges? How do they get and pay for passports for children who are U.S. citizens?
Sylvia Ruiz, who is preparing for a likely return to Guatemala, has four children ages 18, 16, 7 and 2. "The little ones don't understand what's happening," she says. "The older ones do." At Postville's K-8 school, where about half of the 387 students are Hispanic and some have been at the school for years, Principal Chad Wahls predicts 70 to 120 children won't return next fall, possibly including the best friends of his third-grade daughter, who "cried and cried for days" after the raid. When school breaks for summer this week, he predicts more tears — from teachers.
Braced for months of waiting and uncertainty, many Postville residents are certain about one thing: "We have to have comprehensive immigration reform so these people who desire to work can. We have to have a way to welcome them," says Sister McCauley. "When people are so hurt, we have to take a look at the law."

Sunday, Jun. 11, 2006

Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?

By Daniel Gilbert

Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a sermon on self-sacrifice when she decided that her father, a widower who had raised six children, deserved his very own national holiday. Almost a century later, people all over the world spend the third Sunday in June honoring their fathers with ritual offerings of aftershave and neckties, which leads millions of fathers to have precisely the same thought at precisely the same moment: "My children," they think in unison, "make me happy."
Could all those dads be wrong?
Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.
Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television. Indeed, an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework. Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact.
Those findings are hard to swallow because they fly in the face of our most compelling intuitions. We love our children! We talk about them to anyone who will listen, show their photographs to anyone who will look and hide our refrigerators behind vast collages of their drawings, notes, pictures and report cards. We feel confident that we are happy with our kids, about our kids, for our kids and because of our kids--so why is our personal experience at odds with the scientific data?
Three reasons.
First, when something makes us happy we are willing to pay a lot for it, which is why the worst Belgian chocolate is more expensive than the best Belgian tofu. But that process can work in reverse: when we pay a lot for something, we assume it makes us happy, which is why we swear to the wonders of bottled water and Armani socks. The compulsion to care for our children was long ago written into our DNA, so we toil and sweat, lose sleep and hair, play nurse, housekeeper, chauffeur and cook, and we do all that because nature just won't have it any other way. Given the high price we pay, it isn't surprising that we rationalize those costs and conclude that our children must be repaying us with happiness.
Second, if the Red Sox and the Yankees were scoreless until Manny Ramirez hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, you can be sure that Boston fans would remember it as the best game of the season. Memories are dominated by their most powerful--and not their most typical--instances. Just as a glorious game-winning homer can erase our memory of 812 dull innings, the sublime moment when our 3-year-old looks up from the mess she is making with her mashed potatoes and says, "I wub you, Daddy," can erase eight hours of no, not yet, not now and stop asking. Children may not make us happy very often, but when they do, that happiness is both transcendent and amnesic.
Third, although most of us think of heroin as a source of human misery, shooting heroin doesn't actually make people feel miserable. It makes them feel really, really good--so good, in fact, that it crowds out every other source of pleasure. Family, friends, work, play, food, sex--none can compete with the narcotic experience; hence all fall by the wayside. The analogy to children is all too clear. Even if their company were an unremitting pleasure, the fact that they require so much company means that other sources of pleasure will all but disappear. Movies, theater, parties, travel--those are just a few of the English nouns that parents of young children quickly forget how to pronounce. We believe our children are our greatest joy, and we're absolutely right. When you have one joy, it's bound to be the greatest.
Our children give us many things, but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality. The fact that children don't always make us happy--and that we're happy to have them nonetheless--is the fact for which Sonora Smart Dodd was so grateful. She thought we would all do well to remember it, every third Sunday in June.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness. To read an interview, go to time.com/gilbert

As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned about Social Impact

Generation Gap in Values, Behaviors

July 1, 2007

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Download the complete report

Executive Summary

• A Generation Gap in Behaviors and Values. Younger adults attach far less moral stigma than do their elders to out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation without marriage. They engage in these behaviors at rates unprecedented in U.S. history. Nearly four-in-ten (36.8%) births in this country are to an unmarried woman. Nearly half (47%) of adults in their 30s and 40s have spent a portion of their lives in a cohabiting relationship.
• Public Concern over the Delinking of Marriage and Parenthood. Adults of all ages consider unwed parenting to be a big problem for society. At the same time, however, just four-in-ten (41%) say that children are very important to a successful marriage, compared with 65% of the public who felt this way as recently as 1990.
• Marriage Remains an Ideal, Albeit a More Elusive One. Even though a decreasing percentage of the adult population is married, most unmarried adults say they want to marry. Married adults are more satisfied with their lives than are unmarried adults.
• Children Still Vital to Adult Happiness. Children may be perceived as less central to marriage, but they are as important as ever to their parents. As a source of adult happiness and fulfillment, children occupy a pedestal matched only by spouses and situated well above that of jobs, career, friends, hobbies and other relatives.
• Cohabitation Becomes More Prevalent. With marriage exerting less influence over how adults organize their lives and bear their children, cohabitation is filling some of the vacuum. Today about a half of all nonmarital births are to a cohabiting couple; 15 years ago, only about a third were. Cohabiters are ambivalent about marriage – just under half (44%) say they to want marry; a nearly equal portion (41%) say they aren't sure.
• Divorce Seen as Preferable to an Unhappy Marriage. Americans by lopsided margins endorse the mom-and-dad home as the best setting in which to raise children. But by equally lopsided margins, they believe that if married parents are very unhappy with one another, divorce is the best option, both for them and for their children.
• Racial Patterns are Complex. Blacks are much less likely than whites to marry and much more likely to have children outside of marriage. However, an equal percentage of both whites and blacks (46% and 44%, respectively) consider it morally wrong to have a child out of wedlock. Hispanics, meantime, place greater importance than either whites or blacks do on children as a key to a successful marriage – even though they have a higher nonmarital birth rate than do whites.
• Survey Sample and Methods. These findings are from a telephone survey conducted from February 16 through March 14, 2007 among a randomly-selected, nationally representative sample of 2,020 adults.

Overview

Americans believe that births to unwed women are a big problem for society, and they take a mixed view at best of cohabitation without marriage. Yet these two nontraditional behaviors have become commonplace among younger adults, who have a different set of moral values from their elders about sex, marriage and parenthood, a new Pew Research Center Survey finds.

This generational values gap helps to explain the decades-long surge in births to unmarried women – which now comprise nearly four-in-ten (37%) births in the United States – as well as the sharp rise in living together without getting married, which, the Pew survey finds, is something that nearly half of all adults in their 30s and 40s have done for at least a portion of their lives.

But this generational divide is only part of a more complex story. Americans of all ages, this survey finds, acknowledge that there has been a distinct weakening of the link between marriage and parenthood. In perhaps the single most striking finding from the survey, just 41% of Americans now say that children are "very important" to a successful marriage, down sharply from the 65% who said this in a 1990 survey.

Indeed, children have fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of items that people associate with successful marriages – well behind "sharing household chores," "good housing," "adequate income," "happy sexual relationship," and "faithfulness." Back in 1990, when the American public was given this same list on a World Values Survey, children ranked third in importance.

The new Pew survey also finds that, by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual happiness and fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."

In downgrading the importance of children to marriage, public opinion both reflects and facilitates the upheavals in marital and parenting patterns that have taken place over the past several decades.

In the United States today, marriage exerts less influence over how adults organize their lives and how children are born and raised than at any time in the nation's history. Only about half of all adults (ages 18 and older) in the U.S. are married; only about seven-in-ten children live with two parents; and nearly four-in-ten births are to unwed mothers, according to U.S. Census figures. As recently as the early 1970s, more than six-in-ten adults in this country were married; some 85% of children were living with two parents; and just one-birth-in-ten was to an unwed mother.

Americans take a dim view of these trends, the Pew survey finds. More than seven-in-ten (71%) say the growth in births to unwed mothers is a "big problem." About the same proportion – 69% – says that a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.

Not surprisingly, however, attitudes are much different among those adults who have themselves engaged in these nontraditional behaviors. For example, respondents in the survey who are never-married parents (about 8% of all parents) are less inclined than ever-married parents to see unmarried childbearing as bad for society or morally wrong. They're also less inclined to say a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. Demographically, this group is more likely than ever-married parents to be young, black or Hispanic,¹ less educated, and to have been raised by an unwed parent themselves.

There is another fast-growing group – cohabiters – that has a distinctive set of attitudes and moral codes about these matters. According to the Pew survey, about a third of all adults (and more than four-in-ten adults under age 50) have, at some point in their lives, been in a cohabiting relationship with a person to whom they were not married. This group is less likely that the rest of the adult population to believe that premarital sex is wrong. They're less prone to say that it's bad for society that more people are living together without getting married. Demographically, this group is more likely than the rest of the adult population to be younger, black, and secular rather than religious.

Marriage

But while this survey finds that people in nontraditional marital and parenting situations tend to have attitudes that track with their behaviors, it does not show that they place less value than others on marriage as a pathway to personal happiness.

To the contrary, both the never-married parents as well as the cohabiters in our survey tend to be more skeptical than others in the adult population that a person can lead a complete and fulfilled life if he or she remains single. This may reflect the fact that never-married parents as well as cohabiters tend to be less satisfied with their current lives than is the rest of the population. For many of them, marriage appears to represent an ideal – albeit an elusive, unrealized one.

Along these same lines, the survey finds that low income adults are more likely than middle income or affluent adults to cite the ability to meet basic economic needs (in the form of adequate income and good housing) as a key to a successful marriage. Adults with lower socioeconomic status – reflected by either education or income levels –also are less likely than others to marry, perhaps in part because they can't meet this economic bar.

And it's this decline in marriage that is at the heart of the sharp growth in nonmarital childbearing. This trend has not been primarily driven – as some popular wisdom has it – on an increase in births to teenage mothers. To the contrary, those rates have been falling for several decades. Rather the sharp increase in nonmarital births is being driven by the fact that an ever greater percentage of women in their 20s, 30s and older are delaying or forgoing marriage but having children.

The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from February 16 through March 14, 2007 among a randomly selected, nationally-representative sample of 2,020 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points.

Children

The survey finds that while children may have become less central to marriage, they are as important as ever to their parents. Asked to weigh how important various aspects of their lives are to their personal happiness and fulfillment, parents in this survey place their relationships with their children on a pedestal rivaled only by their relationships with their spouses – and far above their relationships with their parents, friends, or their jobs or career. This is true both for married and unmarried parents. In fact, relatively speaking, children are most pre-eminent in the lives of unwed parents.

The survey also finds that Americans retain traditional views about the best family structure in which to raise children. More than two-thirds (69%) say that a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. This question has been posed periodically over the past quarter century,² and – even as the percentage of children who live with both a mother and father has dropped steadily during this time period – public opinion has remained steadfastly in favor of a home with a mom and a dad.

In keeping with these traditional views, the public strongly disapproves of single women having children. Among the various demographic changes that have affected marriage and parenting patterns in recent decades – including more women working outside the home; more people living together without getting married; more first marriages at a later age; and more unmarried women having children – it's the latter trend that draws the most negative assessments by far.

Two-thirds (66%) of all respondents say that single women having children is bad for society, and nearly as many (59%) say the same about unmarried couples having children. No other social change we asked about in this particular battery drew a thumbs-down from more than half of respondents.

Divorce

While the public strongly prefers the traditional mother-and-father home, this endorsement has some clear limits. By a margin of 67% to 19%, Americans say that when there is a marriage in which the parents are very unhappy with one another, their children are better off if the parents get divorced. Similarly, by a margin of 58% to 38%, more Americans agree with the statement that "divorce is painful, but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage" than agree with the statement that "divorce should be avoided except in an extreme situation."

Thus, public attitudes toward divorce and single parenting have taken different paths over the past generation. When it comes to divorce, public opinion has become more accepting.³ When it comes to single parenting, public opinion has remained quite negative.

The oddity is that rates of divorce, after more than doubling from 1960 to 1980, have declined by about a third in recent decades, despite this greater public acceptance. On the other hand, the rates of births to unwed mothers have continued to rise, despite the steadfast public disapproval. Some 37% of all births in the U.S. in 2005 were to an unwed mother, up from just 5% in 1960. This rapid growth is not confined to the U.S. Rates of births to unwed mothers also have risen sharply in the United Kingdom and Canada, where they are at about the same levels as they are in the U.S. And they've reached even higher levels in Western and Northern European countries such as France, Denmark and Sweden.

Public Opinion by Demographic Groups

The group differences in public opinion on these matters tend to be correlated with age, religion, race and ethnicity, as well as with the choices that people have made in their own marital and parenting lives. There are some, but not many, differences by gender. Here is a rundown of the key differences by group.

Age, Religiosity and Political Conservatism

As noted above, the Pew survey finds that older adults – who came of age prior to the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s – are more conservative than younger and middle-aged adults in their views on virtually all of these matters of marriage and parenting. Thus, some of the overall change in public opinion is the result of what scholars call "generational replacement." That is, as older generations die off and are replaced by younger generations, public opinion shifts to reflect the attitudes of the age cohorts that now make up the bulk of the adult population.

Even among the younger generations (ages 18 to 64), however, our survey finds substantial differences in attitudes that fall along the fault lines of religion and ideology rather than age.

White evangelical Protestants and people of all faiths who attend religious services at least weekly hold more conservative viewpoints on pretty much the whole gamut of questions asked on the Pew survey. This is true across all age groups. For example, white evangelical Protestants are more likely than other religious groups to consider premarital sex morally wrong.

They are more likely to consider the rise in unmarried childbearing and cohabitation bad for society and more likely to agree that a child needs both a mother and father to be happy. They also are more likely to say legal marriage is very important when a couple plans to have children together or plans to spend the rest of their lives together. Further, white evangelical Protestants are more likely than white mainline Protestants to say that divorce should be avoided except in extreme circumstances and to consider it better for the children when parents remain married, though very unhappy with each other. In sum, white evangelical Protestants have a strong belief in the importance of marriage and strong moral prescriptions against premarital sex and childbearing outside of marriage.

The pattern is the same among those of any faith who attend religious services more frequently, compared with less frequent attendees. And it is the same for political conservatives compared with their more moderate or liberal counterparts.

Race and Ethnicity

The racial and ethnic patterns in public opinion on these matters are more complex. Blacks and Hispanic are more likely than whites to bear children out of wedlock. And yet these minority groups, our survey finds, also are more inclined than whites to place a high value on the importance of children to a successful marriage. Indeed, they place higher value than whites do on the importance of most of the ingredients of a successful marriage that this survey asked about – especially the economic components. But blacks and Hispanics are less likely than whites to be married. One possible explanation to emerge from this survey is that many members of these minority groups may be setting a high bar for marriage that they themselves cannot reach, whether for economic or other reasons.

As noted above, there are sharp generational differences in views about the morality of unwed parenting. However, there is no significant difference on this front by race or ethnicity; blacks, Hispanics and whites are about equally likely to say it is wrong for unmarried women to have children. There are small differences along racial and ethnic lines when it comes to evaluating the impact on society of the growing numbers of children born out of wedlock. Hispanics are somewhat less negative about this phenomenon than are whites and blacks, between whom there is no statistically significant difference.

When it comes to the relationship between marriage and children, Hispanics again stand out. They are more inclined than either whites or blacks to consider having and raising children to be the main purpose of marriage (even so, however, a majority of Hispanics say that adult happiness and fulfillment is the main purpose of a marriage). Also, Hispanics – more so than either blacks or whites – consider children "very important" for a successful marriage.

But when considering a broader range of characteristics of a successful marriage, it is whites who stand apart. They are much less likely than either blacks or Hispanics to consider adequate income, good housing and children to be "very important" to a successful marriage. And they are somewhat less likely to rate various measures of compatibility (see chart) as being important as well. To some degree all these racial and ethnic differences reflect the differing socioeconomic circumstances of whites, blacks and Hispanics. People with higher incomes and education levels – regardless of their race and ethnicity – tend to rate these various characteristics as less important to marriage than do people with a lower socio-economic status.

When it comes to views about divorce, whites and, especially, Hispanics are more likely than blacks to say that divorce is preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage. However, about two-thirds of all three groups say that it is better for the children if their very unhappy parents divorce rather than stay together.

Views about cohabitation are similar for blacks and whites, while Hispanics are a bit less negative about the impact of cohabitation on society. But the similarities between blacks and whites masks divisions of opinion within each group. Among whites, the difference of opinion between generations is particularly sharp – with 55% of whites ages 50 and older saying that living together is bad for society, compared with 38% among younger whites, a difference of 17 percentage points. The comparable difference between older and younger blacks is just 9 percentage points. Among older blacks and whites, the balance of opinion is tilted in the negative direction. For younger whites (ages 18 to 49), a plurality hold a neutral assessment of the impact on society of couples living together without marrying. Among younger blacks, opinion about cohabitation is more divided; 48% of this group considers living together bad for society while 45% take a neutral position and 5% say it is good for society.

To some degree, views about cohabitation reflect differing moral assessments of premarital sex. Blacks are more likely than whites and Hispanics to say that premarital sex is always or almost always morally wrong – and this is true even after group differences in age are taken into account. Those who consider premarital sex wrong also tend to consider cohabitation bad for society, while those who say premarital sex is not wrong or is only wrong in some circumstances are more likely to say the cohabitation trend makes no difference for society.

When it comes to marital and parenting behaviors (as opposed to attitudes), a number of racial and ethnic patterns stand out.

More than eight-in-ten white adults in this country have been married, compared with just seven-in-ten Hispanic adults and slightly more than half (54%) of all black adults. Among blacks, there is a strong correlation between frequent church attendance, moral disapproval of premarital sex and the tendency to marry. Among whites (who marry at much higher rates) this relationship is not as strong.

Among those who have ever been married, blacks (38%) and whites (34%) are more likely than Hispanics (23%) to have been divorced. Blacks also are somewhat more likely than whites or Hispanics to have cohabited without marriage. But all three groups, this survey finds, are equally likely to have had children.

Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to have children out of wedlock. For all groups, this behavior also is strongly correlated with lower educational attainment. For blacks and Hispanics (more so than for whites), frequent church attendance correlates negatively with the likelihood of being an unwed parent.

Gender

The Pew survey finds a great deal of common ground between men and women on issues surrounding marriage and parenting. There are some small differences, however. While men and women are about equally likely to see unmarried parenting as a problem for society, men are a bit more negative than women about unmarried parenting when no male partner is involved in raising the children. Similarly, men are a little more likely than women to believe that children need both a mother and father to be happy. Women, on the other hand, are a bit more likely than men to consider divorce preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage; they also believe more strongly than men that divorce is the better option for children when the marriage is very unhappy. On other matters – such as the main purpose of marriage or the characteristics of a successful marriage – there are few differences.

Education and Income

College-educated adults and high-income adults marry at higher rates and divorce at lower rates than do those with less education and income. They are also less likely to have children outside of marriage.⁴

However, despite the sharp differences by socio-economic status in marital and parenting behaviors, there are only minor differences by socio-economic status in values and attitudes about marriage and parenting. Adults with higher incomes and more education tend to be slightly less inclined than others to say that premarital sex and nonmarital births are always morally wrong. The college educated also are slightly less inclined than the less educated to say it is very important for couples to legally marry if they plan to spend their lives together. Similarly, those with a college education are a little more likely to say that a man or woman can lead a complete and happy life if he or she remains single.

There are no more than minimal differences by education or income when it comes to views about the impact on society of unmarried childbirths and of cohabitation.

Family Background

The Pew survey finds some strong correlations between the kinds of family arrangements that respondents experienced growing up and their own behaviors in adulthood. For example, among respondents who are themselves products of parents who never married, about a third (32%) are themselves never-married parents. By comparison, just 5% of the general adult population are products of never-married parents.

Family background in childhood plays a smaller role, however, in predicting adult attitudes (as opposed to behaviors) about whether unmarried parenting is bad for society and morally wrong. Once age differences are taken into account, those whose parents never married are just a bit less negative than those whose parents married and never divorced about the impact of unmarried childbearing on society.

Respondents with parents who divorced are just as likely as other respondents to take the position that divorce is painful but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage. Similarly, among people ages 18 to 49, the now grown children of divorce hold about the same views as those who grew up in a traditional-married-parent arrangement on whether divorce is better for children than parents staying in an unhappy marriage. On the other hand, those respondents whose parents divorced are less likely than other respondents to believe that a child needs a home with both a mother and a father to grow up happily.

Moral Beliefs, Attitudes and Behaviors

There are close relationships between behaviors, attitudes and moral beliefs when it comes to the subjects of unwed parenting and cohabitation, the Pew survey finds. For example, those who have fewer moral reservations about premarital sex and are positive or neutral about the impact of living together on society also are more likely to have lived with a partner themselves. Similarly, those who are positive or neutral about the social impact of unmarried parenting and less likely to consider it morally wrong are also more likely to be in this situation themselves. It is not possible from this survey to disentangle which came first--the moral beliefs, the attitudes, or the behaviors--but it is clear they tend to go hand-in-hand.

Statistical analysis of these survey findings shows that having less education and being black or Hispanic are traits associated with being a never-married parent. Attending religious services less often also is associated with being an unmarried parent, particularly among blacks and Hispanics.

On the other side of the coin, those who believe that having children without being married is wrong are less likely to be a never-married parent. Also, those who consider the rise in unmarried parents bad for society are less likely to be unmarried parents.

A statistical analysis of factors correlated with ever having lived with a partner outside of marriage shows that cohabiters are younger, more likely to be black, and, after controlling for other demographic factors, less likely to be Hispanic. They are also less likely to attend religious services frequently. There is a strong relationship between moral beliefs about premarital sex and cohabitation history; those who consider premarital sex always wrong are less likely to have cohabited than others. They are also less likely to have cohabited than those who say living together is bad for society – suggesting that the more powerful stigma against cohabitation comes from concerns about morality rather than from concerns about social consequences.

A different pattern emerges when looking at differences between married people who have – and haven't – been divorced. Here, the demographic and attitudinal factors do little to predict the probability of experience with divorce.

There are a few exceptions, however. Catholics are bit less likely than members of other religious groups to have been divorced. And there is a modest correlation between having been divorced and believing that divorce is better for the children than maintaining a very unhappy marriage.

But in the main, experience with divorce cuts across all demographic subgroups more evenly than does experience either with unmarried parenting or with cohabitation. The belief that divorce is preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage is widely shared by both those who have and have not been divorced.

The body of this report provides a deeper analysis of attitudes and behaviors on all these matters. It is presented in five sections:

I. Nonmarital Childbearing
II. Modern Marriage
III. Cohabitation
IV. Divorce
V. Gay Marriage, Civil Unions and Same-Sex Couples Raising Children

Notes

¹Throughout this report, the term blacks or whites refers to non-Hispanic blacks or whites, respectively. Hispanics are of any race. The survey included an oversample of blacks and Hispanics. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
²See the World Values Surveys conducted in the U.S. in 1982, 1990, 1995 and 1999.
³See for example, Thornton, Arland and Linda Young-DeMarco. 2001. "Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s." Journal of Marriage and Family, 63: 1009-1037.
⁴Bianchi, Suzanne M. and Lynne M. Casper. 2000. "American Families." Population Bulletin 55(4). Population Reference Bureau.

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