Why? I could really wonder about that. Neither parents really promoted religion, though as long as she could, our mother dragged us to church. Her choice of churches wasn't very inspired, so it hardly shaped our lives, but it did happen.
She and my father, too, had advanced educations. My father started off with an M.A. My mother got a master's degree much later, but it wasn't typical of a mother of a large family. So maybe that had some influence, too.
We spent some of our lives in rental property, though my father never considered it more than a transitory thing. Here may be a BIG factor. He never felt the slightest sense of competitiveness with anyone about what he owned. I think that was a major modeling factor for us. Because of that, he was always able to save money and did so consistenlty throughout his life. One thing that may be a REAL factor today in what happens to people is that every dollar of income is already spoken for. People spend WAY too much time listening to commercial messages. There's never any buffer for bad times. And there is a terrible amount of psychological static that interferes with people taking care of the necessary things in life. If we had commercial-free media, I think you'd see a lot of people succeeding who aren't doing so today.
I think the causality is the opposite. The style of life that failing families lead cause them to have no other OPTION but rental housing. They end up there, but it isn't what makes their lives what they are. And another factor is simply that today's business is totally profit-oriented, which causes the bottom rung of the ladder to be constantly snatched away as jobs are moved to lower-wage locations. My parents often had to scratch for income, but they didn't have as much of this rung-snatching to deal with.
Jim Mork Cooper
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