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Showing posts from April, 2013

The Economics of the Tooth Fairy

About a month ago, Matthew lost a tooth, put it under his pillow, and the Tooth Fairy gave him two quarters.  Two weekends ago, Nicholas lost a tooth, put it in a sandwich bag and placed it on my dresser.  This past weekend, I asked Nicholas, if he was going to place his tooth under his pillow, so the Tooth Fairy could visit him. Matthew looked up at me from his bed and said, "Dad, is the Tooth Fairy real?" "What do you think, Honey?" "Well, I don't know.  When I lost a tooth at Mom's, I got four quarters and when I lost a tooth here, I only got two quarters." "Well, Matthew, the Tooth Fairy works on the principle of adaptive economics.  She knows the relative wealth of a particular household and pays for teeth accordingly." "Oh," Matthew said, as my oldest was shaking silently in his bed from laughing so hard. Now it seems I'm going to have to develop an economic theory, and I know almost nothing about economics

Preventing Divorce Before Marriage Happens

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So much is being put out there in the Catholic blogosphere right now about how bad divorce is, the deleterious effects of divorce on children and that married Catholics should never consider divorce.  Most of this, though, seems to be written by young married Catholics who are much more committed to their faith and to the reality of marriage than many of their brothers and sisters in the faith to whom they are writing.  While what they are writing is not inconsistent with Catholic teaching, such columns are doing very little to address the problem of divorce among Catholics.  If anyone is truly interested in ending or greatly reducing divorce among Catholics, we need to start by telling people not to get married in the first place. Divorce is largely a product of a marriage that never should have happened in the first place.  In my own case and in the case of so many others with whom I have spoken, one or both of the parties involved was absolutely convinced that the other person was