Hominids did not evolve as nuclear families, but as small tribes and villages. Communal housing, with only one kitchen, needs to heat/cool one set of walls so the per capita household consumption goes down to average global levels despite modern plumbing, electric, media, & broadband.
Having only 1-2 kids in the family stabilizes the population but results in generations of spoiled brats. Kids need the competition of peers to give them realistic expectations. But by the same token, home schooling lets them learn how to help each other but does not expose them to the innumerable pathogens that constantly circulate in larger schools. The infections have already been identified as triggering autism and other mental pathologies. Hominid immune systems never evolve in large herds and just cant handle exposure to so many pathogens, and there are problems with vaccines also.
A closer look at ancient villages reveals that many were small businesses. Except in their case, everyone walked to work. And the community gardens meant that the transportation costs of their food was zero, while at the same time there were plenty of people on hand at critical times like harvest to get things done on time and under budget.
"Life in a Medieval Village" was taken from the court records of an obscure 13th century English midlands village. It owned a team of oxen to plow all the gardens at once, with each family getting a few rows to try whatever they wanted. The water powerwered mill ground all their flour, the smith made their tools. A weaver came thru from time to time with a more efficient loom to weave the cloth from the wool they got from their own sheep.
Everyone knew everyone else. Nobody needed to buy status symbols, and they didnt work anyway. A jackass with a new truck is still a jackass. There are no cracks for troubled kids to fall thru. There is no theft cause everyone knows what everyone has, so the kids grow up to be honest and hardworking. If the parents split up, no biggie, the kids still have walking distance access to both of them. Because there are so many witnesses to interactions, people cant pretend to be angels at home while being exploitive at work. Being the same person all the time prevents neurosis.
You add it all up, and the same familiar access to the internet, media, & modern comforts can be had with the same energy foot print as your fair share of global resources. yet you can still run a business on online, with the same Fed-X or UPS deliveries. Only, when you buy something, it can be thru the village office, so you never see the spam that results from a purchase. Nor are there any stalkers, burglars, or car thieves.
There are obvious benefits to the nuclear family arrangement. And changing to the "village" model would create massive upheaval right at the core of our daily lives. I see no reason to give up the nuclear family model for myself... and I'm sure others feel the same.
The village model assumes some degree of "shared parenting" and "shared responsibility" which is quite foreign to American ways of thinking... there is a strong streak of "I can do what I want to, and how I want to do it, within the law, and other individuals and society can't encroach upon that without good reason"... in other words, we are too individualistic of a country and society for the village to work as a blanket model here. It's not even really debateable whether this would work for everybody... it would not.
But, as you point out, the village model is something that works when the appropriate village structure functions and works together. So... one question is -- do we let people who want to "check out" of the rest of society and form a self-sufficient village... do we let them do it? Including taxes? I haven't heard of many communes and such lately, and without reaction from my peers, I don't know where America stands on this right now. I, for one, won't find myself in a "village" any time soon, unless World War III wipes our existing infrastructure off the map... in which case it will make perfect sense, and I'll be a founding member.
But maybe the village model might lend some of it's ideas to solve some of the problems where people may not have the freedom, choices, and resources that I and many of the others here enjoy. People in poverty, whether it be urban ghettos or rural shacks... could find some aspects of the village model quite helpful. And the cool thing about the village, when a group of people chooses to go that path... is that what makes it work is not tax dollars. It's people helping each other. Tax dollars would help in the areas of doing a little research on what works and what doesn't... training... etc... because much of that "knowledge" was gained by experience and carrying the tradition forward among those who used it, and obviously that knowledge and buy-in has been lost or is not prominently available to poor people today. And most people who like the village concept are liberals who get all warm and fuzzy about the idea... and optimistically assume that everything will be wonderful... but back a thousand and more years ago when this method was widely used... what happened to the troublemakers? They were tossed out of the village. If liberals want to bring back the village, they will have to come to grips with the fact that the standard issue troublemaker is very disruptive in a village, and there need to be ways of effectively dealing with that with a little more bite than "Okay, mister drug dealer, we don't find your input to be constructive to the group, so please stop, okay?".
So maybe the village model could help solve some of our problems at the lower end... but it would take a dedication to the village model by the members, and some degree of the village members "stepping up their game" to make it work... maybe facilitating this is a useful way for government to be involved. I think the tendency would be to be too optimistic and Pollyanna in the approach... but if some realists were to sign on to help work through some of the pragmatic details, then the village model might be of significant use after all. It wouldn't solve all problems for everybody, but it could make significant progress against some of the tougher ones.
Due to the demographics of the baby-boomer generation, and due to the fact that a large number of them have not saved enough money to retire on... bringing "the elders" back into the family structure is probably something that will start happening more and more over the next few years... and present home-building woes aside, it might be a good time to get into the business of building 'in law apartments'.
Rational discourse appreciated do2mind. Maybe you noticed it is in short supply? We already have 'massive upheaval' in many areas, with so many adults so neurotic that the divorce rate has gone thru the roof, too many children are born outside of marriage, our prisons are full, and the shrink's office are as well.
If you can make the nuclear family model work in your community, more power to you. But if Fema trailers were setup in some remote rural area, and single moms given the chance to take their kids out of drug and gang infested neighborhoods, they'd jump at the chance. LA gangs tried to go into business in the Arkansas delta. Pine Bluff has a real problem. But lotsa small towns noticed the strange cars driving around, soon picked up on the fact there were thugs coming, and as you say, ran them outta town. The anonymity needed in the drug business wasnt so easy to come by.
30 odd years ago, the Hippies moved into the Arkansas Ozarks, looking for a clean environment to raise their own kids. the area has since had problems with meth, but that's the newest generation of moonshiners, and they are moving to the cities where the drugs are more convenient, and the welfare benefits greater.
The drug dealers got nowhere with the hippie kids, who grew up in homes with parents who smoked pot. There were some counties and towns like Leslie that got infested with hippies. New Age, pot smoking, skinny dipping, solstice rituals, organic gardening and food nuts. A town of 600 with an organic bakery, dykes, faggots, and people dressed in psychedelic clothes. And what was the result of all this depravity? Well, when my son graduated from Leslie High in 1996, it had the highest ACT scores in the state. 25% of the senior class scored above the 95th percentile.
And if you look it, and the other hippie hill towns in the Arkansas Ozarks up, towns like Alread, Bee Branch, Clinton, Deer, Flippin, Eureka Springs, Greer's Ferry, Heber Springs, and so on thru the alphabet, the numbers jump out at you.
http://normessasweb.uark.edu/reportcards/select.html *zero* rates of violence. dropout rates in the single digits, attendance rates near 95%, graduation rates near 90%.
From schools that have less than 300 kids. with long bus rides from the farm. No fast food outlets in most towns, much less junkfood vending machines in the schools. And no, you dont hear about the communes; they keep a low profile. They dont need crazies like you noticed showing up and wanting in. The big diff with these moder communities compared to the ancient versions has to do with 'puberty rites', which are a universal property of tribes all over the world. To avoid litigation, they send the kids to go live with grandmothers. But then the kids get socialized by the modern world which panders with media aimed at young people, and they never come back.
One of the problems with monogamy is that, ever since the birth control pill came in men who stayed faithful to wives who bore them no sons are out of the gene pool, while the charming philanderers have sired bastards to be raised on welfare all over the county. And now, this has gone on for a few generations, and young women just cant find honorable men for husbands any more. Highly successful career women, who look around at the men in their professions, see they are already married to young sexy bimbos. As a result, they are increasingly not looking for husbands at all any more, but going to fertility clinics to choose among thousands of remarkably talented Y chromosome lines. They get it, that husbands and boyfriends come and go, but a kid is forever, and they want a good relationship when the kid grows up.
And part of that process is now finding them moving in with each other to share the childcare. This will naturally evolve over time with more women moving into communal housing and then selecting a few men because of mentoring skills. This is what the Mosou of SW China have done for centuries. In a remote impoverished area of the Eastern Himalayas, they have been left alone to do things the way they want, and it remains to be seen how they adjust to outsiders.
But modern technological methods can make an enormous difference. http://www.paulekman.com outlines the lie detection techniques he discovered doing primate research with autonomic facial expressions that then get painted over during an attempt to deceive. With a high speed, high def camera, you can spot the liars. I would not be surprised if the aforementioned highly educated women have not picked up on this. They will no doubt use it during the applications for mentoring positions to eliminate the pervs. Single moms have a real problem with this. The vast majority of sexual abuse is not some stranger with candy, but some man in the family or a boyfriend she trusted.
This this goes on as much as it has is driving the research into alternative social models. The hypocritical political figures in the news are just the tip of the iceburg creating massive social problems hiding in the nuclear family model. There are other models that are having better results.