Let me just say right off the bat that I’m not here to add fuel to the raging tabloid fires burning everywhere these days over John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Better bloggers than I have already said better things than I can even imagine, both pro and con and everything in the middle too, and this is after all an economics blog, not a political blog.

But I have noticed with growing interest a strange phenomenon that first appeared in the wake of the Palin announcement, kind of like the Loch Ness monster might have appeared briefly in the wake of a motorboat scooting across some Scottish pond, then submerged again, then appeared again, until finally nobody was really looking at the boat at all anymore because that re-emerging monster was so strangely familiar.

“The Palin Effect” is a familiar beast alright; it is none other than that long (we thought) debunked rhetorical 1970s chimera,

“Do working mothers damage their children?”

Can you believe that geezer has the nerve to reemerge after all this time, and what’s more, to do it in the company of a woman who admits to shooting large animals dead in Alaska and gutting them for fun?

Well believe it. It’s back. Thirty years after 1970s feminism held its funeral and catapulted Hillary Clinton into a force to be reckoned with on the political and world stage, here comes none other than Newsweek with a feature article entitled “To Work or Not,” pitched with the familiar tag:

“A new study finds that children of privileged families fare worse when the mother works outside the home. But what does the research really tell us?”

Really? A new study on the damage wrought by working moms? You mean to tell me someone is still doing these kinds of studies? Where? In a time machine? In one of the wormholes created this week when the Large Haldron SuperCollider was turned on to investigate the Big Bang? Is someone, somewhere, also burning a bra and refusing to shave her armpits? Is Gloria Steinem going to be on Oprah with Marlo Thomas again?

No, it turns out the only working moms of interest here, the ones possibly doing the most severe (possible) damage to their progeny, are the moms of privileged families, as in rich moms. Moms who are already rich, the article suggests, may be making their kids slightly fatter and less happy by working outside the home. According to a study published by University of North Carolina economist Christopher Ruhm, kids who come from low-income families with working mothers don’t seem to be nearly as disadvantaged as rich kids who come from homes in which rich mom goes off to a job.

Poor kids with working mothers actually perform at the same level on school exams, or slightly higher, than poor kids whose mothers stay at home. Rich kids, on the other hand, see a decline in their test scores under similar conditions. Rich kids with working moms also tend to weigh slightly more than rich kids with stay-at-home moms.

What conclusions are we to draw from this data?

Ruhm explains that, while no specific conclusions can or should be drawn, the data are suggestive and warrant further study and thought. Ruhm says his own wife worked while their children were small, and he doesn’t want his study to be taken as a warning that rich moms should stay out of the workplace.

“This comes down to a fundamental principle of economics: something has to give. We can’t have it all,” Ruhm says. “But I would never tell anybody what to do or not do about that. I certainly wouldn’t tell my wife.”

Right. And yet here we have this article in Newsweek strongly suggesting that poor women do their kids a favor by earning some cash for Pete’s sake, while rich moms need to understand that their desire for a career may come at the cost of little Tiffany getting a prom date (when that special time finally comes).

My own children were born on the declining cusp of the feminist movement of the 1970s, at a time when you couldn’t pick up a collection of recipes that didn’t have an article featured on the cover about the horrible dilemma faced by working mothers. Can women have it all? Should they? Does it harm the children?

Today, most women need to work. A single income is no longer sufficient to float a middle class family. The increase in the number of children in poverty is largely due to the increase in single mothers and the inadequacy of their less-than-equal wages. It takes two people working two or more jobs now to do what one guy could do back in the 50s and 60s: put food on the table. Everyone knows this. Working women have become the norm, and working mothers, while not having it easy by any bizarre stretch of the imagination, have more than proven it can be done and done well.

What interests me about the reemergence of these kinds of articles is that they are arriving concurrent with large numbers of women exiting the workforce. Back in 2000 when economists first noticed women leaving the workforce, it was assumed that with unemployment rising and jobs growing more scarce, affluent women were choosing to sit out the job hunt until their children were of school age, or even longer, because they had that choice.

That assumption was found to be false, however, by a panel of economists in a Congressional study described in a July 22, 2008, New York Times article. It turns out that women are exiting the work force for the same reasons men are: a bad economy. Women are losing their jobs through lay-offs or attrition and have been unable to find new ones. Many women are simply dropping off the charts.

Mark Twain famously noted that there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When Palin burst onto the national scene in a conservative venue with five kids in tow, a trendy suit, designer specks, a bun, and a hot body, it made a lot of people woozy. Was she a parody of a stripper librarian or the most amazing Superwoman in the History of America? Lots of tongues wagged about bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, and who changes the diapers anyway? If the red phone rings at 3:00 a.m., will her hands be full of wet naps and talcum, or will she be able to put Putin in his place while applying fresh lipstick?

Weird stuff. We shouldn’t let it distract us from real economic issues, which are issues facing people today, not women. Declining wages, too few jobs, unequal pay, poor day care choices, expiring unemployment benefits, food prices that keep rising even though food stamps don’t: these are issues facing Americans, not women, and certainly not just privileged women.

It’s great to sell magazines and newspapers. That creates jobs and profit I guess.

But do we really have to return to the 70s to do it?