"Other than a religious revival, how can we get back to that vision?"
We don't. And I write that as someone who has been non-religious for my entire life. I didn't know it when I was in my teens, twenties, and thirties, but cultural preservation and propagation is the primary purpose of religion as a practical matter, and there is no replacing it- it can be improved (we can clearly see in history which religions have succeeded best and worst at this task), but not replaced.
My vote would be no vision, no attempt to make up the shortfall. An end to all social services. An end to the monthly mailout of government checks. An end to the federal government making states sit up and perform tricks to get that sweet, sweet money, with which to do mischief. An end to the provision of government daycare aka public school. An end to government provided "health care". An end to all rehab services for addicts, all interventions for the homeless. As a bonus, we'd never have to hear about people's fertility ever again - so yay. All private matters. All pathologies, especially those that have been deified: private matters.
This is actually the only hopeful path, curiously enough. The leviathan can only interfere with the development of - a future we can survive.
And perhaps in a way, that's what is happening already. So much of the cultural life and indeed the national life is LARPing at this point, LARPing a charade that our successors, those to whom we are gifting the country, will have no interest in taking up.
But there will be great losses, at least in the areas I care about. The transformation certainly hasn't been and won't be without enormous cost. And no, this has nothing to do with "privilege".
The main alternative to a religion for culture is nationalism. The USA was a Christian based secular nationalism, and proud of "America", which was great and it was acceptable to be great, because it was also good. ("America is great because America is good. And if America ever stops being good, America will stop being great." Reagan wrongly quoting de Tocqueville).
The 1619 Project is to push the belief that America has never been good. My belief is America has been bad, like in Slavery, as well as good, like in fighting/ killing/ dying to end slavery, as well as the limited gov't coming from a constrained vision of humans. The disagreements about what is "good" is a big part of the culture war.
Especially the importance of "good sex" (=equals orgasm?) to define "goodness", rather than love and commitment to raising kids (as Kearney recently wrote around).
As I mention in the linked post, "As an act of rebellion against technology, I try to be phone-free in the mornings. I defied our technological overlords..."
My observation is 90% of people carry their smart phones with them everywhere they go, and they don't spend more than 5-10 minutes not checking it, either. Other than the cost of the data plan, my main reason for not having a smart phone is that I don't trust myself to not do the exact same thing. I don't event take my flip phone with me anywhere except for car trips of more than 5 miles from home.
It's become quite an addiction for me. I used to have a laughably low tech phone, and was talked into the smart phone by well meaning friends. At first, I used it for the maps, which made driving in a city so much less stressful. But entertainment and addiction crept in steadily. I remember the clarity of the old days, without constant entertainment, but I suspect many don't remember, if they have had the experience at all.
For this reason, I've vowed that my next phone will not be a smart phone. What I will do about maps and driving, I don't know yet, but I find every effort to restrict smart phone time is temporary and easily reasoned away. It's got to be cold turkey for me.
1) The framing of "Two Parent Privilege" is godawful and possibly deliberately malicious. The word "privilege" implies an illegitimate right granted by society, and especially in today's context it implies that should be dismantled. Having sensible parents is definitely not that, and using the word "privilege" is, knowingly or not, an attack on what's left of the American nuclear family.
2) The decline in marriage (lower marriage rates, later marriage, less happy marriages) begins around 1970 and is basically linear until the present. I don't think this is consistent with the "modern media outcompetes marriage" hypothesis, but it is entirely consistent with the feminism + welfare hypothesis. In this model, no-fault divorce + child support greatly reduces men's incentive to marry - we don't get the major benefit of pre-70s marriage, which is a reasonably secure family to call our own. We instead have to hope our wives have enough foresight not to take our kids and money and leave us if they become unhappy for any reason, which of course rules out half of the time preference bell curve right off the bat. On women's side, the social stigma of single motherhood is basically gone, and women - particularly single mothers - collectively receive massive transfers from the state, paid for mostly by married fathers (who are by far the most productive of the married/unmarried men/women combinations). Being able to get men's money without having to give anything in return is of course an attractive deal, and so women's incentives to marry are also greatly reduced. And since fewer marriage-minded women makes life harder for marriage-minded men and vice-versa, this feeds on itself. Obvious solutions: welfare for children should go to married fathers (who pay the taxes), divorce should require fault, and we start "slut-shaming" again. I doubt this would restore the golden age of marriage from the 40s-60s (which was plausibly in part due to anomalously low female workforce participation), but it would probably be enough to return us to more historically normal late 19th/early 20th century norms.
I think it's a way to make the book more palatable to liberal readers even as it delivers the more conservative message that two-parent families are good.
There is also a distinction between urgency and impatience. Urgency involves a strong preference (or sentiment) for early *action*. Impatience involves a strong preference (or sentiment) for an early *outcome*.
Urgency is compatible with timely initiative to make prompt progress towards achievement of a long-term plan.
Impatience tends to work at cross-purposes with steady progress towards achievement of long-term plans.
Awareness of the problem, then a conscious and determined decision to push bask are both necessary but not sufficient. It is no easy thing to push back.
Would be interesting to see a breakdown between two career married couples and whether their children married, and if so at what age, vs where there was a stay at home mom.
OMG. The answer is in front of you. We have spent decades discouraging marriage and childbearing - and now we're distressed that it worked?
Both men and women have noticed that there are enormous - and rising - costs to having children, and no material economic benefits. Both have taken notice. Both are much less enthusiastic about children than they used to be.
Women are now able to earn money income. Women are better off than they were: their time is worth more. That makes it more expensive to spend their time on child-raising. This is a global phenomenon: educate women, make their time more valuable, watch birthrates fall. It's not only true because education allows women to avoid childbirth; it's also true because their husbands would also rather see them spend less time raising children!
Meanwhile, culturally we have dramatically raised our standards for acceptable parenting, making it more expensive (in cash terms) and more time-consuming. So many things, from requiring bulky car seats (and therefore three-row vehicles for families with more than two children), to regulation of child care, to stranger-danger-panic leading to supervised playdates and soccer moms and helicopter parenting - often now enforced by child protective services - have increased the cost of children.
In an effort to draw women back to marriage and childbearing, legislatures have tried to increase the material benefits of marriage and motherhood. As a result, for much of the past 70 years men have been subject to frankly unconscionable treatment under family laws. This has partly worked: women are more interested in marriage and children today than men are. But, men are more willing than they used to be, to buck the cultural norm rather than continue to be mistreated this way - just as women had begun to do by the early 20th century, a time when family law treated women quite poorly (legislators seem incapable of crafting family law with any notion of fairness).
Even with this abusive treatment of husbands and fathers, the benefits to women have not been enough to produce the desired growth in birthrates. Partly that's because family law attached too much of the benefit for women to marriage rather than childbearing. But, more important is this: there simply isn't enough value available to transfer from men to women, to offset the cost of having women devote so much time to raising children.
The underlying problem is that children cost their parents too much. The rest of us want to see children, to provide for the future society we will depend on. We're going to have to stop assuming that punishing men for marrying and being fathers is going to work (why do we think it would?): we're going to have to pay for children. All the cultural angst and anti-screen panics and religious pining and pro-marriage BS are deflections.
>>The decline in marriage among parents in the U.S. has not been replaced with a corresponding rise in unmarried parents stably living together for the long haul and essentially being married in all but name. In the U.S., cohabitation is a very fragile arrangement.
As a person being married in all but name in Sweden, I say that the choice between cohabitation and marriage is probably decided by laws and financial incentives to a large extent. There is exactly one legal reason for Swedes to get officially married: death. Spouses inherit each other, while people who cohabit don't. There can also be problems if a legally unmarried woman dies in childbirth, before she has had the opportunity to state the name of the father of her child. Otherwise, there are zero incentives for people in Sweden to get officially married. No tax incentives or other material benefits. Marriage just seems like another unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Typically, people get married after a number of years and children together, when they are getting a bit bored and want a reason to throw a big party.
Things seem drastically different in the US, where there are heavy material advantages in getting legally married. If nothing else, Americans share each other's health insurance. Most stable couples in Sweden would get legally married too if such things were at stake.
"there are heavy material advantages in getting legally married"
Not if you are the partner with the higher income - usually the man, because women avoid men who earn less than they do, and tend to de-emphasize their own careers after marriage. For the higher-earning partner there are really, really heavy material disadvantages. (Not sure I used enough "really"s there.)
We tend to forget that men matter too. We tend to take men for granted. We're living in Barbieland, and don't even know it ;-)
The higher-earning party might want to buy a devoted partner and parent for their children for most of their money... I have heard that such people exist. IF people want to strike such deals to raise families, different societies provide different material benefits to the couple as a unit in case of legal marriage vs cohabitation. Who benefits the most within the couple is a different story. In societies that give any perk to any party of a married couple, marriage rates will be higher than in societies that don't.
They might. The thing is, family laws generally exclude any obligation to be a devoted partner or to parent children or to do any of the things the higher earner may naively have thought they were buying, while strictly enforcing the obligation to pay for them - even long after the end of the relationship, and after those things were never delivered.
Marriage, in many western countries, is a uniquely one-sided institution.
Yes, in Western society marriage is supposed to build on trust. Those who trust the right person hit the jackpot. Those who trust the wrong person tend to find themselves in different levels of deep shit. And still people keep on betting on each other, because the upside is so huge.
Marriage is based on explicit recognition that trust isn't enough; indeed, we see many western countries re-introducing various forms of "common law" or "de factor" marriage to address the problems that arise when one person, who has been supporting another, wants to stop. They are doing this despite the fact that it's clearly a violation of the intent of the universal declaration of human rights, which most of them once championed. The problem is that the "solution" is worse than the problem: marriage and family law have become legally enforced codependency from which the codependent cannot escape. On one side, it's all upside; on the other side, not so much. There is no reason to put people in such an asymmetric situation, by law.
Western law used to abuse women, and nobody cared because nobody cared about women; now it abuses the higher earner - usually but not always the man, because these days nobody cares about higher earners or men (both categories deemed to automatically imply privilege).
How about stopping legally imposing spousal abuse altogether?
It's funny that a libertarian relies on structural arguments or tacit coercion when it is an issue one cares about going in the "wrong" direction.
What happened to rational choice theory or the primacy of individual freedoms? The most parsimonious explanation to declining birthrates is just that people are "choosing" and optimizing for their own individual welfares and not caring about abstract theoretics.
I'm sure the ease, and interest, in distracting ourselves with digital stuff is negative for In Real Life relationships, which is where marriage & kids will come from. But shared fun stuff, like hikes or even movies or TV together can allow bonding. "Doing it together" is more important than being inside or outside, tho outside active walks, bike rides, sports, all reduce phone use.
Kearny's interview included this great note on how economists are uncomfortable being honest about family importance: "this discomfort stems from a well-intentioned instinct to not want to come across as sounding judgmental or shaming certain types of families. And I'm very sympathetic to that instinct. The problem, though, is that avoiding this topic is counterproductive. Denying the importance of family structure and the role of families to children's outcomes and economic mobility is just dishonest, based on the preponderance of evidence."
Sluts need to be shamed, including the male slut-jerks (slut-cads). There's lots of "shame" today, against whites, against men, against Trump supporters (or Kavanaugh, or Clarence Thomas); some semi-secret shame against fat women. Promiscuity is shameful - BECAUSE it so often leads to unwed mothers raising kids, which is sub-optimal (= "immoral" insofar as religion substitutes morality for optimality).
The single biggest reason that so many US kids are poor (bottom 20% quintile) is because their mothers are sluts. This is a key reason among many so it is still less than 50%. Kearney notes that economic policy wonks don't have a good solution to this, but then gives weasel words about the issue: "receipt of benefits should not be conditioned on having an absent parent as U.S. welfare used to be, since that explicitly disincentivized marriage. But I do want to acknowledge the concern that insofar as transfer payments increase the economic viability of single-parent households, that might lead to some small increase in these types of households. My read of the evidence is that the behavioral effects there are likely to be small."
My read is that of moral hazard - the more welfare mothers get for kids, the more women have one or more kids w/o marrying their father.
Lifestyle coaches/ social workers should be assisting women to NOT have sex with men they're not married to. If men don't love them enough to marry them, they don't love them enough.
The gov't either gives benefits, or punishments. Right now the gov't rewards slut behavior.
It used to be that "reality would punish" the unwed mothers, which is maybe at the bottom 5% mal-nourishment level of poverty that no caring American wants for any kid. This did push many women to get in and stay in "bad marriages", as well as "lousy" and "not as good as expected/ hoped for" marriages. When Moynihan's report came out in the 60s, black unwed mothers had 30% of black kids.
The fact that so many black women are sluts, the mothers of some 75% of black kids, makes it easy to call those me a racist, because I favor shaming slut behavior. Also a sexist.
The truth is racist, the truth is sexist.
There are more white sluts raising kids w/o a married father - my own sister was one for awhile.
We don't get on the track of reducing the problem by denying the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. (It will likely never be solved, as long as we have the freedom to act like sluts, but it can be hugely reduced.)
Finally, Kearny notes the importance of local community, which she doesn't quite define but I would say the best real demarcation is the local gov't high school district boundaries. Giving targeted benefits to married women and men inside those districts with higher numbers of unmarried parents would be a non-racist way to get more benefits for good behavior.
Those with good behavior "need" gov't benefits less - but rewarding them for good behavior is the way to make a few more humans do the rewarding behavior.
We need a social safety net to avoid grinding poverty, and more gov't rewards for good behaving people living in those poor areas w/o kids, as well as more gov't rewards for being married.
I've become a bigger spending Republican - wanting the gov't to subsidize good behavior more than rewarding sub-optimal (/immoral) behavior. With gov't benefits based on behavior, not identity.
I read this because of receiving a notification on my telephone . I quickly read it (distraction mode) and have instantly forgotten anything of value if there was anything of value here. Next...
You sound like a good candidate for the (long-term) Darwin award - unlikely to get married or have kids; genetic dead end (tho siblings and cousins have most of your genes, too).
Tom , you seem to be overthinking things a bit. First you speculate about my marital and family situation and now a semi-lecture about my motives. This is not snarkiness on my part just a sincere reaction. Maybe we should stop here.
So -- you've already got grandkids! Congrats. But your "forgotten anything of value" snark seemed to be asking for a snarky reply.
And your snarky "Next ..." is contradicted by your replies.
Perhaps you thought it was humorous rather than insulting?
In the social media world, it seems quite likely that snarky insults seem more humorous in a one-minute comment than they would face-to-face, but if so, that increases the toxicity of the distractions.
Then my point actually stands- you were just born much, much earlier than the children born in the 1980s forward. Distracting you hasn't affected your life negatively because you had children long before such distractions of today were even invented.
In short, I should have written, you sound like someone born before 1980, which is completely correct.
prevent me from having a family but it has taken other tolls. But your point is well taken if you compare my history of distraction with Gen Z or even millennials. My 33 yr old daughter has not read a full book,
Well said. I think religion itself doesn't need to change, it just needs a good rebranding. Religion contains the secret recipe that gives meaning and purpose to existence. It's humanity's outlet for the spiritual dimension in life. Unfortunately it just has a bad rep because it so often gets passed down as an obligation instead of an opportunity, and is portrayed as oppressive instead of as an enhancement to life.
Love the critique of Stephen Covey who some would say kicked off the modern self-help book mania which only reinforces the notion that media will save the individual, not community.
This reminds me of my favorite Arnold quote, “I believe that grandparents are the happiest people.” I love this vision of life.
As you imply here, religion used to be the medium of cultural preservation. Other than a religious revival, how can we get back to that vision?
"Other than a religious revival, how can we get back to that vision?"
We don't. And I write that as someone who has been non-religious for my entire life. I didn't know it when I was in my teens, twenties, and thirties, but cultural preservation and propagation is the primary purpose of religion as a practical matter, and there is no replacing it- it can be improved (we can clearly see in history which religions have succeeded best and worst at this task), but not replaced.
My vote would be no vision, no attempt to make up the shortfall. An end to all social services. An end to the monthly mailout of government checks. An end to the federal government making states sit up and perform tricks to get that sweet, sweet money, with which to do mischief. An end to the provision of government daycare aka public school. An end to government provided "health care". An end to all rehab services for addicts, all interventions for the homeless. As a bonus, we'd never have to hear about people's fertility ever again - so yay. All private matters. All pathologies, especially those that have been deified: private matters.
This is actually the only hopeful path, curiously enough. The leviathan can only interfere with the development of - a future we can survive.
And perhaps in a way, that's what is happening already. So much of the cultural life and indeed the national life is LARPing at this point, LARPing a charade that our successors, those to whom we are gifting the country, will have no interest in taking up.
But there will be great losses, at least in the areas I care about. The transformation certainly hasn't been and won't be without enormous cost. And no, this has nothing to do with "privilege".
The main alternative to a religion for culture is nationalism. The USA was a Christian based secular nationalism, and proud of "America", which was great and it was acceptable to be great, because it was also good. ("America is great because America is good. And if America ever stops being good, America will stop being great." Reagan wrongly quoting de Tocqueville).
The 1619 Project is to push the belief that America has never been good. My belief is America has been bad, like in Slavery, as well as good, like in fighting/ killing/ dying to end slavery, as well as the limited gov't coming from a constrained vision of humans. The disagreements about what is "good" is a big part of the culture war.
Especially the importance of "good sex" (=equals orgasm?) to define "goodness", rather than love and commitment to raising kids (as Kearney recently wrote around).
As I mention in the linked post, "As an act of rebellion against technology, I try to be phone-free in the mornings. I defied our technological overlords..."
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/little-chicks-in-the-big-post-office
(Yes it's morning and the technological overlords won, but I was up a lot last night)
My observation is 90% of people carry their smart phones with them everywhere they go, and they don't spend more than 5-10 minutes not checking it, either. Other than the cost of the data plan, my main reason for not having a smart phone is that I don't trust myself to not do the exact same thing. I don't event take my flip phone with me anywhere except for car trips of more than 5 miles from home.
It's become quite an addiction for me. I used to have a laughably low tech phone, and was talked into the smart phone by well meaning friends. At first, I used it for the maps, which made driving in a city so much less stressful. But entertainment and addiction crept in steadily. I remember the clarity of the old days, without constant entertainment, but I suspect many don't remember, if they have had the experience at all.
For this reason, I've vowed that my next phone will not be a smart phone. What I will do about maps and driving, I don't know yet, but I find every effort to restrict smart phone time is temporary and easily reasoned away. It's got to be cold turkey for me.
Sadly, they no longer exist!
Exactly. What I think is that... wait, someone is texting me
Two comments:
1) The framing of "Two Parent Privilege" is godawful and possibly deliberately malicious. The word "privilege" implies an illegitimate right granted by society, and especially in today's context it implies that should be dismantled. Having sensible parents is definitely not that, and using the word "privilege" is, knowingly or not, an attack on what's left of the American nuclear family.
2) The decline in marriage (lower marriage rates, later marriage, less happy marriages) begins around 1970 and is basically linear until the present. I don't think this is consistent with the "modern media outcompetes marriage" hypothesis, but it is entirely consistent with the feminism + welfare hypothesis. In this model, no-fault divorce + child support greatly reduces men's incentive to marry - we don't get the major benefit of pre-70s marriage, which is a reasonably secure family to call our own. We instead have to hope our wives have enough foresight not to take our kids and money and leave us if they become unhappy for any reason, which of course rules out half of the time preference bell curve right off the bat. On women's side, the social stigma of single motherhood is basically gone, and women - particularly single mothers - collectively receive massive transfers from the state, paid for mostly by married fathers (who are by far the most productive of the married/unmarried men/women combinations). Being able to get men's money without having to give anything in return is of course an attractive deal, and so women's incentives to marry are also greatly reduced. And since fewer marriage-minded women makes life harder for marriage-minded men and vice-versa, this feeds on itself. Obvious solutions: welfare for children should go to married fathers (who pay the taxes), divorce should require fault, and we start "slut-shaming" again. I doubt this would restore the golden age of marriage from the 40s-60s (which was plausibly in part due to anomalously low female workforce participation), but it would probably be enough to return us to more historically normal late 19th/early 20th century norms.
"Divorce should require fault, and we start "slut-shaming again".
Sure, make relationships and marriage even LESS attractive. That should really boost birthrates.
Those days are over, and thank heaven. Family law needs to be fixed, not reverted to something that didn't work the first time.
"The framing of "Two Parent Privilege" is godawful ..."
I agree, it's that popular trope of pretending that the harder way is the "easy" or effortless or "given" way and vice-versa.
I think it's a way to make the book more palatable to liberal readers even as it delivers the more conservative message that two-parent families are good.
Re: Urgency.
There is also a distinction between urgency and impatience. Urgency involves a strong preference (or sentiment) for early *action*. Impatience involves a strong preference (or sentiment) for an early *outcome*.
Urgency is compatible with timely initiative to make prompt progress towards achievement of a long-term plan.
Impatience tends to work at cross-purposes with steady progress towards achievement of long-term plans.
Awareness of the problem, then a conscious and determined decision to push bask are both necessary but not sufficient. It is no easy thing to push back.
Would be interesting to see a breakdown between two career married couples and whether their children married, and if so at what age, vs where there was a stay at home mom.
OMG. The answer is in front of you. We have spent decades discouraging marriage and childbearing - and now we're distressed that it worked?
Both men and women have noticed that there are enormous - and rising - costs to having children, and no material economic benefits. Both have taken notice. Both are much less enthusiastic about children than they used to be.
Women are now able to earn money income. Women are better off than they were: their time is worth more. That makes it more expensive to spend their time on child-raising. This is a global phenomenon: educate women, make their time more valuable, watch birthrates fall. It's not only true because education allows women to avoid childbirth; it's also true because their husbands would also rather see them spend less time raising children!
Meanwhile, culturally we have dramatically raised our standards for acceptable parenting, making it more expensive (in cash terms) and more time-consuming. So many things, from requiring bulky car seats (and therefore three-row vehicles for families with more than two children), to regulation of child care, to stranger-danger-panic leading to supervised playdates and soccer moms and helicopter parenting - often now enforced by child protective services - have increased the cost of children.
In an effort to draw women back to marriage and childbearing, legislatures have tried to increase the material benefits of marriage and motherhood. As a result, for much of the past 70 years men have been subject to frankly unconscionable treatment under family laws. This has partly worked: women are more interested in marriage and children today than men are. But, men are more willing than they used to be, to buck the cultural norm rather than continue to be mistreated this way - just as women had begun to do by the early 20th century, a time when family law treated women quite poorly (legislators seem incapable of crafting family law with any notion of fairness).
Even with this abusive treatment of husbands and fathers, the benefits to women have not been enough to produce the desired growth in birthrates. Partly that's because family law attached too much of the benefit for women to marriage rather than childbearing. But, more important is this: there simply isn't enough value available to transfer from men to women, to offset the cost of having women devote so much time to raising children.
The underlying problem is that children cost their parents too much. The rest of us want to see children, to provide for the future society we will depend on. We're going to have to stop assuming that punishing men for marrying and being fathers is going to work (why do we think it would?): we're going to have to pay for children. All the cultural angst and anti-screen panics and religious pining and pro-marriage BS are deflections.
Incentives matter. It's that simple.
>>The decline in marriage among parents in the U.S. has not been replaced with a corresponding rise in unmarried parents stably living together for the long haul and essentially being married in all but name. In the U.S., cohabitation is a very fragile arrangement.
As a person being married in all but name in Sweden, I say that the choice between cohabitation and marriage is probably decided by laws and financial incentives to a large extent. There is exactly one legal reason for Swedes to get officially married: death. Spouses inherit each other, while people who cohabit don't. There can also be problems if a legally unmarried woman dies in childbirth, before she has had the opportunity to state the name of the father of her child. Otherwise, there are zero incentives for people in Sweden to get officially married. No tax incentives or other material benefits. Marriage just seems like another unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Typically, people get married after a number of years and children together, when they are getting a bit bored and want a reason to throw a big party.
Things seem drastically different in the US, where there are heavy material advantages in getting legally married. If nothing else, Americans share each other's health insurance. Most stable couples in Sweden would get legally married too if such things were at stake.
"there are heavy material advantages in getting legally married"
Not if you are the partner with the higher income - usually the man, because women avoid men who earn less than they do, and tend to de-emphasize their own careers after marriage. For the higher-earning partner there are really, really heavy material disadvantages. (Not sure I used enough "really"s there.)
We tend to forget that men matter too. We tend to take men for granted. We're living in Barbieland, and don't even know it ;-)
The higher-earning party might want to buy a devoted partner and parent for their children for most of their money... I have heard that such people exist. IF people want to strike such deals to raise families, different societies provide different material benefits to the couple as a unit in case of legal marriage vs cohabitation. Who benefits the most within the couple is a different story. In societies that give any perk to any party of a married couple, marriage rates will be higher than in societies that don't.
They might. The thing is, family laws generally exclude any obligation to be a devoted partner or to parent children or to do any of the things the higher earner may naively have thought they were buying, while strictly enforcing the obligation to pay for them - even long after the end of the relationship, and after those things were never delivered.
Marriage, in many western countries, is a uniquely one-sided institution.
Yes, in Western society marriage is supposed to build on trust. Those who trust the right person hit the jackpot. Those who trust the wrong person tend to find themselves in different levels of deep shit. And still people keep on betting on each other, because the upside is so huge.
Marriage is based on explicit recognition that trust isn't enough; indeed, we see many western countries re-introducing various forms of "common law" or "de factor" marriage to address the problems that arise when one person, who has been supporting another, wants to stop. They are doing this despite the fact that it's clearly a violation of the intent of the universal declaration of human rights, which most of them once championed. The problem is that the "solution" is worse than the problem: marriage and family law have become legally enforced codependency from which the codependent cannot escape. On one side, it's all upside; on the other side, not so much. There is no reason to put people in such an asymmetric situation, by law.
Western law used to abuse women, and nobody cared because nobody cared about women; now it abuses the higher earner - usually but not always the man, because these days nobody cares about higher earners or men (both categories deemed to automatically imply privilege).
How about stopping legally imposing spousal abuse altogether?
It's funny that a libertarian relies on structural arguments or tacit coercion when it is an issue one cares about going in the "wrong" direction.
What happened to rational choice theory or the primacy of individual freedoms? The most parsimonious explanation to declining birthrates is just that people are "choosing" and optimizing for their own individual welfares and not caring about abstract theoretics.
I'm sure the ease, and interest, in distracting ourselves with digital stuff is negative for In Real Life relationships, which is where marriage & kids will come from. But shared fun stuff, like hikes or even movies or TV together can allow bonding. "Doing it together" is more important than being inside or outside, tho outside active walks, bike rides, sports, all reduce phone use.
Kearny's interview included this great note on how economists are uncomfortable being honest about family importance: "this discomfort stems from a well-intentioned instinct to not want to come across as sounding judgmental or shaming certain types of families. And I'm very sympathetic to that instinct. The problem, though, is that avoiding this topic is counterproductive. Denying the importance of family structure and the role of families to children's outcomes and economic mobility is just dishonest, based on the preponderance of evidence."
Sluts need to be shamed, including the male slut-jerks (slut-cads). There's lots of "shame" today, against whites, against men, against Trump supporters (or Kavanaugh, or Clarence Thomas); some semi-secret shame against fat women. Promiscuity is shameful - BECAUSE it so often leads to unwed mothers raising kids, which is sub-optimal (= "immoral" insofar as religion substitutes morality for optimality).
The single biggest reason that so many US kids are poor (bottom 20% quintile) is because their mothers are sluts. This is a key reason among many so it is still less than 50%. Kearney notes that economic policy wonks don't have a good solution to this, but then gives weasel words about the issue: "receipt of benefits should not be conditioned on having an absent parent as U.S. welfare used to be, since that explicitly disincentivized marriage. But I do want to acknowledge the concern that insofar as transfer payments increase the economic viability of single-parent households, that might lead to some small increase in these types of households. My read of the evidence is that the behavioral effects there are likely to be small."
My read is that of moral hazard - the more welfare mothers get for kids, the more women have one or more kids w/o marrying their father.
Lifestyle coaches/ social workers should be assisting women to NOT have sex with men they're not married to. If men don't love them enough to marry them, they don't love them enough.
The gov't either gives benefits, or punishments. Right now the gov't rewards slut behavior.
It used to be that "reality would punish" the unwed mothers, which is maybe at the bottom 5% mal-nourishment level of poverty that no caring American wants for any kid. This did push many women to get in and stay in "bad marriages", as well as "lousy" and "not as good as expected/ hoped for" marriages. When Moynihan's report came out in the 60s, black unwed mothers had 30% of black kids.
The fact that so many black women are sluts, the mothers of some 75% of black kids, makes it easy to call those me a racist, because I favor shaming slut behavior. Also a sexist.
The truth is racist, the truth is sexist.
There are more white sluts raising kids w/o a married father - my own sister was one for awhile.
We don't get on the track of reducing the problem by denying the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. (It will likely never be solved, as long as we have the freedom to act like sluts, but it can be hugely reduced.)
Finally, Kearny notes the importance of local community, which she doesn't quite define but I would say the best real demarcation is the local gov't high school district boundaries. Giving targeted benefits to married women and men inside those districts with higher numbers of unmarried parents would be a non-racist way to get more benefits for good behavior.
Those with good behavior "need" gov't benefits less - but rewarding them for good behavior is the way to make a few more humans do the rewarding behavior.
We need a social safety net to avoid grinding poverty, and more gov't rewards for good behaving people living in those poor areas w/o kids, as well as more gov't rewards for being married.
I've become a bigger spending Republican - wanting the gov't to subsidize good behavior more than rewarding sub-optimal (/immoral) behavior. With gov't benefits based on behavior, not identity.
I read this because of receiving a notification on my telephone . I quickly read it (distraction mode) and have instantly forgotten anything of value if there was anything of value here. Next...
You sound like a good candidate for the (long-term) Darwin award - unlikely to get married or have kids; genetic dead end (tho siblings and cousins have most of your genes, too).
I am married and have grandchildren. I guess your predictive powers need some work.
Tom , you seem to be overthinking things a bit. First you speculate about my marital and family situation and now a semi-lecture about my motives. This is not snarkiness on my part just a sincere reaction. Maybe we should stop here.
So -- you've already got grandkids! Congrats. But your "forgotten anything of value" snark seemed to be asking for a snarky reply.
And your snarky "Next ..." is contradicted by your replies.
Perhaps you thought it was humorous rather than insulting?
In the social media world, it seems quite likely that snarky insults seem more humorous in a one-minute comment than they would face-to-face, but if so, that increases the toxicity of the distractions.
Then you sound like someone who was born in the 1960s and 1970s, Joel.
Another poor speculation. I was born in 1948.
Then my point actually stands- you were just born much, much earlier than the children born in the 1980s forward. Distracting you hasn't affected your life negatively because you had children long before such distractions of today were even invented.
In short, I should have written, you sound like someone born before 1980, which is completely correct.
I would say being distracted didn’t
prevent me from having a family but it has taken other tolls. But your point is well taken if you compare my history of distraction with Gen Z or even millennials. My 33 yr old daughter has not read a full book,
and she’s quite smart!
Well said. I think religion itself doesn't need to change, it just needs a good rebranding. Religion contains the secret recipe that gives meaning and purpose to existence. It's humanity's outlet for the spiritual dimension in life. Unfortunately it just has a bad rep because it so often gets passed down as an obligation instead of an opportunity, and is portrayed as oppressive instead of as an enhancement to life.
I think the more obvious causes of the decline of the family are: (1) birth control; and (2) pornography.
Aren't you forgetting (3) "child support"?
Love the critique of Stephen Covey who some would say kicked off the modern self-help book mania which only reinforces the notion that media will save the individual, not community.
Plausible that this is a contributor! Although fertility went down in Japan and parts of Europe before things got so distracting.
But as a whole I think this distraction issue is a huge one for a lot of people and I fight it every day.