David Friedman's article is excellent. I have a couple comments about conceiving of marriage as a contract for the purposes of economic analysis. Traditionally, marriage has often been called a covenant. In the modern era, we often do call marriage a contract, but then we do not apply most contract concepts, defenses, or notions of breach to marriage. Marriage even in the modern conception is more like a covenant because just as covenants attached to land "run with the land," marriage has implications that "run with the blood" in every state. In the legal world, there's also a dialectic between the so-called "support theory" of marriage and the "partnership theory" of marriage. Friedman does get into this a little bit. Support theory is on the outs, but there are many old cases for failure to support along the same lines that you would see a child support case and adjudicated similarly. Some of the older cases even sound in criminal law on the same theory as child neglect (if you neglected your wife's upkeep and she died of tuberculosis, you're in trouble).
So with marriage we have something that was traditionally an inviolable covenant that became subject to many additional caveats and contracts. You still have many covenant aspects that particularly come into play in the law of inheritance (your obligations and property run with your blood by default, and even trying to override it by will or trust can subject you to various challenges). Today, your duties to your children are conceived of as statutory duties commanded by the state, but you could also arrive at the same point by interpreting them as deriving from the marriage covenant, merely observed and enforced by the state. To add also to his citation of the Brinig article, there also used to be (now mostly abrogated) causes of action against seducers on the basis of alienation of affection, which is the subject of some other law review articles, some of which are cited there. Then you also have to consider the laws against sodomy and fornication which, while always lightly enforced going back to medieval times, could always be used to dissuade caddishness and increase the bargaining power of a party that wished to broker a shotgun marriage.
Unfortunately, all of this makes it hard to analogize marriage to other things accurately. Marriage isn't like a contract because very few contract concepts apply to it. Marriage isn't like a covenant either because it can be dissolved relatively straightforwardly if it is not contested. It's not like a partnership because there is no joint and several liability for all partners or any concept of what's in the scope of the partnership and what's not. Marriage is its own little cul-de-sac of horrors and delights.
Audience member question: "When I try to persuade somebody else to listen to one of my opinions with an open mind, is there some particular technique that you would recommend for persuading other people to do better with their own biases? Because, of course, they’re even more resistant to that than I am when I challenge myself."
Daniel Kahneman: "It’s a game one primarily plays with one’s spouse, and it doesn’t work, I think, by and large."
My understanding is that risks for autism go up for both older moms and dads. From a 2024 meta-analysis: “The findings showed that older parents are more likely to have children who develop autism.” (https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-024-02184-9) I’ll admit that deciphering these sorts of articles is not my speciality, but ChatGPT tells me that the specific rate it reports is about 20% extra risk per each 5 years of age (for one parent? both? I’m not sure).
I haven’t looked this up for ADHD, but the two conditions are hella correlated, so I’m guessing we’d find the same thing.
Given the structure of retirement benefits, where those who don’t have kids can make the kids of those that did pay for them, it probably maximizes lifetime earnings to have fewer children. Inevitably, people abuse the commons.
"I wonder what the trend for autism or ADHD looks like if you control for age of parents when the child was conceived."
I wonder what the trend for autism or ADHD looks like if you control for likelihood of making the diagnosis today versus the past given exactly the same symptoms.
Since Friedman seems to admit of the possibility that the law of marriage and changes thereto may ave an impact on fertility, it may be interesting to consider the example of Brazil where couples have choice in selecting a legal regime, formal and informal and joint or separate property rights, to govern their relationship. At least two studies have found that fertility varies significantly by legal regime. One study states:
"Marriage choice is a function of cultural, socioeconomic, and structural factors, weighed differently by women of different ages and marriage orders. Type of marriage remains a strong predictor of marital stability and fertility even when other factors are controlled for. Marital stability itself plays an important role in distinguishing informal marriages from formal, and having children contributes to marital stability. The fact that women who enter informal marriages are likely to experience more than one marriage results in higher fertility for these women than occurs within each particular marriage. Informal marriage appears not to be entirely advantageous to women because it is less stable than formal marriage, and women remain responsible for children after separation. They are aware of these risks and often prefer formal marriage."
The assumption that the one size fits all family law regime in the US is optimal might be questionable as well as the assumption that there are no trade offs involved in legal regimes seemingly designed to cater exclusively to what are deemed to be women's best interests.
I continue to maintain that increases in diagnoses in ADHD and autism is a result of diagnostic bloat/diagnoses du jour rather than external factors increasing the ACTUAL rate of affliction.
That "shaming," people having and letting their opinions be know about parental practices, is a significant deterrent to having children does not ring true to me. True that parents feel they need to put a lot more time and effort into child rearing than parents in the past, but that is not quite the same thing.
The use of the term "sociobiology" shows how out of date they are on evolutionary behavioral & psychology. We're (almost) all here because our ancestors liked sex, not because they wanted to have children. Once born, there was certainly selection pressure on mothers (& fathers) to keep their babies alive. Once pregnancy becomes a matter of choice, most people will still have sex, many will choose to postpone or avoid the child-bearing part.
Interesting that environmental factors other than urbanization aren’t mentioned given that this trend is happening globally other than in sub-Saharan Africa.
Whatever the cause of the demographic change, it highlights the mistake is is to tax _wages_ to pay social insurance benefits. Not only is this to some extent taxing savings and just consumption as a VAT would, but the base, total wage payments, is more vulnerable to demographic changes than a VAT. It also undermines the myth that Social Insurance is sort of like individual saving for future consumption needs and not just a transfer from people in one life circumstance when their need of consumption is relatively less than the need of the person in a different circumstance -- unemployment, old age, illness, child rearing.
I think we can forgive FDR for deciding on the wage tax as the VAT had not been invented, but by at least the time of the Great Society it had been and that was the time that Medicare-Medicaid should have been set up to be financed by a VAT and SS and unemployment insurance should have been switched.
David Friedman's article is excellent. I have a couple comments about conceiving of marriage as a contract for the purposes of economic analysis. Traditionally, marriage has often been called a covenant. In the modern era, we often do call marriage a contract, but then we do not apply most contract concepts, defenses, or notions of breach to marriage. Marriage even in the modern conception is more like a covenant because just as covenants attached to land "run with the land," marriage has implications that "run with the blood" in every state. In the legal world, there's also a dialectic between the so-called "support theory" of marriage and the "partnership theory" of marriage. Friedman does get into this a little bit. Support theory is on the outs, but there are many old cases for failure to support along the same lines that you would see a child support case and adjudicated similarly. Some of the older cases even sound in criminal law on the same theory as child neglect (if you neglected your wife's upkeep and she died of tuberculosis, you're in trouble).
So with marriage we have something that was traditionally an inviolable covenant that became subject to many additional caveats and contracts. You still have many covenant aspects that particularly come into play in the law of inheritance (your obligations and property run with your blood by default, and even trying to override it by will or trust can subject you to various challenges). Today, your duties to your children are conceived of as statutory duties commanded by the state, but you could also arrive at the same point by interpreting them as deriving from the marriage covenant, merely observed and enforced by the state. To add also to his citation of the Brinig article, there also used to be (now mostly abrogated) causes of action against seducers on the basis of alienation of affection, which is the subject of some other law review articles, some of which are cited there. Then you also have to consider the laws against sodomy and fornication which, while always lightly enforced going back to medieval times, could always be used to dissuade caddishness and increase the bargaining power of a party that wished to broker a shotgun marriage.
Unfortunately, all of this makes it hard to analogize marriage to other things accurately. Marriage isn't like a contract because very few contract concepts apply to it. Marriage isn't like a covenant either because it can be dissolved relatively straightforwardly if it is not contested. It's not like a partnership because there is no joint and several liability for all partners or any concept of what's in the scope of the partnership and what's not. Marriage is its own little cul-de-sac of horrors and delights.
Audience member question: "When I try to persuade somebody else to listen to one of my opinions with an open mind, is there some particular technique that you would recommend for persuading other people to do better with their own biases? Because, of course, they’re even more resistant to that than I am when I challenge myself."
Daniel Kahneman: "It’s a game one primarily plays with one’s spouse, and it doesn’t work, I think, by and large."
My understanding is that risks for autism go up for both older moms and dads. From a 2024 meta-analysis: “The findings showed that older parents are more likely to have children who develop autism.” (https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-024-02184-9) I’ll admit that deciphering these sorts of articles is not my speciality, but ChatGPT tells me that the specific rate it reports is about 20% extra risk per each 5 years of age (for one parent? both? I’m not sure).
I haven’t looked this up for ADHD, but the two conditions are hella correlated, so I’m guessing we’d find the same thing.
Given the structure of retirement benefits, where those who don’t have kids can make the kids of those that did pay for them, it probably maximizes lifetime earnings to have fewer children. Inevitably, people abuse the commons.
All societies are urbanising. All societies are suffering fertility collapses. These two things are surely connected. https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/collapsing-fertility-is-not-so-mysterious
All societies are getting richer. All societies are suffering fertility collapses. These two things are surely connected.
(And, though we tend not to think of it, the nature of being rich--or at least not poor--is changing.)
"I wonder what the trend for autism or ADHD looks like if you control for age of parents when the child was conceived."
I wonder what the trend for autism or ADHD looks like if you control for likelihood of making the diagnosis today versus the past given exactly the same symptoms.
Since Friedman seems to admit of the possibility that the law of marriage and changes thereto may ave an impact on fertility, it may be interesting to consider the example of Brazil where couples have choice in selecting a legal regime, formal and informal and joint or separate property rights, to govern their relationship. At least two studies have found that fertility varies significantly by legal regime. One study states:
"Marriage choice is a function of cultural, socioeconomic, and structural factors, weighed differently by women of different ages and marriage orders. Type of marriage remains a strong predictor of marital stability and fertility even when other factors are controlled for. Marital stability itself plays an important role in distinguishing informal marriages from formal, and having children contributes to marital stability. The fact that women who enter informal marriages are likely to experience more than one marriage results in higher fertility for these women than occurs within each particular marriage. Informal marriage appears not to be entirely advantageous to women because it is less stable than formal marriage, and women remain responsible for children after separation. They are aware of these risks and often prefer formal marriage."
(https://www.proquest.com/openview/67adf999022c3fa3ffe43bfc2eea717c/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y )
The assumption that the one size fits all family law regime in the US is optimal might be questionable as well as the assumption that there are no trade offs involved in legal regimes seemingly designed to cater exclusively to what are deemed to be women's best interests.
I continue to maintain that increases in diagnoses in ADHD and autism is a result of diagnostic bloat/diagnoses du jour rather than external factors increasing the ACTUAL rate of affliction.
That "shaming," people having and letting their opinions be know about parental practices, is a significant deterrent to having children does not ring true to me. True that parents feel they need to put a lot more time and effort into child rearing than parents in the past, but that is not quite the same thing.
It's not as strong as the social pressure/shaming for not having kids before the '80s.
The use of the term "sociobiology" shows how out of date they are on evolutionary behavioral & psychology. We're (almost) all here because our ancestors liked sex, not because they wanted to have children. Once born, there was certainly selection pressure on mothers (& fathers) to keep their babies alive. Once pregnancy becomes a matter of choice, most people will still have sex, many will choose to postpone or avoid the child-bearing part.
I thought fecundity was probability of giving birth, conditional on actively trying to do so (i.e regular unprotected sex)
Interesting that environmental factors other than urbanization aren’t mentioned given that this trend is happening globally other than in sub-Saharan Africa.
Whatever the cause of the demographic change, it highlights the mistake is is to tax _wages_ to pay social insurance benefits. Not only is this to some extent taxing savings and just consumption as a VAT would, but the base, total wage payments, is more vulnerable to demographic changes than a VAT. It also undermines the myth that Social Insurance is sort of like individual saving for future consumption needs and not just a transfer from people in one life circumstance when their need of consumption is relatively less than the need of the person in a different circumstance -- unemployment, old age, illness, child rearing.
I think we can forgive FDR for deciding on the wage tax as the VAT had not been invented, but by at least the time of the Great Society it had been and that was the time that Medicare-Medicaid should have been set up to be financed by a VAT and SS and unemployment insurance should have been switched.