Yascha Mounk interviews Anastasia Berg; Arctotherium on the marriage game; Tove K on the fear of an African population boom; Lyman Stone on non-monogamous societies
"... bewildering public intellectuals, who fail to understand why men won’t respond to market signals."
Obviously the men -are- responding to market signals.
The mistake of those public intellectuals is that, on the chalkboard, they try to analyze the signal in nominal terms, whereas instead, in reality, it is experienced in real terms.
In other words, they are failing to adjust for inflation. And you can't use the PPI to make this particular adjustment.
The nominal cost of what it takes for a young man to obtain the status and attractiveness necessary to make a quality young woman his bride with the expectation that she'll stick around for the long haul has -exploded- in the past several generations, leaving gains in productivity and income in the dust, by an order of magnitude at least.
As usual when trying to adjust for inflation, one has to try to correct for changes in 'quality', for example you can't just look across a decade and compare iPhone to iPhone, you have to specify the version and the attributes and so forth. Likewise, while it's tempting to compare 'marriage' across time, the changes in expectations, legal rights and risks, and other factors affect the perceived value of the 'deal' so much that you can only make sense if you append the particulars, e.g., "New-Marriage-29M-25F-Maryland-2023."
The sad fact is that a marriage of the quality the average man's grandfather was able to experience is now above the production possibility curve for a large and growing fraction of the male population. One might as well ask why short men with plenty of untapped athletic potential are still deciding to slouch on the couch instead of trying as hard as they can to get into the NBA. They don't try because there's no victory condition within their reach worth trying for. In other words, they are responding to market signals.
I know a grandmother who just passed away. Of her six children, only one had children. Of those two grandchildren (who moved away), only one had children and did so very late in life when the great grandma was senile and couldn't recognize who she was or who they were.
There is no way to ensure that having children creates grandchildren. In a low and delayed fertility environment, the odds actually get pretty bad.
While I'm spiritually in line with you on being a grandparent, the idea that simply exhorting people to take on huge immediate personal expenses because *maybe* they will see a reward forty years later when they are very old is such a fools errand. We don't need to debate this, the cratering TFR is empirical evidence enough.
If you want more kids, you need more concrete incentives *in the here and now* to improve parents lives. It won't come cheap, and it probably cost rather than raise cultural and political capital. But that is what being a statesmen and leader means.
Given Arctotherium’s statement, “The woman is cooperating if she ensures that the child her husband helps to support is his. She is defecting if she tries to get him to support a child who is not his.” how does divorce constitute defecting, as is later claimed by the author? Divorce and extramarital pregnancy are not necessarily related.
Right, 'defect' a bad and overly reductive way to put it.
It's more like "Breach of Contract" (traditional societies certainly understood marriage to be an enforceable contract) and failure to perform any of the many duties in a contract constitutes a breach. The tacit (formerly very explicit) marriage 'deal' involves a lot of asymmetric duties, and so there are plenty of ways for either side to breach. Contract law doesn't consider contracts inviolable, but imposes penalties to discourage "inefficient breach" tending to benefit one party at the expense of the other.
If the child-related expectation for a man entering marriage is that the woman delivers "the whole package", biological paternity, custody and control during the child's entire minority, etc. then the woman's unilateral decision to impair the package in any way might be what Arctotherium was aiming at with 'defect'. So, not just adultery or cuckoldry, but also separation, divorce, and so forth.
I'm not sure what you're asking. What I think Arcotherium was trying to get at with that clumsy attempt to categorize societies in terms of the game equilibrium moves in local sexual dynamics? One of many (obsolete) traditionalist litanies of marital rights and responsibilities (e.g., "he shall love and cherish, she shall honor and obey") and consequences for lapses? A summary of current Family Law from a particular jurisdiction? My guess at the current modal social consensus, or some individual woman's preferences, or something else? Just as regards children, or everything else too?
At a broad level of generality the pragmatic answer to that question is that the whole package of obligations for a husband consists of all the duties that his failure to fulfill would be considered by the wife as breach of contract and just grounds for dissolution of the partnership, i.e., a divorce which could be compelled on him against his will by the relevant authority. Yes, that sounds very abstract and legalistic, but without a definite context there's no way around that.
But understanding "the package" as being effectively the obverse function of the "socially acceptable reasons for initiating divorce" is a useful way to compare different social contexts. In the old "at fault divorce" regimes, the number of grounds were small and the threshold for severity and burden of proof high. That meant "the package" was fairly minimal, and if a man or woman has followed the basic rules it would be considered shameful and unjust for the other spouse to try to divorce them. As the requirements for divorce fell and fell to what is in many places effectively nothing, "the package" necessarily balloons into requirements that a large percent of the population cannot hope to maintain over their whole lifetimes.
I had the same thought. Staying married does nothing to prevent the man defecting (having a side piece) or the woman defecting; arguably it makes it easier for the woman who is safe from a suspicious husband leaving her if she defects. I haven’t read Arcto’s piece, just Kling’s summary, but if Kling is doing justice Arcto’s ideas are nonsequitors.
To stay within his original framework, he should argue that the state, Uncle Sugar, represents to the woman a man who cannot defect, and thus she is incentivized to defect all she wants outside of marriage.
“Stable unions will only remain high if at least one of these conditions it met - either the community remains conservative, women are still economically dependent, or there is a high supply of men with appealing offers of companionship.”
So many good links, tho Mounk's second half is paywalled - the other interview is good, too. Here's a short book summary:
>>The most direct goal of the book is to help people who are faced with the decision of whether or not to have children to think more clearly about it. In our current reality, you have to do that in the face of a lot of different pressures and normative scripts that either make children somewhat of an afterthought, recommend postponing them past the point of physical viability, or even threaten the moral legitimacy of having children.
In order to gain some clarity, we address the concerns that people are experiencing from the first-person perspective. We treat the looming concerns of finances. We think about the romantic scripts that we draw on, the scripts of how we should be dating and what we should be trying to get from our relationships that help—or, more often, don’t help—us find the kind of relationship in the context of which we can have children. We also look at length at what it means specifically for women to have children, given the apparent incompatibility of having children with the way we often understand feminist goals, namely, as empowerment and equality to men. And finally, we look at the greatest moral challenge to having children today, which takes the form of the threat of climate change, but really is the deep philosophical, ethical concern about whether life is so miserable, or perhaps we are so fallen, that reproducing our species is no longer justified.<<
Thus a reason based, non-religious book to support, in many (most?) cases, having children. Many feminists don't want husband-wife marriages to be the main goal of life, and kids the main output. They want equality with men -- none of whom get pregnant and have kids. That kind of equality is socially destructive.
It's great that Arnold is using the Fertility decline, not yet a crisis (?), as reason to link to many posts. Too bad he hasn't read & reviewed this book, it seems likely to be more interesting than many other posts.
Cooperate / Defect is an interesting idea, but Handle's Breach of Contract is a more robust view. Our social norms have changed so the prior unspoken duties & benefits need more honest view. "Unrealistic expectations" seems a big reason for divorce, related to "lack of commitment" and "argue too much".
(Most) Men want more sex than (most) women want, so the Big feel reason for men to want marriage starts out unequal. Whether it's every night, every other, once a week, or only when the woman feels like it -- this is often a big issue for the man. How much time to spend together doing what they both like, usually harder with kids, things the wife likes more, things the husband likes more. Men don't like doing as much housework as women want done, nor being as neat & tidy.
True differences need to be discussed more, and more honestly. But also expectations need to be set well.
“ The divorce rate for couples with children is as much as 40 percent lower than for those without children.” See link below. So if more divorces are among childless couples, how are these childless defecting women having their husband raise someone else’s child?
I tell my kids commitment is crucial -- but any commitment limits individual freedom; and interferes with doing as one feels at the moment.
"Unrealistic expectations" isn't quite defection, nor even Handle's (better) breach of contract, but bailing on a relationship before having kids is sort of more responsible / more idealistic in some POV.
Tho I don't like most item phrases like your 40%, or this:
"in “Understanding the Divorce Cycle”, the risk of divorce is 50 percent higher when one spouse comes from a divorced home and 200 percent higher when both partners do."
50% higher than what base? 20%? 60%? So 40% lower of 50%(base) means 30%.
But 90% is 200% higher than 30% (base), & 45% for one spouse from divorced home.
We must note that we live on a finite planet without enough energy to become an interplanetary species. The amount of food we can produce on this planet is also limited by energy to make fertilizer and pump or desalinate seawater.
We are adding 3 billion more people as the population lives longer, and the investment cost and effort per child for the education necessary to make them productive individuals are getting higher as we grandparents save money for our grandchildren's education.
The only real resource limits are energy and human creativity. Still, it takes time and education to allow human creativity to be expressed, as many detrimental belief systems and mind viruses need to be evolved. Many of our political and religious belief systems are trying to prevent human innovation for the future, like the killing of nuclear power in the US by activists or preventing marine aquaculture from producing seafood using less energy in the US (also activist-winning).
"... bewildering public intellectuals, who fail to understand why men won’t respond to market signals."
Obviously the men -are- responding to market signals.
The mistake of those public intellectuals is that, on the chalkboard, they try to analyze the signal in nominal terms, whereas instead, in reality, it is experienced in real terms.
In other words, they are failing to adjust for inflation. And you can't use the PPI to make this particular adjustment.
The nominal cost of what it takes for a young man to obtain the status and attractiveness necessary to make a quality young woman his bride with the expectation that she'll stick around for the long haul has -exploded- in the past several generations, leaving gains in productivity and income in the dust, by an order of magnitude at least.
As usual when trying to adjust for inflation, one has to try to correct for changes in 'quality', for example you can't just look across a decade and compare iPhone to iPhone, you have to specify the version and the attributes and so forth. Likewise, while it's tempting to compare 'marriage' across time, the changes in expectations, legal rights and risks, and other factors affect the perceived value of the 'deal' so much that you can only make sense if you append the particulars, e.g., "New-Marriage-29M-25F-Maryland-2023."
The sad fact is that a marriage of the quality the average man's grandfather was able to experience is now above the production possibility curve for a large and growing fraction of the male population. One might as well ask why short men with plenty of untapped athletic potential are still deciding to slouch on the couch instead of trying as hard as they can to get into the NBA. They don't try because there's no victory condition within their reach worth trying for. In other words, they are responding to market signals.
I know a grandmother who just passed away. Of her six children, only one had children. Of those two grandchildren (who moved away), only one had children and did so very late in life when the great grandma was senile and couldn't recognize who she was or who they were.
There is no way to ensure that having children creates grandchildren. In a low and delayed fertility environment, the odds actually get pretty bad.
While I'm spiritually in line with you on being a grandparent, the idea that simply exhorting people to take on huge immediate personal expenses because *maybe* they will see a reward forty years later when they are very old is such a fools errand. We don't need to debate this, the cratering TFR is empirical evidence enough.
If you want more kids, you need more concrete incentives *in the here and now* to improve parents lives. It won't come cheap, and it probably cost rather than raise cultural and political capital. But that is what being a statesmen and leader means.
Given Arctotherium’s statement, “The woman is cooperating if she ensures that the child her husband helps to support is his. She is defecting if she tries to get him to support a child who is not his.” how does divorce constitute defecting, as is later claimed by the author? Divorce and extramarital pregnancy are not necessarily related.
Right, 'defect' a bad and overly reductive way to put it.
It's more like "Breach of Contract" (traditional societies certainly understood marriage to be an enforceable contract) and failure to perform any of the many duties in a contract constitutes a breach. The tacit (formerly very explicit) marriage 'deal' involves a lot of asymmetric duties, and so there are plenty of ways for either side to breach. Contract law doesn't consider contracts inviolable, but imposes penalties to discourage "inefficient breach" tending to benefit one party at the expense of the other.
If the child-related expectation for a man entering marriage is that the woman delivers "the whole package", biological paternity, custody and control during the child's entire minority, etc. then the woman's unilateral decision to impair the package in any way might be what Arctotherium was aiming at with 'defect'. So, not just adultery or cuckoldry, but also separation, divorce, and so forth.
And the reverse? What’s the “whole package” for the man?
I'm not sure what you're asking. What I think Arcotherium was trying to get at with that clumsy attempt to categorize societies in terms of the game equilibrium moves in local sexual dynamics? One of many (obsolete) traditionalist litanies of marital rights and responsibilities (e.g., "he shall love and cherish, she shall honor and obey") and consequences for lapses? A summary of current Family Law from a particular jurisdiction? My guess at the current modal social consensus, or some individual woman's preferences, or something else? Just as regards children, or everything else too?
At a broad level of generality the pragmatic answer to that question is that the whole package of obligations for a husband consists of all the duties that his failure to fulfill would be considered by the wife as breach of contract and just grounds for dissolution of the partnership, i.e., a divorce which could be compelled on him against his will by the relevant authority. Yes, that sounds very abstract and legalistic, but without a definite context there's no way around that.
But understanding "the package" as being effectively the obverse function of the "socially acceptable reasons for initiating divorce" is a useful way to compare different social contexts. In the old "at fault divorce" regimes, the number of grounds were small and the threshold for severity and burden of proof high. That meant "the package" was fairly minimal, and if a man or woman has followed the basic rules it would be considered shameful and unjust for the other spouse to try to divorce them. As the requirements for divorce fell and fell to what is in many places effectively nothing, "the package" necessarily balloons into requirements that a large percent of the population cannot hope to maintain over their whole lifetimes.
Maybe Kling should have referred us all to you rather than to that poorly thought out post from Arctotherium.
I had the same thought. Staying married does nothing to prevent the man defecting (having a side piece) or the woman defecting; arguably it makes it easier for the woman who is safe from a suspicious husband leaving her if she defects. I haven’t read Arcto’s piece, just Kling’s summary, but if Kling is doing justice Arcto’s ideas are nonsequitors.
To stay within his original framework, he should argue that the state, Uncle Sugar, represents to the woman a man who cannot defect, and thus she is incentivized to defect all she wants outside of marriage.
I see you’ve never paid child support for children you aren’t allowed to visit.
Child support after divorce is not support of another man’s child.
It’s still effectively defecting.
I’m commenting on the authors’s definition of defecting, not on your definition
And then there’s this from Alice Evans:
“Stable unions will only remain high if at least one of these conditions it met - either the community remains conservative, women are still economically dependent, or there is a high supply of men with appealing offers of companionship.”
https://www.ggd.world/p/ghosting-the-patriarchy-female-empowerment
I guess we’ll have to go with Door #3
So many good links, tho Mounk's second half is paywalled - the other interview is good, too. Here's a short book summary:
>>The most direct goal of the book is to help people who are faced with the decision of whether or not to have children to think more clearly about it. In our current reality, you have to do that in the face of a lot of different pressures and normative scripts that either make children somewhat of an afterthought, recommend postponing them past the point of physical viability, or even threaten the moral legitimacy of having children.
In order to gain some clarity, we address the concerns that people are experiencing from the first-person perspective. We treat the looming concerns of finances. We think about the romantic scripts that we draw on, the scripts of how we should be dating and what we should be trying to get from our relationships that help—or, more often, don’t help—us find the kind of relationship in the context of which we can have children. We also look at length at what it means specifically for women to have children, given the apparent incompatibility of having children with the way we often understand feminist goals, namely, as empowerment and equality to men. And finally, we look at the greatest moral challenge to having children today, which takes the form of the threat of climate change, but really is the deep philosophical, ethical concern about whether life is so miserable, or perhaps we are so fallen, that reproducing our species is no longer justified.<<
Thus a reason based, non-religious book to support, in many (most?) cases, having children. Many feminists don't want husband-wife marriages to be the main goal of life, and kids the main output. They want equality with men -- none of whom get pregnant and have kids. That kind of equality is socially destructive.
It's great that Arnold is using the Fertility decline, not yet a crisis (?), as reason to link to many posts. Too bad he hasn't read & reviewed this book, it seems likely to be more interesting than many other posts.
Cooperate / Defect is an interesting idea, but Handle's Breach of Contract is a more robust view. Our social norms have changed so the prior unspoken duties & benefits need more honest view. "Unrealistic expectations" seems a big reason for divorce, related to "lack of commitment" and "argue too much".
(Most) Men want more sex than (most) women want, so the Big feel reason for men to want marriage starts out unequal. Whether it's every night, every other, once a week, or only when the woman feels like it -- this is often a big issue for the man. How much time to spend together doing what they both like, usually harder with kids, things the wife likes more, things the husband likes more. Men don't like doing as much housework as women want done, nor being as neat & tidy.
True differences need to be discussed more, and more honestly. But also expectations need to be set well.
I gather the book is "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman.
Also, re Arctotherium,
“ The divorce rate for couples with children is as much as 40 percent lower than for those without children.” See link below. So if more divorces are among childless couples, how are these childless defecting women having their husband raise someone else’s child?
See here for data on divorce, including reasons:
https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/
Fine data on reasons given for divorce:
Lack of commitment 73%
Argue too much 56%
Infidelity 55%
Married too young 46%
Unrealistic expectations 45%
Lack of equality in the relationship 44%
Lack of preparation for marriage 41%
Domestic Violence or Abuse 25%
I tell my kids commitment is crucial -- but any commitment limits individual freedom; and interferes with doing as one feels at the moment.
"Unrealistic expectations" isn't quite defection, nor even Handle's (better) breach of contract, but bailing on a relationship before having kids is sort of more responsible / more idealistic in some POV.
Tho I don't like most item phrases like your 40%, or this:
"in “Understanding the Divorce Cycle”, the risk of divorce is 50 percent higher when one spouse comes from a divorced home and 200 percent higher when both partners do."
50% higher than what base? 20%? 60%? So 40% lower of 50%(base) means 30%.
But 90% is 200% higher than 30% (base), & 45% for one spouse from divorced home.
Don't like these phrases of % of % difference.
We must note that we live on a finite planet without enough energy to become an interplanetary species. The amount of food we can produce on this planet is also limited by energy to make fertilizer and pump or desalinate seawater.
We are adding 3 billion more people as the population lives longer, and the investment cost and effort per child for the education necessary to make them productive individuals are getting higher as we grandparents save money for our grandchildren's education.
The only real resource limits are energy and human creativity. Still, it takes time and education to allow human creativity to be expressed, as many detrimental belief systems and mind viruses need to be evolved. Many of our political and religious belief systems are trying to prevent human innovation for the future, like the killing of nuclear power in the US by activists or preventing marine aquaculture from producing seafood using less energy in the US (also activist-winning).
Madeleine Davies' article in the New Statesman on these issues is also very much worth seeking out.