For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end:
Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who are disproportionately likely to be stably married, to preach what they practice—to not only enjoy the benefits of marriage in their private lives but also to advocate for them in public.
This is the problem in today's society. You cannot preach good values, because somebody is going to get offended. It is important that all lifestyles are tolerated. But at the same time as a society it is important to instill good values in the next generation, values that will keep them healthy, happy and productive. And the problem is, those values are going to offend someone for sure.
I come from a south Asian immigrant family in the US. Nearly every single person I know in my extended cohort of immigrants followed the script (because we were socialized to do so): we studied hard in school, pursued financially lucrative majors, eschewed dating at an early age, got married in our 20s, and had kids. My brother is having his first kid at 31–and my dad and I were frankly getting pretty antsy. And for every single one of us that followed the script it paid off, including those whose parents came here without white collar jobs.
And of course none of us talk about that in public because we want to seem illiberal to our educated white American friends. For a long time I reconciled myself to that cognitive dissonance. But my wife is American, from a deep blue state. And it’s been eye opening to watch the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution on Americans outside the economic elite. It seems like everybody’s parents are divorced. They hang around any stable family they can find. Nobody is willing to guide their kids: they’re supposed to “discover themselves” on their own. The parents are too scared to impose values: this is what we expect, this is what constitutes a good life, this is what your purpose and function and role is. It’s a mess. If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country.
I’m a fairly new father. It was hard fought for my wife and I. Three years of trying, rounds of IUI, I had to be on different medications that entire 3+ that made me feel shitty, and eventually we succeeded with our first round of IVF. We now have an 18 month old daughter, and we just tried with one of our frozen embryos to get her a sister.
I say tried because while my wife got pregnant, we found out a few days ago that it was an anembryonic gestation. My wife passed what embryo there was today.
We aren’t exactly rich and my parents helped with the funds.
But you know what? It’s all been worth it. Hell, I’ve been stressed like crazy because I want to change careers back to using my degree in computer science instead of the photography I’ve been doing and I don’t have the time to get my skills up to snuff because of her…
But my daughter makes me the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. It’s a joy I never had before. I wish I could somehow let my friends that have decided not to have children experience it.
Regarding wanting to get back in to CS: I became a dev in my mid 30s, and found my first job in a country where I don't speak the language. Received plenty of rejections and embarrassed myself during both whiteboard and take home coding challenges.
Even when I went above and beyond for a take home challenge, the offer went to someone else. But something stuck out to the hiring director (grit, belligerence in the face of the odds?) and I was offered a position mainly on my intangibles.
Sometimes I tend over think and catastrophize, but every now and then I catch lightning in a bottle and defiantly ignore that skeptical voice. So I hope you can take something from my rant.
Thank you. It's a bit hard in my case as we want to stay in our rural area, so that would mean probably a remote job. What's worse is that weddings are booked pretty far out, so I would need to not take any (more) bookings for 2024 and desperately hope I can get a job after wedding season is done in November. There's no way I could take on a full time job in addition to a full summer's worth of weddings. I work 15 or so hours a day during the worst of it already.
I've been working on a VR game in my free time so right now my hope is to (somehow) finish that this year and then at least I'll have something to show...which I guess might be that lightning in a bottle that I need.
You can look at the cultural characteristics of different American groups that were here but didn’t build civilization. Look what the places the Puritans, Germans, and Mormons built. These are cultures that lean towards communal rule following. Contrast that against Appalachians, or the frontiersmen who populated the Oregon coast, and what they built. These are cultures that have emphasized individual self determination.
I’m saying that Appalachia is more like a third world country than other parts of the US, and drawing an inference about what the US would be like if Appalachians had populated the whole country.
You still seem to be missing my question, which is, how did third world countries become how they are? Certainly not by adopting something like contemporary American culture, right?
Furthermore, you've made a very strange pivot: first you were talking about how "it’s been eye opening to watch the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution", but now you're talking about "what the US would be like if Appalachians had populated the whole country". The former and the latter seem to have very little or nothing to do with each other.
It's also pretty weird that you contrast for example Germans and Appalachians, because "Germans were a major pioneer group to migrate to Appalachia". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia
And: "Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of its inhabitants."
> You still seem to be missing my question, which is, how did third world countries become how they are? Certainly not by adopting something like contemporary American culture, right?
Sure, but that’s besides the point. Countries can fail to develop for many different reasons. Third world countries, like the one I’m from, have different cultural problems. It’s hard to climb out of that well. But you can compare a more individualistic subgroup of Americans to other subgroups that are in broadly similar circumstances and draw an inference.
The 1960s social revolution turned up the individual self determination aspect of American culture to 11. Seeking pleasure, prioritizing personal satisfaction, rejecting social rules in favor of individualized morality, etc. That individualist streak has always been latent in American culture, but it’s most apparent in Appalachia. For example, even 100 years ago Appalachians had higher rates of multiple marriages than the rest of the country: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-appalachian-go-round-family-i...
There were lots of German immigrants in Appalachia, but they didn’t build the place the way they did the Midwest. Many went to established cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
The distinctive culture of Appalachia isn’t a “myth.” For reasons tracing all the way back to the types of British immigrants who founded the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed.
As Lee Kuan Yew says, culture is destiny: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923. If you want to understand what works and what doesn’t, look at the culture of the people who made things work contrasted against the people who didn’t.
> I’m using “third world country” as a generic reference to low standard of living.
Um, ok, here's a tip: if you want to be understood, maybe try using words like everyone else uses them, instead of repurposing existing words with your own private definitions?
> That makes it impossible to develop government and rule of law. [You seem to have deleted this sentence in editing.]
In other words, we're doing a lot right, otherwise we wouldn't attract so many immigrants, and thus our culture isn't as bad as it's portrayed by, ironically, immigrants.
> That individualist streak has always been latent in American culture, but it’s most apparent in Appalachia.
I... am speechless. I don't know how to respond to this, at least without saying something that will get me downvoted or flagged. So I guess our conversation may be over.
> For example, even 100 years ago Appalachians had higher rates of multiple marriages than the rest of the country
From your own linked article: "Whether this was due to divorce or higher mortality, I can’t say".
Also: "Even with these higher divorce rates, the share of Appalachian women currently married is nonetheless higher than women in the rest of the US."
Your article doesn't even show what you seem to want it to show.
> There were lots of German immigrants in Appalachia, but they didn’t build the place the way they did the Midwest.
I'm a lifelong Midwesterner. There's a very strong, deep rooted progressive streak in the Midwest, for example in Wisconsin and Minnesota, notably, which both have large populations of German ancestry. Frankly, your comments seem to be imbued with with overgeneralization and stereotypes.
A major reason why divorce rates have increased in the past 50+ years is that over this time period, women have achieved a great deal of financial independence from men. They don't have to be married anymore. They have more choices, can be more selective. This is, I would say, good. I don't want to go back to a past where women were subservient.
> Um, ok, here's a tip: if you want to be understood, maybe try using words like everyone else uses them, instead of repurposing existing words with your own private definitions?
Referring to the law standard of living is the common usage of the term "third world country." Nobody is referring to alignment vis-a-vis NATO and the USSR.
> In other words, we're doing a lot right, otherwise we wouldn't attract so many immigrants, and thus our culture isn't as bad as it's portrayed by, ironically, immigrants.
We immigrated to the America of Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. The country is still riding the inertia of that. Moreover, immigrants are generally insulated from the larger culture. Affluent, educated immigrants can count on joining the top quantile, where as the article observes marriage norms remain strong. And whether affluent or not, immigrants have their own communities with their own social structures. Rampant divorce in Oregon doesn't affect Bangladeshis in Queens.
> I'm a lifelong Midwesterner. There's a very strong, deep rooted progressive streak in the Midwest, for example in Wisconsin and Minnesota, notably, which both have large populations of German ancestry.
Yes, but it's mainly a collectivist form of economic progressivism. As we saw with 2012-2016 shifts, when cultural issues predominate, the alignment runs in the other direction.
> A major reason why divorce rates have increased in the past 50+ years is that over this time period, women have achieved a great deal of financial independence from men.
Except the women who have the most potential for independence have the highest marriage rates. The marriage rate of people in the top quantile is the same today as it was in 1979: https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-.... Marriage rates for women with a bachelor's degree were pretty close to those without a high school disagree in 1968: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08.... Today, marriage rates in the former group have dropped about 10 percentage points, but have been stable since the mid 1980s. (If you account for the fact that way more people have bachelors degrees today, there might not be much real change at all.) Meanwhile, marriage rates for the other groups have dropped 20-30 points and are still declining.
The data supports an alternative hypothesis. Social norms around marriage and taboos against divorce function as guard-rails that encourage normal people to do something that's good for them--getting and staying married. High-IQ, high impulse control people (the folks who go to college and end up in the top 20%) don't need those social guard rails, and have done fine without them. That is consistent with other social trends too--for example, college educated people are far less likely to be obese than everyone else.
> Nobody is referring to alignment vis-a-vis NATO and the USSR.
You actually said you were were from a third world country in an earlier comment, though you deleted that bit soon thereafter.
Regardless, the point you still seem to be avoiding is that the US does much better economically than many other countries (whatever you want to call them), so there seems to be no empirical support for the idea that the cultures of those other countries are superior economically to the US culture, or that the current US culture will somehow result in a low standard of living.
> We immigrated to the America of Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. The country is still riding the inertia of that.
I understand that you don't approve of the social changes that started in the 1960s, but it's now more than 50 years since the 1960s, so where is the economic doom, the low standard of living, that you suppose is caused by these social changes? When exactly do you predict that to happen? It appears to me that "still riding the inertia" is a convenient way of shrugging off the lack of empirical support for your belief.
I see that you've now dropped your discussion of Appalachia, which is probably for the best, because the equation of that with 1960s social changes has always seemed totally bizarre and nonsensical to me.
> Yes, but it's mainly a collectivist form of economic progressivism.
So you claim. I guess it's necessary for you to spin it that way to support your other beliefs.
> As we saw with 2012-2016 shifts, when cultural issues predominate, the alignment runs in the other direction.
I'm not sure what you mean by "shifts" or "alignment". I'd have to guess you're referring to elections, which are often decided by razor thin margins, then wrongly interpreted as significant cultural shifts.
> Except the women who have the most potential for independence have the highest marriage rates.
That's rather easy to explain: those at the top have the best selection of potential mates! Moreover, those at the top are much less likely to experience the kind of financial crises that can put a great strain on a marriage.
The wealthy always had financial independence. That's why nothing much has changed at the top. Now non-wealthy women have a lot more financial independence too.
There's been no cultural rejection of the institution of marriage. After all, as another commenter here astutely noted, there wouldn't have been such a massive battle over gay marriage if we didn't care about marriage. The point of divorce is to get out of a bad marriage, which is much more possible now than before. Also, people have more freedom now to delay marriage until they're ready for it, when they feel the timing is good. Some people prefer singlehood, even later in life, but they're the minority.
> do something that's good for them--getting and staying married.
I disagree that this is necessarily good for them. I don't want to recite my personal life on HN, but let's just say that I wish my parents had divorced a lot sooner than they did. And now they're much happier divorced than they were married, and I'm also happier as a result. If anything, the problem is that people get married too easily, and too young.
3rd world places are just places that used to be everywhere.
When people come together into larger and larger communities, then more specialization can take place over longer periods of time.
This is if you have a stable situation, of course.
Additionally, writing and schools are critical, so knowledge can be passed down systematically. Not randomly by "tribe elders."
And the schools should be fairly open, meaning being able to be open about what they say and teach. To be able to push boundries.
Ancient Athens had writing, they had schools. They passed down architecture and philosophy in regular schools. If you are in hunter/gatherer mode, nobody really is a schoolteacher. The smartest hunter/gatherer, even if he or she was legit Einstein smart, is going to be out hunting for rabbits or deers or planting rice. You must have "extra." Extra population that supports scholars. That's why in medieval times, the Catholic Church was the keeper of scholarship. They had a lot of priest for the laypeople, but they had money to support a lot of people who hung out and did intellectual work. And, those who WERE Einstein smart joined the Catholic Church, because they figured out where they should go with their talents, just like a super smart student today knows to apply to MIT or Harvard or Princeton, etc.
Once you have the modern type university (as opposed to one or two subjects like law and religion, for example), then it all starts to snowball. Technology starts to snowball. This is one of the reasons why the Western world surpassed all others. It started in ancient Greece, and continued. England created the first modern universities at Oxford and Cambridge. Some claim it was University of Al Quaraouiyine, Morocco, but it was not a modern style university in the subject offered.
This is why England dominated the world. It passed on knowledge from generation to generation until it was absolutely the top. England's geography of being an island and cut off from mainland Europe also helped a lot.
"Third world countries", meaning hunter/gatherer, tribal, herdsman cultures, just don't have the critical mass. They simply do not have the numbers of people to make it.
The USA is the 4th most populated nation on earth. With this great population, if one out of a million is a tippy-tippy top person in some area of study, then there are going to be 330 in each area of the USA, since we have 330 million population. In every endeavor.
On the other hand, if you are in a country that has 2 million people, your odds of having that one in a million person are 3 in every area of endeavor/industry. 330 vs 3 is a big difference when you are talking about near-einstein level.
Except in a very populous country, these exceptional people will find their way to other exceptional people (usually via universities), but those in "3rd world" countries who are 1 out of a million might be stuck doing subsistence farming or shit like that. And even IF one of those 1 out of a million in Sudan, let's say, were to somehow find their way out, they would move to England or USA or Germany or France, and not stay in their poverty country. And, those countries would GLADLY give them citizenship if university was to line up behind a super skilled person.
.
Culture is important. Population density is important. Inculcation of education is important (which is part of culture, I guess.). If a culture spurns education, they will never self-actualize.
People talk about islam and how they "saved" all the knowledge, and that's all great and stuff, but what have they done for us lately? The reality is that the super religious anti-education conservative elements of islam took over and fucked over the learned islamic peoples, and the conservatives of islam destroyed the smart part of islam. The same that is happening in the USA right now.
So to answer your question directly, their world countries did not "become" how they are. They are exactly like they were 10,000 or 50,000 years ago.
In order to change, you have to change. If someone is conservative and does not like change, then they will want to be like it was 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years ago. There are many, many people today who don't thing viruses or germs are a thing, for example. There are many who still believe in "gods"...like, 96% of the world believe that gods are real.
Meanwhile, the most educated do not go for that. You look at those with science degrees and only 50% believe in a god. Look at the NAS, Natural Acadamy of Science her in the USA where only top scientists are admitted, only 4% accept that a god exists.
So it's like that. Culture. Education. Knowledge. Population. Wealth. Etc.
It is a web of interconnected stuff that takes a long time to put together. England started Oxford in in 1200, and it took 800 years to make it to the peak of their Empire. Their empire fell apart because of the spread of knowledge to other parts of the world. Knowledge. Nothing else. Not war. Not WwI or WWII. Knowledge. Education.
> The reality is that the super religious anti-education conservative elements of islam took over and fucked over the learned islamic peoples, and the conservatives of islam destroyed the smart part of islam. The same that is happening in the USA right now.
How Abdus Salam was treated aside, Al-Biruni’s books languished for hundreds of years because basically no one read them.
I think everyone knows at some level that the cookbook for the success you highlight is correct and works, as south and eastern asians have demonstrated so systematically. Yet, sadly, many groups avoid it… I think often for intentionally self-defeating or other pathological reasons.
> as south and eastern asians have demonstrated so systematically.
I challenge this. With 1.5 billion people the cream of highly motivated and intelligent people will of course rise to the top. Anyone not razor focused on getting out, getting up, and pushing successful traits wouldn't make it; survivor bias.
Except it applies to their kids too. Asian Americans growing up in the bottom 1/5 of the income distribution are more than twice as likely to end up in the top 1/5 as adults compared to white Americans. You can say that’s because their parents are highly motivated—but you can’t gift your kids motivation. What you can do is pass on certain culture and values, which brings us back to the point above.
It's interesting to have it called a script; implying that it is fixed and out of your control. For what it's worth, I was given the same script by my parents and especially the Catholic Church, but it all seemed pretty ridiculous on its face; even to a child it was pretty clear that it was a nice delusion, but we all end up gone and forgotten once the script runs out. I have zero desire to put children through any of it.
5 billion years of little more than random biochemical interactions. It hasn't felt like much of a gift so far, though I suppose the pain of living with a crippling illness might color that view a bit. Still if I could choose to continue to exist, I might actually, but unless there are some serious technical advances (or if you believe those Catholics), then extinction is coming for me and all of us. Creating children consigned to suffer the same fate in some futile quest for immortality seems like far too heavy a burden to place on them.
I am however intrigued that you appear to have created an account just to reply to me. That is a novel experience.
Thank you for the brave statement. I am an immigrant from the former USSR and have the same exact observations.
Somehow the boomer generation convinced themselves, when young, that youth was wiser than age, and then neither their kids nor grandkids got any guidance.
Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school.
"Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home
"We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases
It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.
Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them.
The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
I don't know if I count as educational elite, but I have a few degrees, so does my wife, and we have talked disparagingly about marriage in the past.
My gripe is that marriage, as an institution, ought to evolve to meet the people's changing needs, and by codifying it, the government locks in features (like the assumptions about gender or money or about who gets to make medical choices of certain kinds) which might then later fail to match up with how the people are living.
So it's not that I think it's irrelevant, it's just that I think it could serve us better if we kept a cleaner divide between what we practice socially and what we legislate. Whatever it is that you might need a reference to marriage for in the law, instead create separate decoupled systems for handling those things. More flexible that way.
We weren't going to bother with the marriage paperwork, because who cares what the state thinks. But then we did our taxes both ways and decided to swallow our pride and take the money.
I used to think similarly to you, but now I realize that between my wife and I (4 graduate degrees between the two of us so maybe we are in a similar boat) what really matters is that we pattern our life on the concept of traditional marriage we inherited from the past generations rather than put a confused modern spin on it.
I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.
I don't really quibble with the idea that marriage (can) work well. What I have a problem with is the suggestion that somehow the so-called "elite" opinion that social relations like marriage should be more flexible
1. constitutes a denigration of the institution
2. actually materially causes the decline in marriage rates we see, especially among the economically exploited.
Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society. I'm pretty sure that people having kids out of wedlock aren't doing it because they read about it in GOOP or whatever. In fact, further down this thread someone has posted a survey which suggests that people more likely to get divorced actually have a stronger belief in marriage than people less likely to. This suggests strongly that it isn't the opinions of the upper classes that actually cause divorces and points to other economic causes.
> Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society.
I don't disagree that traditional marriage works. Despite all attempts to reject tradition, we've ended up living a pretty traditional married life. We wouldn't have ended up here if it wasn't a stable equilibrium. But I think the following are equally valid explanations for the results:
> Marriage is good, actually.
> Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health.
It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.
When we got married, we didn't tell anybody. We had already been living like we were married for years, so it was just a tax thing.
A year or so later, my wife decided she wanted to have a party and make a big deal about it--the primary driver for this decision was that she noticed that her female co-workers weren't treating her like a professional, and she suspected it was because they didn't see her as really married.
I didn't press the issue, we had a party, it was great. But apparently, women treat unmarried women differently in professional contexts.
Also, men do. Also, the IRS does. Also, parents do. Do nurses without a family end up working different hours? There are a lot of factors.
I'm just saying that it's really difficult to sort out whether being married helped these women because it's so great, or whether not being married harmed the other ones because they were treated poorly in ways we don't understand.
Of course it's the women who often have unrealistic standards and much less of a drive to find a mate, for basic evolutionary reasons found in the vast majority of sexually reproducing animals.
I don't think this constitutes denigration of marriage. Its just totally normal reflection about the institution and its role in and interaction with the state. It doesn't sound like you actively preached to people that they "shouldn't get married" and that marriage qua marriage is bad.
If you take "people with college degrees" as elites, you can see two things documented in surveys: a) way less people with college degrees think that marriage is important if a couple has children together than people without college degrees (25% vs 31% in 2020). This holds also when you ask them whether marriage is important for life partners (31% vs 42% in 2020). All this while b) people with college degrees have higher ratios of marriages than people without.
More than half of working age adults have college degrees. I wouldn’t call that a satisfying definition of “elite”. When I think of the elite I’m thinking heads of state, CEOs, and leaders of the arts and sciences. Not a rando marketing manager with an English degree.
Right, but this difference in opinion hardly constitutes an active denigration of marriage. And this survey result actually undermines the idea that marriage decline is _because of_ elite opinion that marriage isn't important: the classes with the highest rates of divorce and unmarried parenting actually believe marriage is _more important_ than those with the lowest.
Gee, I wonder if there is a material, economic, explanation for the stability of various family structures in different classes?
South Bay Area has quite a few prosperous cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga) where the demographics are politically liberal in candidate preference and their public schools are outstanding. Maybe they're not as good as the private schools you're talking about, but the cities in South Bay tend to be brimming with optimism for their young generations.
In one well known city with a strong middle class, one might expect half of the students to be on the fastest math track available and half of the math faculty in the local high school to be Calculus teachers. The surrounding cities are not too much different.
I wonder what makes your city different? Would you mind specifying what region you're talking about?
Pretty much the rest of the country has awful public schools. Every large city has a few good ones and a number of less than wonderful ones.
I think a meaningful separation point might be the cost of living and more specifically the taxes raised from housing. If you have houses with an average price of $1M and houses with an average price of $300k, in the latter a public school system would simply have less to work with.
This gets brought up a lot, but in (all? most?) US states the additional state and local funding that goes to low-income schools more that makes up for the decreased local property tax revenue. That manifests as a negative correlation between affluence and per-pupil spend, and (at least in Ohio where I grew up) a negative correlation between per-pupil spend and various measures of academic success.
I wish people would look up the data on this sort of thing before confidently making claims.
There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority.
Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.
Eventually, almost everyone figures out for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn't. Moreover, there are plenty of unmarried people who aren't against marriage, who indeed want to get married, but their life circumstances haven't resulted in marriage, for various reasons. They don't need preachers.
Keeping universal insight a secret and expecting everyone to figure it out for themselves seems oppressive to me.
Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is out of consideration for all the single parents, and you therefore decided to adopt. You figure it out two years later. Years have gone by, and dating is now very difficult. Is this somehow progressive!?
Sure, people guess. And I expect most still underestimate it by a country mile. It isn’t very openly discussed, because no one wants to impinge involuntarily single-parenthood households.
Being vaguely aware that “single-parenthood is harder than two-parenthood” does not count as informed.
> he's saying that discussing it is taboo, and increasingly so.
It's not though. There's no evidence of that.
In fact, the very claim "no one wants to impinge involuntarily single-parenthood households" is itself an ironic admission that the difficulties of single-parent households are obvious to everyone.
Otherwise you are either completely devoid of advice or you only get advised by someone who is selling you something.
EG: if I advocate marriage (and I do!) it's out of some small ounce of altruism. Economically I don't give half a shit about you and your life circumstances, I never met you and you have no impact on me.
But - if I have a chance of sharing something wholeheartedly that has made my life better and I believe will make most people's lives better - I share that out of some pleasure of perhaps helping someone.
That's what preaching is. When someone preaches to me, I may not listen but I appreciate what is driving them.
However empirically I found that the more convinced one is that they don't need advice the more badly they actually need it.
Objectively, if I was deciding on whether I want to be married or not - I'd want to speak to a lot of old dudes who never married and those who did, and understand their experiences.
And I'd love to have heard from someone who loved single life like I did but found even deeper meaning in marriage.
Doesn't mean I would let them make the decision for me but I would want to know it. And if I was too dumb to ask those questions, I'd hope someone older and wiser would recognize that and help me
> However empirically I found that the more convinced one is that they don't need advice the more badly they actually need it.
Empirically, I found the opposite. ;-)
> Objectively, if I was deciding on whether I want to be married or not
You decide that subjectively, not objectively. It's actually pretty simple: be single for a while, and see how it feels. If it sucks, then try not to be single. If it's great, then continue.
There's also the crucial matter of marriage being a mutual decision between two people, so one can't just decide to get married. I will offer some advice myself though FWIW: if you're not in love with someone, or they're not in love with you, then you probably shouldn't marry them.
// It's actually pretty simple: be single for a while, and see how it feels. If it sucks, then try not to be single
Perhaps you are not a married dude... I found a huge difference between "not being single" and being married. The life long commitment backing the relationship adds a lot.
I wouldn't have expected that a priori. And I think maybe this isn't well understood.
> The life long commitment backing the relationship adds a lot.
Marriage isn't exactly a lifelong commitment anymore. Til divorce do we part.
In any case, as I discussed in my previous comment, the lifelong commitment can't be one-sided. You don't just make a lifelong commitment to a random person on the street. You have to meet the right person first. Any advice or preaching is irrelevant unless you happen to meet a potential spouse, in which case you may not even need advice, and things will just take their natural course.
To meet the right person, you need to BE the right person. Like, imagine you meet someone who wants to get married and have kids and you are unsure. They probably won't stick around to see if and when you are gonna figure it out for yourself.
I assume you are referring to money raised by Churches from their congregations?
If so, you are not following the conversation. We are using preachers to mean those who provide moral/life guidance from their own experience. You can fall that "advocates" or whatever.
We do not need preachers and we certainly do not need them for something as commonly aspired to as marriage.
How out of touch can we truly be here? Marriage and having kids are two of the things universally pushed. We need solutions to the root problems leading to these "lower stats of marriage".
Becoming that person who believes he's performing altruism by telling his friends to have kids is not beneficial to anybody, and will likely prevent your relationship with them from developing any deeper than mutual transactions. Everyone KNOWS. What they do not know is whether they'll have a job tomorrow to afford their kids, whether they can overcome their upbringing to provide a healthy environment to raise their kids, etc.
So please, enough with the preaching. It might ironically be better if we had more people selling real solutions to these problems.
Human beings, especially young people, need social pressure to help them make good decisions. Do you think if you go to dinner and all your friends order a salad instead of the deep dish pizza, that doesn’t make a difference?
The fact is that most people think they’re special, but they’re not. Modern American society gives people this illusion of choice, and they’re paralyzed by it. But for maybe 80% of people, it’s not going to get much better than getting married, having kids, and working to put food on the table. Socializing the next generation of workers is probably the most you’re cut out to do in this world.
Preachers, teachers, what's the difference, besides the connotation you want to attach?
I believe I had good parents, but I still did lots of mistakes, costly mistakes that I wish I did not make. I am determined to teach all I can to my future children, if any, so that they don't have to learn it all by themselves again.
I think it is only sensible that such teachings are spread society wide, for children who have no good parental figures.
> I believe I had good parents, but I still did lots of mistakes, costly mistakes that I wish I did not make.
That's how it works. That's totally natural. It's human nature. You can't live your kids' lives for them, can't make their decisions for them. And sometimes kids end up better than their parents, despite their parents.
Besides, we're not really talking about parents preaching to their kids, are we? Parents can say whatever they want to their kids in the privacy of their own homes. You seemed to be referring to public preaching.
I mean, are you putting to question whether anything at all can be taught? If we can pass down knowledge, then what is so special about knowledge about human relationships in particular that cannot be passed down?
I don't care what is natural. I care what results in better outcomes. I know I could have had better outcomes if I was given better advice. In this particular circumstance learning by mistakes is exactly what you should not aspire to do, because it is so costly. One bad mistake can derail your entire life.
> I mean, are you putting to question whether anything at all can be taught?
Teaching is not preaching. Facts are not values.
> I know I could have had better outcomes if I was given better advice.
This is what I dispute. You can give advice, but that doesn't mean anyone is going to take it. Especially not youths, who are omniscient, omnipotent, and immortal.
Oh? How stably married has the owner of the Wall Street Journal been? As far as I know, the opinion arm of his TV network is all in favor of monogamy, at least in cases where its ideological adversaries aren't practicing it.
This article is about women, but I believe the same relationship is seen (perhaps even more strongly) in men.
My cynical view is that healthier people are more likely to attract spouses - in other words, that causality runs in the other direction than the commentaries usually imply.
"Our study’s sample population—mostly white and relatively well-off professional women deciding about marriage in the early 1990s—does limit the conclusions we can draw from it with confidence. For instance, our all-female sample cannot tell us anything about the effects of marriage on men. More rigorous work in this area is needed, since prior research indicates that marriage promotes men’s longevity and health even more strongly than women’s."
Earlier this year I was curious if I could live life as a single male for the rest of my life in a capitalistic Western society that tends to frame many issues from a partisan-listic perspective.
I'm no sociologist and did not apply any critical analysis to these works, but most of the literature and surveys I found on this topic suggested that men fare worse than women on health outcomes when it comes to marital/romantic singlehood. The speculative cause was that these women possessed deeper friendships than those men, who tended to be more isolated, especially in later stages of life.
I think that’s a pretty honest assessment. Data point of one, but my friendships are not nearly as close or deep as those of my wife’s.
Additionally, if I got divorced, I’m pretty sure I won’t marry again and the only close relationships I am likely to have later in life are with my children and possibly grandchildren (if they bless me with any).
A married men attains the benefits of a wife promoting a social calendar with her (at least in my case) more numerous friends. This might also be true for anyone in a relationship at all - having a broader circle of friends, and thus social life.
If I read this when I was single, I'd think it's horrible.
Now that I am a bit older and married I deeply appreciate this. It's also another reason to marry someone a bit different than you - they bring you things you need.
Modern society is like a conjurer who whacks your heirloom rolex with a mallet for a trick. When all that remains is a pile of cogs, broken glass and twisted metal, it suddenly dawns on him.... he's forgotten the end of the trick.
Modernity: let's smash everything. What can possibly go wrong?
It's a nice image, but there's no unsmashing that watch. You can decry the destruction of tradition, but good luck re-instituting it, those traditions developed in a different world, for example the extended families living together (to take care of children and the elderly) broke up as young people moved to where work was (and various institutions took over child- and eldercare, with varying degrees of success). I think it's too easy to say that pre-modern societies were automatically happier, they were more predictable, but certainly had plenty of people who didn't have a great time. The real question for us now is how do we want to go forward, not why can't we go back.
First we reject this Whig History nonsense that history is an inevitable march forward. It is clear we have gone badly off course. We have chosen a future that is making people desperately unhappy. So we need to re-adopt things that were carelessly cast aside.
1. Women should use union power to demand proper respect from men. No more sex outside of marriage.
2. Make marriage laws much more strict. No more no-fault divorce. Marriage is a life-long commitment that people shouldn't be incentivised to bail out of - especially not with lucrative settlements.
3. Tar and feather feminists and all people perpetuating divisive gender ideology that makes partnership impossible.
4. Normalise full-time motherhood as a profession that the large majority of women will adopt for a time. No more trying to have it all while the children suffer.
5. Extreme penalties for all pornographers. Their product blights our lives and debases our society.
6. Zero income tax for any married woman who has had more than 4 children - a stroke of brilliance from the Hungarians.
There's just a few ideas for ways we could tip the scales in favour of marriage thus making men, women and children's lives far more happy and fulfilled.
1. Women are not happy with the current arrangement - that's the point of this article. They have power to create change by demanding men raise their game. If they wish to.
2. If you make a public promise to stay with someone "'til death do you part" - that's your agency. Noone is forcing you to make these promises.
3. Feminists have cast the relations between men and women as a pseudo-marxist class struggle. The sexes shouldn't war with one anothers. We are partners in a common struggle.
4. Very few women have the option to take on full time motherhood. My wife and I are lucky, because my income is pretty good. Most women don't have that choice. Modernity has robbed women of this opportunity, and now sells their misery back to them as empowerment.
5. Indeed. It is extremely corrosive to relations between the sexes. The government can step in and protect the people, in the same way as health and safety laws are there to protect people from harm.
6. Women are currently heavily penalised for having large families.
We're here commenting on an article about a study that shows that the institution of marriage has been badly damaged, and it is emiserating people.
If you would like to, you can offer some suggestions on how to fix this. You can either be part of the problem, or part of the solution.
It doesn't have to be this way. What's your solution?
Increase minimum wage to $45/hr to match the loss in increased wages over the past 40 years. Then wives will have the choice whether to work or not because one person will be able to make enough for them, their spouse and children to live.
I can agree that change has made many people unhappy, possibly even most. What I can't agree with is the general suggestion that a forced return to an idealized past would correct that. Partly there's the 'forced' aspect which others here have reacted against. But primarily I think it's also unworkable - you can't just argue that people should change how they form families, if their social economic reality prevents them from living like that. I am also skeptical about the implication that we as a society should want larger families - population growth may be slowing in the developed world, but given our outsized ecological footprint, that seems like at worst a mixed blessing.
My point is that people react to incentives. At the moment the incentives are stacked up to keep people unmarried, childless and miserable. We have control over the incentives, so lets choose incentives designed to make people happy.
I can agree with that - also I think it answers to the 'forced' aspect better, instead of a law making marriages permanent, incentives that made people more willing to stay in them seem less intrusive (though personally I am unconvinced that would make individuals happier overall, or be an obvious social good).
From my own experience, my marriage went through a rough patch. Though for us, divorce is not something we believe is permissible in most cases. This forced us to work through our problems with the help of a therapist. With lots of hard work and time, we were eventually able to resolve all of our issues. Our marriage is now better than ever - we are happier, more intimate and better able to communicate than we ever were before.
Not having a exit hatch pushed us to persevere with our problems. I think if we had had less of a sense of comittment, then one or other of us would have bailed, and caused both of us and our kids a huge amount of suffering.
“If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.”
I know that middle-brow dismissals are frowned upon but I want to write this anyway: I will never believe these types of studies without either a control group or better measuring of confounding variables. Health & happiness and marriage both have giant confounding variables like meeting a great partner and being a good partner. The authors claim that they accounted for this but I don't see how. The study is here[1].
> an unmeasured confounder would need to be associated with both incident marriage and mortality by risk ratios of 2.45 each, above and beyond the measured covariates, to fully explain away the observed association between marriage and mortality.
I may be interpreting that incorrectly and would appreciate corrections but why is it so unreasonable that meeting a great partner and having kids and thus wanting to strive to be healthier happier person would decrease all-cause mortality by a factor of 2.45 over someone who hadn't accomplished those things?
Because that was the cohort studied, not because the opposite is true for men only. As it says in the article previous studies indicate the effects may be even greater for men.
Personally, I've lived what is pretty close to the highlight of single life (dating on NYC, traveling to 20-30 countries a year, etc) and now am a boring but super happy suburban dad of 2 (and hoping for more) - you don't think someone like me can offer an insight on what works and why?
No, probably not. Whatever your life circumstances are, they're so ridiculously far outside the norm that almost nothing about your life applies to most people's.
I am making an extreme point. Whatever people's idealized single life is, working in finance/tech in NYC, dating and traveling would be on that list. And I can still articulate why married life is way better for me.
I was a product manager at a finance tech firm and would do several region tours a year. So sometimes it would just be a day or two in a country at a time, still fun.
I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I have to say, when I was single several years ago, my happiness was maybe a 4-5 on a scale of 1-10. I used to feel lonely all the time. Right now I'm married and expecting our first child, and I'd rate it a 7-8 (depending on my mood). Some of that is from being more financially secure though.
I'd guess that in general, some financial security comes from a stable relationship: a shared living environment, efficiencies of scale with things like shopping/cooking, car ownership potentially, utilities from heating/cooling, common cause on other fronts.
Having kids have brought me more happiness and more pain than anything else I have ever done. Using you scale, if I was 5-7 when single and 6-8 when married with no kids, having kids changed it to 2-10.
"We also have to be cautious in generalizing across generations. The Gen-Xers in our sample were deciding for or against marriage in a different cultural setting than young adults today. In the past 30 years, for instance, norms against extramarital cohabitation have relaxed considerably."
Given that the study only concerned women during a time period where stigma was even worse than it still is I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this.
Choosing a more conventional lifestyle, regardless of what you as an individual genuinely want often takes so much pressure from you that it's hard to discern whether it is you or others who are happy about your decisions. I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable.
I think there's a difference between "success" as a consequence of reaping social rewards because you do what is expected of you and genuine individual freedom.
> I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable.
Or they feel like failures because they are failures in a biological sense, and they know it deep down due to their biological brain wiring, but they blame their guilt on their parents and society.
I think there is a lot of societal pressure to get married/be in a relationship. As such, I think it would be pretty hard to claim that the benefits of marriage are separate from the benefits of not fighting societal pressures in your day-to-day.
Or if you could prove that, I think it would be an interesting study.
That doesn't make sense. As a male new yorker I faced zero societal pressure to do basically anything traditional.
I am happy as a married dude because my life has infinite more meaning and impact when I am being a husband and a father, versus whatever I was up to before.
I would argue his evidence isn't even evidence against my point. Since he probably doesn't realize the societal pressures that got him into being married. :)
But it's also definitely anecdotal. My counter-evidence is somewhat anecdotally motivated, but I've definitely lived in all kinds of places where there's strong societal incentives to get married (for one thing, at a baseline, taxes).
Do relationships matter? Yes, of course. We're social beings.
That said, and not to get off topic, my theory is we'll eventual discover that there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. For much the same reason studies say people with pets live longer. Yes, there's the emotional companionship (that impacts the physical) but there is also the exposure to another's bacteria.
Again, just a theory. But the more I read about "the gut" the more important and influential it's becoming.
*based on readings, often here on HN, I'm not a medical professional
A cursory google search suggests that cohabitating couples converge on the same gut biome among various other things like good habits but also bad habits.
The paper also points out that because of all the concordances, couples tend to share the same downfalls, not just the good things: disease risks, bad diet, bad sleep, emotional turmoil.
Yeah. We increasingly want to believe that there exists a viable substitute for everything, that we can have it all.
For example, there are clear health benefits associated with long term relationships and marriage. Some antisocial people would like to believe that that doesn't matter because they can replicate these benefits if only they eat clean, exercise, abstain from alcohol, etc. Well, turns out, there are health benefits to LTRs that cannot be replicated otherwise. Your theory is one possibility. But simply eating clean, working out, getting a lot of sleep, drinking water, and having clean bills of health and good blood tests isn't enough. You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. You won't have the discipline to maintain this lifestyle until the end of your life.
But you can't enjoy the benefits of singlehood and the benefits of LTRs at the same time. This is controversial. But you can't have it all. You can't optimize your life for everything at the same time. We're disgusted at the idea that we may have to pay a cost or sacrifice something. In this case, sacrificing the freedom of choice and the flexibility that comes with singlehood for the health benefits of LTRs. But no. We want the freedom of choice, the flexibility, and the benefits of LTRs.
Similarly, you can't become rich quickly without taking an incredible amount of risk that will in all probability leave you worse off. Other than luck, the true and tried path to long term wealth is to grind for decades at a job or a profession that brings money. Being a doctor, or a FAANG SWE, or starting a business. This all takes hard work and patience. But some people would rather try their hand at get rich quick schemes with cryptocurrency, options trading, or other scams. Very few succeed. That's luck. Most fail.
> You will still die earlier than someone who's not single.
This assumes the reason people in LTR's live longer is because of LTR's, and not that healthier or more fit people are more likely to score LTR's. IME people settle once they think a relationship is locked in and let themselves go.
Perhaps. But people who give up on relationships also let themselves go as well.
On the other hand, when you're a couple, you might be tempted to let yourself go, but at least there's a chance your mate will refuse to go. Since our behavior is driven by environment (a la we observe the norm, and conform) you'll resist temptation and stay healthy. Habits are easier to maintain when you're not alone.
> there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles.
Fascinating hypothesis. I wouldn't be surprised that shared diet, living space and activity leads to a converging of gut bacteria. But how would this lead to health and happiness?
Studies are ahowing gut bacteria has many health implicimplications, tho exact details are still being determined. They also finding a gut to brain connection.
I believe they say, we have more bacteria than cells. Makes me wonder who is hosting who. The point is, those bacteria matter.
Look I don't think that "hookup culture" is the future, but it is practically speaking impossible to expect women to be full-time employed AND have time to be homemakers. And yet the productivity of our modern economy is based on women's place in the labor market. There are absolutely emotional and psychological benefits of having a committed partner, but how often do marriages end in divorce, how often are people just putting up with each other, and how much sexual frustration and violence on account of it has been generated by socially enforced monogamy? I don't see why we can't aspire to building a better society where women aren't competing tooth and nail for the men who are fighting tooth and nail for the best social status?
A truly free society would not be one that is either polyamorous or monogamous but one where the fulfillment of sexual needs is considered a social necessity just like the fulfillment of any other physical need and is addressed as a social problem. Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.
> Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.
I don't even know what that means. People are forced to have sex and rear children?
Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care? /jk
But really, I’d like to see more attention to how many of these effects are due to the ways in which marriages are legally recognized and respected in ways that other monogamous long term relationships are not.
I’d also like to know why, if LIBERALS HATE MARRIAGE so much, they spent decades fighting for the right to gay marriage?
The only part of marriage that bothers me is not about marriage itself, but how it is codified into legislation and being married can have significant financial implications
1 - Does such direct promotion actually work? My vague impression is "poorly, at best".
2 - How much overhead cost (especially legal & bureaucratic) does the promotion create? Note that politicians getting to congratulate themselves on being yet more pro-marriage is not a benefit for society.
Prior to like, 2017, the tax code used to impose a significant marriage penalty on couples with similar incomes; now it only imposes some smaller penalties. It is extremely recent that the tax code wasn't an active disincentive to get married for many couples. Being married is mostly not rewarded, unless one partner is a homemaker.
(Home ownership, parenting, and charity are rewarded by the tax code in a way that is unrelated to marriage.)
> Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care?
j/k not needed: being single can be an adversely selected by poor health - or other things that can cause poor health, such as drug addictions and poverty.
