Untying the Knot

24/7 baby machine, so he can live out his picket fence dream

saddest shit i’ve ever seen (well until in the mood for love)

This is what we have always known. When a mother loses a husband, she can sew, or she can get food by begging or working for it. But when a husband loses a wife, he can't do anything.

Alice Evans on the Inuit (also go subscribe to her Substack it’s great)

Everyone and their moms is talking about marriage these days: how evil progressives have dismantled the foundation of society or how children with two parents do better in life or whatever the hell points they’re trying to make. In general, people are just reading into charts and statistics and just confirming what they already believed - “single parents have worse outcomes, therefore women must have no rights” or “therefore we must liberalize zoning laws” or “therefore we must levy a VAT and use it for reparations”. But really, what’s with the economics of marriage?

When two people love each other very very much…

I’m not a poet, I’m just a woman. And as a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don’t, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. If we had children they would belong to him, not me. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me.

Amy March, “Little Women” (2019)

The first, basic question is how marriage works, economically speaking. The best way to conceptualize this is by taking the family as a company that can either employ its members outside the house, doing “market work” (aka a job) or inside the house, doing domestic work. It then uses the money made in market work to purchase goods and services outside the house, while the domestic work produces goods and services in the house - so working more hours, for instance, would require picking up the slack in the house by either people or machines.

Historically, there was not much of a distinction between market and domestic work (subsistence agriculture and the like), but when it was, men were the ones who picked up the slack by clocking in 9 to 5, and women stayed home. In fact, the more differentiation there was between men and women in “market work”, the more pronounced gender differences are to this day. But over time, naturally, the disparities in labor force participation between men and women shrank, and women eventually reached parity or so with men. And when women make more money, they have more power over household decisions. All thanks to Barbie, of course.

It’s important to know that there were two reasons that women were able to enter the workforce, besides cultural change: wages rose, and the amount of labor required in the home fell. The former was due to a host of reasons, generally linked to economic growth and to the growing education of women. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, women showed much less interest in a career than they do presently - surveys, for instance, show that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own. But, at the same time, the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education, which meant that when this differential shrank, women were incentivized to hunt for jobs. At the same time, domestic work has had ample productivity increases with the invention of domestic appliances, as well as social changes and legislation, and shifts in biopolitics (?) such as the widespread accessibility of the birth control pill, abortion, or divorce.

It should be noted that marriage as a legal construction mostly benefits men. Obviously, because of “the patriarchy” and whatnot since men held all the power when they came up with it¹. But also marriages end up being astonishingly unequal between partners. Even if men aren’t sole breadwinners anymore, women are still tasked with most of the housework, and there is a strong, negative correlation between domestic work and wages for women. Even when no children are had, marriage negatively affects women’s wages and distorts their career choices - straight women have shorter commutes than gay women, because men expect different things from women than other women. At the same time, large firms (that offer non-wage benefits like childcare) employ more women, because this strengthens their position in the household.

When childrens come along, this gets nasty: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children (chart time!), to the point wheremotherhood and its implications account for most of the gender wage gap. Most of the more obvious ways the gender wage gap manifested have vanished, but subtler, more insidious ones remain - culture, values, etc. For instance, after giving birth, women have different career tracks in firms, meaning that their lifelong eranings get derailed by child-rearing. And in academia, women’s productivity decreases after having children compared to male academics. A recent paper has found that women and men are equally likely to get tenure controlling for all factors, including parental status, but ommitted from all the celebratory statements is the finding that only 27% of mothers get tenure, compared with 48% of fathers and 46% of childless women. Economics, after all, is pretty sexist.

It seems, all in all, that marriage is an economic institution, one that mostly serves the interest of men - Swedish lottery winners who are women run off to get divorced, while men stay in their marriage; the effect for women, however, only occurs if the marriage was unhappy or there were financial disparities between partners.

The “single parent trap” trap

Where’s this all coming from, anyways? There’s been a book, called The Two Parent Privilege (link to an overview and review), that makes the case that 1) there are more children by single mothers (especially among low income families), 2) this is bad because it disadvantages the children in certain ways, and 3) some solutions.

The book appears to be generally decent in quality of writing and research, and reasonable in its claims. The solutions seem to mostly be “give poor people more money and better social services”, but also mushy cultural priorities stuff such as a debunked MTV study about teen pregnancy - or also that teen pregnancy seems to occur disproportionately (as in, two thirds) between teenage girls and adults. Such a bad thing, the statuatory rape crisis.

But back to it: there’s a somewhat well documented link between marriage rates and fertility, and lower population growth is generally economically bad. Plus children outside of marriage is bad. So is the solution to make more people get married? Or is the problem that the people having children out of wedlock are “worse”?

It’s, unsurprisingly, the latter. Firstly, children of more educated mothers have better outcomes than those of less educated mothers, regardless of marital status - and per the book everyone is quoting, less educated women are more likely to be single mothers. At the same time, a core reason for why marriage rates seem to be declining is the cost of housing: divorce makes it so each person gets half a house, but half a house isn’t enough to afford anything because the housing market is a shitshow, so getting divorced is too costly, and if divorce is too costly then fewer people get married - plus, non-homeowners have fewer kids in general. This means that only affluent people marry, resulting in declining marriage rates outside of the elite. So it just seems that the problem with single mothers isn’t that they’re single, but rather, that they’re poor. Especially given that poor Black kids with married and unmarried parents seem to have equally bad life outcomes, so the problem is either they’re Black or they’re poor, and the former normally means the latter.

But why are single mother single? It appears to be, not because of weird feminist mumbo jumbo, but simply because the available men do not meet expectations. Most people still want to get married and have families. Culturally speaking, the communities with the highest number of single mothers also have the highest disaproval of them.

I have recently watched the movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (see banner image) by Jacques Demy, a delightful musical about two lovers who get separated (tragically) by happenstance. A key development in the plot is that the woman, Genvieve, becomes pregnant, so she must accept a rich man’s marriage offer instead of waiting for the baby’s father, Guy, to return. Both her and Guy end up married to other people, but it’s pretty heavily implied that they’re not exactly happy - and the reason why they didn’t get married was that there was a lot of stigma against being an unwed mother. Now, her husband (a rich diamond trader) was an okay guy who was in love with her, but he could easily have been an abusive jerk and, without divorce, she’d been screwed. In fact, legalizing divorce resulted in a 20% reduction in female suicides, and another large reduction in femicides (i.e. murdering the wife). So she’d probably have died if her husband wasn’t a nice guy. Trés bien it worked out for her, then.

When women’s wages are higher, they expect more from their partners, not just in terms of money but also in terms of actual quality of a match. Put another way, the quality of the relationships women have is going up, but mainly due to having fewer of them - resulting in fewer marriages and fewer births. And money doesn’t actually help: when men make more money, marriage or fertility rates don’t seem to go up much. It seems to be an effect, then, of the fact that relationships tend to result in marriage, and marriages result in children, which women bear the burden of in terms of their earnings and their work - which is especially important when you can actually have a relationship with someone without getting married. A solution, then, could be to normalize men leaning out of the workforce to become stay at home dads in cases where it’s convenient. If men aren’t bringing enough resources to a relationship for women to be interested in marrying them, the solution isn’t to wax lyrical about the sexual revolution or whatever other incel tropes we’re legitimizing this week, it’s for men to actually develop those resources.

Of course the issue here are the cultural norms, particularly around domestic work, that prevent men from being effective partners to women - why would girls choose the entitled and misogynistic jocks instead of the quiet nerds, whose attitudes towards women are exactly on par with the jocks but who are less attractive. Culture is not too feminized (I mean, when has it not been too feminine) to result in marriage; it is, in fact, insufficiently feminine to make for actually satisfactory marriages. So the options are make being a single mother better, make men better, or take away all of the social and economic advancements women have made to weaken them in society and the home. Guess which one the marriage talk contingent prefers.

Children of women

The problem that a crisis of marriage is supposed to cause, besides too many uppity sluts spreading their legs for everyone except nice guys like me, is that there aren’t enough children being born. Birth rates are declining everywhere on the planet, due to something called the “demographic transition” (is trans ideology allowed?), but they’ve fallen quite behind in some places in the devleoped world, such as Japan, or in the un-developed world, like China.

But if you look at the US specifically, birth rates fall across income, wage, and age groups - and it’s not just marriage, because married people also have fewer children. It seems to be a combination of mostly the economy being really mediocre for most of the last twenty years, some demographic trends surrounding Latinos, and “shifting priorities”. Now this could be a huge GOTCHA for the wokesters and their evil cult of the Rabenmutter, except… the most conservative countries in Europe, Hungary and Poland, don’t have substantially higher birth rates than, say, France or Sweden. There barely is any association with what people think about family roles and how many children they have, at least in Europe.

So what explains birthrates? Well, let’s look at the baby boom. The post-war baby boom wasn’t just the war, but rather, that everyone within a generation had a lot of children, especially after a bunch of people didn’t have children during it. This came mostly because the economic conditions were legitimately terrible, unsurprisingly.

So why was there a baby boom? The first explanation is that there was a post-war economic boom, which no shit, but particularly that there was a big positive disconnect between how people expected to live, and how people actually lived - so people who grew up eating shoes in the depression were suddenly seeing a massive economic boom, and thus had lots of children just for the fun of it. This idea has not really borne out empirically in latter data, but I’ll come back to it.

A second, easier explanation is that life, especially domestic life, got easier. Remember those appliances that made it easier for women to work? They also made it easier to raise children. Similarly, there were large improvements in medicine and sanitation that made life generally safer, meaning that people could have children and expect them to live as adults - you can see this based on the fact that the Amish, a group that does not have appliances but does use medicine, had a baby boom as large as everyone else’s. There’s also the housing issue: a lot of housing was built in the postwar years, meaning people actually had somewhere to live and build families. Places that built more housing also had bigger baby booms, so to speak. Does everything just come down to housing? Appears so.

And here’s where the economic growth part comes back: even when real incomes have largely grown over the past couple of decades, a growing and growing share has gone to things like housing and childcare, which makes up a large chunk of the pay-productivity gap, since compensation (which is pay + stuff like health insurance) has largely tracked productivity. So people aren’t actually making less money, but it’s just not growing very slowly either.

Conclusion

Why are people not getting married? Because men, seemingly, suck. And why are people not having children? Because it’s really expensive, most major economies have been extraordinarily mediocre for the last twenty years, and basically all countries on Earth are engulfed in some manner of a housing crisis (except Japan, which just has absolutely atrocious economic performance).

The solution? Just do eveyrthing I already wanted people to do, it seems.

1. Second weird sidenote all of the “very conservative gender norms” Asia has substantially lower birthrates that progressive libertine Europe, and both have lower birthrates than “all over the place on gender liberation” United States, so I’m not buying that this is about women being too feminist.