Locked and Wedded
Valentine's Day is for one thing: arguing about marriage rates online
It’s Valentine’s Day, so what better way to celebrate love than to get into arguments about marriage rates and fertility. In this case, made by Brad Wilcox, conservative think tanker and author of an upcoming book clled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization” (weird tone). The gist of his thesis, which he’s laid out in The Atlantic, is that single parents are bad, marriage is down, and liberals are to blame for both, with the added condiment that it’s somehow hypocritical that liberalism, an ideology mainly about letting people choose to do whatever they like even if you disagree, lets people choose to do whatever they want even if the liberals themselves disagree with it.
It seems that the only thing the American chattering class wants to talk about these days is how to get people to marry and breed. So, are stuck up feminists responsible for the collapse of the traditional family and the ensuing child poverty?
Femmes maison
The first question is why marriage rates are coming down. The main explanation for the decline of marriage isn’t the all-encompassing influence of sinister feminist brainwashing, but rather, that women aren’t meeting men that they like - per libertine wokester (checks notes) Brad Wilcox, men are less likely to be “fully committed”. In fact, most people still want to get married and have families.
The issue is as follows: 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 - a in lifestyles, preferences, personalities, you name it. For instance, Swedish women who win the lottery run off to get divorced, while men stay in their marriage and have more children; the effect for women, however, only occurs if the marriage was unhappy or there were financial disparities between partners. In another, more extreme example, if women are allowed to seek jobs, domestic violence rates decrease, since they leave their partners rather than endure a violent relationship.
The key factor here is that women are now more educated than men, resulting in higher incomes than before. To bring back an analogy I’ve already made, let’s take the example of Anatomy of A Fall: the movie follows the failing marriage between two writers, Sandra and Samuel, which ends with Samuel suspiciously dying, and Sandra as the main suspect. The marriage was troubled, and it’s revealed that Samuel deeply resented his wife: he felt humilliated by being the caretaker rather than the breadwinner. This dynamic is backed by research: straight couples where the woman outearns the man have lower likelihood of marrying, higher divorce rates, and lower satisfaction ratings (writeup of the research here, in Spanish).
The issue here is mostly status: it is in men’s benefit, both material and symbolic, that women take second place - and women are choosing to not put up with any of it. Consequently, the quality of the relationships women have is going up, but mainly due to having fewer of them with more selectivity in serious, long-term partners - resulting in fewer marriages. This also helps address rising marriage satisfaction: it is much higher because not as many people are getting married as in the 1970s, so the marriages that do happen are going to be very different than when there were more marriages, resulting in different outcomes and different satisfaction.
Lastly, more money to men doesn’t actually help: when they make more money, marriage or fertility rates in the area don’t seem to go up much. A major obstacle is that most women want help around the house now, and women are still tasked with most of the housework even if men aren’t sole breadwinners anymore. At the same time there is a strong, negative correlation between domestic work and wages for women. Marriage negatively affects women’s wages even without children, and affects their career choices - straight women have shorter commutes than gay women, because men expect more from their girlfriends than women do. When children come along, this gets more pronounced: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children (chart here), to the point where motherhood and its implications account for most of the gender wage gap.
A bun in the oven
A second locus of concern, for both Wilcox and Melissa Kearney, author of The Two Parent Privilege (and instigator of the first post on marriage) is single parenthood, and its detrimental effect on children.
The case both Kearney and Wilcox make is 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 arguments, and Kearney’s book (I can’t speak about Wilcox’s, which hasn’t come out yet) appear to be generally decent, and the claims seem reasonable.
Why are more births ocurring out of wedlock? Unsurprisingly, it’s that people who get married are different than people who don’t, in ways that make the latter have more children. Firstly, single people are outearned by members of couples. Additionally, children of more educated mothers have better outcomes than those of less educated mothers, regardless of marital status - and per Kearney herself, less educated women are more likely to be single mothers. The general trend here is that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and have for decades, leading to greater workplace participation. Back in the 50s and 60s, 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 had productivity increases with the invention of domestic appliances, as well as social changes and legislation, such as the widespread accessibility of birth control pills, abortion, and divorce.
Regarding divorce, it’s interesting to note that it does seem to have a negative impact on the children, in factors such as future economic outcomes, academic difficulties, disruptive behavior, or depression. However, the results have to be softened: firstly, it’s fairly likely that forcing disfunctional couples to stay together also negatively affects children. Secondly, divorce is not exogenous to economic or personal factors: unemployment, for instance, raises the chances of a couple divorcing. Thirdly, changes in legal requirements for divorce aren’t actually exogenous to the underlying determinants of divorce. A final issue is that many studies are quite old, and the initial wave of divorces after no-fault divorce was led by the worst, least functional marriages. It’s even possible that, absent no-fault unilateral divorce, marriage rates would be even higher, since the risk for marriage is also higher. Finally, before any of you dare lift a finger against divorce, be reminded that legalizing divorce resulted in a 20% reduction in female suicides, and another large reduction in femicides.
Housing costs also seem to have an impact on fertility: non-homeowners have fewer kids in general, and there are studies linking the 70s baby boom to low housing costs, among other factors. If a marriage breaks down, divorce laws normally make it so each person gets half a house, but half a house isn’t enough to afford anything because the housing market is awful, so getting divorced is too costly, and if divorce is too costly then fewer people get married.
In consequence, only affluent people are able to afford to get married, resulting in declining marriage rates outside of the elite. For example, in France, cutting the child allowance in 2014 resulted in lower fertility, but only for couples with children - as in, people went from planning on two to staying at just one, rather than from one to zero. So the margin of adjustment ifor already existing families to scale back.
It 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.
Sigma grindset
A big claim that Kearney and Wilcox both make is that “culture” is resulting in lower births and/or more single mothers. In the US, birth rates fall across income, wage, and age groups, due to lower marriage rates, lower fertility among married couples, demographic trends surrounding Latinos, and “shifting priorities”.
Before getting into the woke of it all, something to consider is that the “shifting priorities” explanation accounts for the steep decline among women 20-24 and 25-29, but that one of the biggest relative drops, and a leading factor in this decline, is the sharp drop in teen pregnancies, aka in the 15 to 19 group. The reasons for this are varied, but largely come down to a weird mix of sex ed, increased access to contraceptives and the morning after pill, and teenagers having less sex in general. It is not due to ineffective or midly effective government marketing campaigns or to “awareness”, as Wilcox claims, since the study about 16 and Pregnant he cites was later debunked. Regardless, I do think that a shifting cultural priority can account for this: lower approval of age gap relationships. This impacts teen pregnancies because, for 70% of teen mothers (during the 1990s, the recent peak of fertility), the fathers were older than 20, and 15% were older than 25. And looking at mothers 12, 13, and 14 years old, the fathers were adults in 27% of cases.
The shifting priorities line is interesting, but not especially in line with a “too woke” reading. Culturally speaking, the communities with the highest number of single mothers also have the highest disaproval of them. And 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 between support for traditional gender norms and fertility. The French Revolution and its emphasis on secularism was followed by a “baby bust”, but it could also be attributed to inheritance reforms - people die at different dates to avoid higher taxes.
I do think that culture is influencing the choices of affluent people to have too few children, but not in the woke Rabenmutter way, but rather, in a “being a parent is really difficult and expensive” way. Fertility in South Korea, one of the most unfertile societies on Earth, is declining due to increased status competition: parents want their kids to participate in the best extracurriculars, go to the best schools, get the best grades, and go on to the best careers. Because this is incredibly expensive, fertility falls, especially for poor and middle class families. This is complimented by three main factors: higher economic growth (disputed, though), more ease and safety in child-rearing, and lower housing costs.The fact is that parenting is getting more and more demanding, and affluent parents do more and more, while poorer parents fall behind - all of which is falling on the shoulders of women (see above). As is the burden of an aging population, by the way.
Maternal mortality has risen in the US in recent years, aka the opposite of what you’d want to see for more babies. And housing costs have soared, taking a toll on the entire US economy. So it’s no wonder women don’t want to be mothers, or see it as an anxiety inducing, (literally) dreadful ordeal.
Conclusion
So there’s no hypocrisy or propaganda or anything - the men available to educated women are better, and they’re the only ones who can afford a nuclear family. It’s not hypocritical to do something that you think is best while not demanding that everyone else does it - that’s called being a conservative, not a liberal. Liberal elites are hypocritical, but regarding careers, housing, and schools - not marriage.
This helps clear up the “success sequence” for child poverty: advising people to graduate high school, get a job, and not get pregnant before marriage to prevent poverty is a solid idea, but ignores that the reason those things happen isn’t a culture of permisiveness, but rather, “bad luck” and widespread poverty. Not having a job, for example, is a matter of bad luck in employment, not moral turpitude. So the success sequence is just a misunderstanding of data, more or less.
The solutions are interesting. Wilcox mentions getting rid of tax provisions that penalize marriage, which is a good idea, and then a bunch of vibes-based right wing stuff. Hilariously enough, there’s some evidence that lesbian moms produce better outcomes for kids than straight couples, so by Wilcox’s own logic, the government should incentivize Gen Z’s wide pool of bisexual women to turn away from men1. Melissa Kearney wants to increase aid to families (good), and Alice Evans (author of an amazing Substack) wants to tax the tiger mom rat race out of existence.
The answer is obvious, and boring: make it cheaper and easier to have more kids - cheaper housing, cheaper childcare, better jobs, etc.
Credit to Matt Bruenig for coming up with this one, with a hilarious follow up of “that is a truly radical proposal”. And other research shows no, or very little, differences between kids from straight and gay families. So overall telling women to munch beaver can’t be less effective than whatever the government is already telling them.
Should ‘bad luck’ and unemployment exhibit a secular trend?