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CellBioGuy comments on [Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike - Less Wrong
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Why is this a problem? I genuinely don't understand. EDIT I mean if our values are less conducive to vigorous economic competition by a particular subset of the population these days, then why should we change our values? Shouldn't economies serve our values not the other way around?
The problem Dalrock is outlining is a severe breakdown of trust. The reason folks might choose not to marry is not because they would be getting a bad deal if they did (if that was the issue, the incentives would simply adjust in some way), but because they have no way of trusting the deal they are going to get. In the absence of a way of re-establishing this kind of trust (and AIUI, commonly proposed solutions, say pre-nup agreements, are highly imperfect), there is no hope of avoiding a comparatively very bad outcome.
It's basically the same reason why societies with undeveloped or untrusted legal systems always have terrible economies: there's no way of trusting the contracts you get into, hence no basis for real development.
Yes. This is exactly why I remain a bachelor with a girlfriend of a decade that I love dearly.
You would say child support laws for example accurately reflect our values? They certainly don't reflect mine. I consider them grossly unfair.
"Our" and "we", when applied to whole societies, should probably be viewed as efforts to co-opt or silence opposition. Any other words or phrases to add to the list?
"The right side of history" implies that the speaker knows the future.
I denotatively agree, but I think that's okay (Am I correctly reading a disapproving connotation?)
it's okay to make some predictions about which direction morality and law will drift in the future. There are trends and patterns which are not too hard to extrapolate.
I do agree (denotatively and connotatively) with the other sentences you wrote - using "us" or "we" when there is obvious disagreement on a topic consists of declaring an in-group and I think drawing in-groups is usually bad.
Yes, I intend a negative connotation. The future hasn't happened yet. I count "the right side of history" as, at best an estimate which is expressed with excessive certainty, and at worst, a claim to validation from a victory which hasn't been won.
Correct insight. But I'd assume that some part of our values is geared toward a stable economically viable society. At least if you basically agree with your societies values.
Yeah, I see this as mostly a correction of the wage gap -- compared to women, men as a class have historically pursued money over things like creature comforts, social status, personal safety, and time with friends and family. This is what correcting that trend looks like.
The men in question worked hard because they really wanted to have families of their own, they are now less likely to have them and aren't working as hard. This isn't a story of men kicking back and relaxing because their preferences changed, this is a story of men not being able to get what they want with hard work anymore.
This. My impression is that a hard-working person can no longer expect income that supports a family. (I must admit that I have not researched what percentage of working men earn sufficiently much for that now vs. in the past, though.)
[edited to eliminate some unclarity, partly due to my confusing something, but preserving the main statement]
But one of the reasons why it used to be possible for one person to support a family but no longer is is that our standards for what “support a family” means have risen (see also).
If you're willing to be frugal (e.g. spend on yourselves as little as Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman do) it isn't actually that hard to live on one income in the First World.
That and that when the supply of labor increases, the demand will go down.
That may well be so. Why does this sentence start with "but", though?
Signaling that you expect your mate to be frugal might not be a widely applicable strategy for attracting one, though…
If you're frugal yourself, it might be a signal you want to send if you want to improve the odds of a mate who won't drive you crazy.
It may be true for you. I doubt it's true for me. And most importantly, I doubt it's true for the average male. Hence not much of a surprise that people aren't going around signaling frugality and trying to support a family with one earner on a relatively low income.
The average ;male isn't frugal, either.
It's like any other unusual trait which works best with a cooperating partner.
Search this post for “Attractiveness: Mean and Variance”. (That's even more relevant for potential marriage partners than for casual sex. Also, what matters is not how many people are attracted to you, but how many people whom you're attracted to are attracted to you.)
(You posted the same comment twice; you might want to delete the other copy.)
Why would I rather work for money (hereafter “work”) 2n hours a week and marry someone who doesn't work at all than work n hours a week and marry someone who works n hours a week (assuming the former is what you mean by “have families of their own”)? I don't get it.
Because the n hours your wife is working is n hours not spent raising children.
But I am also working n hours less in the second scenario, so I can also spend n more hours raising children. Sure, there are things I cannot do (e.g. breastfeeding), but that's what maternity leaves are for.
Comparative Advantage.
The data don't seem to support the theory.
I can't access a lot of those papers unfortunately. Anyone have PDFs of them?
That is the reason the 2n/0 model is still sensible if you are raising more than 2 kids and/or consider raising the kids yourself (mainly by the /0 partner) has a higher value (e.g. by unavailable of comparable education) than the income you could earn in the time the children by school/kindergarten. This may depend on your country/views.
You are presupposing that you get to marry someone in either case, which kind of defeats the point. Well, one could still talk about the attractiveness of 0-hour working vs. n-hour working mates, but that's not as intuitively forceful.
So the choice that you're suggesting is probably not one that people ever actually face(d) frequently.
I, for one, am more attracted to the latter (and indeed my partner makes more money than myself), but I know that there exist men who are more attracted to the former. (Attractiveness is a two-place word.)
Yes, but when we're talking about a broad societal phenomenon, we need generalisations. And I would think that some decades ago, the average male found the wife they could expect to get with a 2n/0 arrangement, weighed by the probability of her existence, more attractive. Also, bogus below is quite right to point out that the 2n/0 arrangement used to give you higher social status.
As for today, I'm not sure. My impression is that the 2n/0 option is plainly unavailable for many people. And indeed, the meaning of a woman not working has changed, which may influence the attractiveness equation (including for the average male).
Economies of scale come into play here too. If you can get to the point where 2n is a typical job, then having two part-time jobs is likely to not offer as many benefits or long term opportunities as a single full time job. Even if n is a full time job, depending on the job, having one person work massive amounts of hours is probably better for long term promotion potential than two people putting in the bare minimum and constantly having to take time off to take care of children.
Also, as others have noted, a stay-at-home parent is not someone who "doesn't work at all." Most stay-at-home parents tend to be responsible for raising children, cleaning, money management, shopping, general home repair, and a host of other things that if you outsourced so that the partner could traditionally work, could potentially cost more than the partner's earnings.
Wait why do we want to correct the wage gap? I might care about men and women being paid the same amount for the same value of work. But that isn't what the phrase "wage gap" means at all once you look at it closely.
Perhaps I was unclear -- it's not that we want to correct the wage gap, but that it's simply part of the narrative of men opting out of the rat race. Alternatively, it's a natural correction as the cause of over-valuing income - relative to other values - declines in men as a group.
Wait, do you mean that less pressure on men to provide is a result of a declining gap?
If so, I think some people are mistakenly parsing your statement as "child support is a method of correcting the wage gap". I myself parsed it that way at first glance.
Err, I think so? The social pressure to marry and raise a family is a big part of the wage gap in the first place. Remove the social pressure, and it's going to help equalize the economic choices that the sexes make.
Me neither.
I'm assuming things in the US are very different than they are here in my country (or I am particularly oblivious), because the comments on Dalrock's blog post fail to resonate with me at all, and I'm a male -- and yet Konkvistador seems to know what this all is about, even though I guess his country is even further away from the US than mine [EDIT: looks like I was wrong] (but he's much less oblivious than me on this kind of things).
At least for a lot of folk, including many of these men, their choices reflect expressions of limited choice. They're expressing lack of interest in marriage (and sometimes even dating), higher education, and the job market not because they lack interest in these things, but because the external costs of following these interests are extreme and increasing.
If those costs were reasonable and desired by society as a whole, that might be acceptable, but it's not clear that they are. The internals of divorce case law are not established by the desires of all of society over the long-term, but on the values of family law judges facing single cases at a time -- and unsurprisingly, battles between the legislature and the judiciary regarding divorce laws are pretty common. Likewise for a number of other attributes. Officially, the gender disparity in college education is something we as a society oppose!... just not, you know, in any significant manner.
Also, while men are voicing less interest in marriage, it remains a valuable thing for women, and the majority of these women are specifically interested in marrying men. If we care about their values, having the market for het men collapse into the most tenacious or the least monied probably makes things pretty unpleasant for them.
More directly, Smith's discussion covers not just marriage or the "rat race", but a pretty significant variation of success and even what the men she asked described as "growing up". It's possible this is a culture-bound assumption, but generally the threshold to maturity, wherever your culture puts it, has some pretty major secondary effects.