Shouldn't we be looking at changes in divorce rates to provide counterexamples?
That'd provide a better means of comparison between culturally similar nations, but all I was trying to challenge was the assertion that low legal barriers to divorce set up an inevitable cascade of failures for reasons based mainly on economics rather than culture. One major barrier, as others have pointed out, is the difficulty of determining the direction of causation: statistics on non-divorce separations would help clear this up, but I haven't been able to find any.
A glance over the statistics seems to reveal a correlation between divorce rates and l...
"Wet houses"-- subsidized housing for alcoholics (they need to get most of their own money for alcohol, but their other expenses are covered) might actually be a good idea. It's cheaper than trying to get them to stop drinking, arguably kinder than trying to get people to take on a very hard task that they aren't interested in, and leads to less collateral damage than having alcoholics couch-surfing or living on the street.
Utilitarians, what do you think?