A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their secretaries, which was the way for them to jump to higher social class. Now, a director making advances towards their secretary faces immediate sexual harassment lawsuit, so they choose to marry other managers/directors instead.
For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.
It's a bad thing from the secretary's point of view if a) she consents to the advances and b) successfully leverages that into a marriage with far greater benefits for her and her offspring.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa).
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
More and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates.
In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized.
It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history.
If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.
The solutions are quite simple. Provide free daycare. Provide 1 or ideally 2 year long parental leaves for both parents. Provide a somewhat generous child allowance for up to 3 kids.
The hard truth is that it's not as expensive or complicated to encourage people having child but for some reason we are trying to do anything except for the things that actually matter: allowing parents that want to spend all their time with their new child this opportunity and allowing parents that can't be bothered to handle all the early mechanical aspects to avoid them.
Cheaper starter housing and for the US cheaper higher education would also help but I'm convinced those are lower priority than targeting the early years.
So much? Singapore's GDP per capita is $60k per year so $5k per month. If $2 month's worth of GDP for 1 baby so an entire lifetime of a new citizen is a lot, then I don't even know what to say.
> for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable
Having kids sucks (your mileage may vary, but before ~2-3 years the investment >>> benefits for all but the most dedicated people out there). Kids used to be cheap labor, which is now illegal for good reasons and they could be abused at will for various things, which is also illegal for good reasons. They were also frequently born because women didn't have a say in the matter, which is also becoming illegal for good reasons.
It is sustainable, it just needs to be done properly and respectfully.
Not by treating women like broodmares and kids as slaves to be worked to death and beaten up by adults who don't have any other way to relieve stress.
Do you have some data on how widespread and effective it was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by the time it was conquered, having a population of only 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one million.
But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.
In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.
The obvious solution is artificial wombs, but that is probably very far in the future. But since you're talking about who the future belongs to, that's who. Until then, probably low population density already-developed countries that have fairly open immigration policies to accept the children of foreign breeders. That has seemed to mostly mean the US for the past few centuries, but places like Canada and Australia could easily employ similar strategies.
Even short of artificial wombs, there is a lot that can be done to help with this. The real issue isn't that women don't want to have kids at all, ever. It's that if they enter the labor force and work full time, usually it gets put off, often until it's not exactly too late, but at least too late to have as many children as you might have if you'd started earlier, bringing down the national birth rate because too many would-be mothers have aged out. There could easily be medical solutions to that focused on making pregnancy more viable in late middle-aged women. Better prenatal care, cheaper treatments for infertility. Even non-medically, it could just be more flexible working arrangements like you mentioned, work from home, better and cheaper daycare, more generous universal leave policies that don't single out parents, possibly something like sabbaticals that universities do but for commercial ventures, too. Mandatory paid gap years for people in their 30s even if they don't have children. A country that pulls that off could keep the economic advantage of having a larger workforce talent pool to draw from without sacrificing internal population growth.
Obviously, private employers can't bear that burden and it would need to be subsidized by the government, but if you really believe there would be significant national strategic advantages to doing this, then it should be subsidized by the government.
I always see people mentioning better employment benefits and more flexibility to increase fertility in working women. Unfortunately, I think this misses a fundamental problem with working and motherhood: opportunity cost. The more driven, promising, smart and successful a woman is, the higher her opportunity cost of having children. You also have to take into account that young people are not just working for current earnings but also investing in their skills for future earnings. It would then be reasonable for young women to simply take advantage of the more relaxed work environment for further career advancement. It’s likely what explains Europe’s low birthrates despite more generous welfare policies. Eventually as people get older their career progression stabilizes and the opportunity cost falls to the point where they can afford to have children. Notice that opportunity cost is not money per say. For example poorer working class people tend to have more children, I suspect, because their opportunity cost is lower. So, in a sense, the poorer you are the more affordable children become.
Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people. If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture — the financial incentives are clearly there.
Only if you manage to avoid the often catastrophic downside risks, which are very apparent and very frequent in many industries. It's quite straightforward and convenient (in that there is an entire industry in family law serving it) to completely destroy decades of earnings and often times decades of future earnings for one or both parties.
Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated almost exclusively by well educated white collar professionals were either going through it/at some stage of it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it. It's easy to assume it's because the other party did something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems, usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can tell.
> Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
Men don't see it coming because they don't care. Quite frequently men are in bad relationships that don't affect them much but they generally don't walk away.
Women pull the trigger when they can't take it anymore.
This could be the reasoning of someone with survival bias though.
Unfortunately, life can be complicated, e.g. family member went through undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years, one can imagine how that upset the marriage assumptions prior to the mental health issues.
Sure. However, there are plenty of not so straightforward people too who are very well aware of loopholes in our law, society and human psyche and they are happy to exploit them.
What if you were drafted, served in a war overseas and came back with severe PTSD? For my parents generation that was a real thing that caused a lot of divorces.
Think of the tens of millions of families who last their dad in ww1 and ww2. Even that is echoing through time, because their missing influence probably impacted their Children’s success and so on.
You can mitigate most of this if you're wealthy already.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
Young people get pretty bombarded by divorce horror stories - especially from pop culture. Most divorces don't go to a court and a large number are resolved entirely internally and only seek professional help for the finalization of the agreement... but there are the attention grabbing headlines of someone being left with only the shirt on his back (and like 20 mil in options) on the far side of a really bad divorce.
I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.
There have always been divorce horror stories. The systemic reasons for declining marriage rates are mostly financial. The American middle class has seen declining incomes for the past generation or so, with rising student loan payments, unaffordable housing, expensive childcare etc. You have to be making a lot of income to seriously consider having children.
Whether it is mostly financial is still being debated. Even Norway (which has orders of magnitudes more in savings per capita) has low marriage rates.
Abstractly, marriage was a giant public act of consent due to the consequences of sex. Now, sex is decoupled from marriage, so the institution isn’t needed in secular culture.
Depends on the culture. For example, Rome was converted (>50%) to Christianity in about two centuries due to the impact of opening Jewish family customs to the Gentiles (read: everyone not a Jew by blood) and a reformulation of what it means to love.
I never married anyone and certainly I would never do it for financial/political reasons. It also never crossed my mind that marrying for love makes me a modern thinker :)
Marriage licenses are like $100 — are you confusing wedding and marriage in this? (i.e. it should be that marriage paperwork is not too expensive, but a wedding is unaffordable)
Well, consider, about 50 years ago almost every child was raised by married parents, today about half are.
Having so many people with no lived experience means lower cultural forces behind asking them to participate in an expensive party, even though marriage is so good for raising children (which used to be the purpose of marriage).
Why is an expensive party important? You can certainly get married at a Church or at a courthouse for pretty cheap and a party isn't required, but even if it is, you can throw a decent party without thousands of dollars spent. I've been to many of them in small towns across the Midwest.
If you are already cohabitating, marriage is an expense you can indefinitely procrastinate.
Especially if you see what others are doing on social media, your mental model of the expense continues to inflate and the pressure to procrastinate grows.
Historically marriage was seen not just as commitment between two people but between them and their community, and them and G-d. By committing to the marriage in a public, religiously-affiliated place, the couple is acknowledging their responsibility to those parties as well.
If nothing else, it makes the commitment stronger and creates greater incentives to work through issues rather than bail. You can think of G-d and community as additional "accountability buddies" here.
You can say that's stupid, and that it should simply be a commitment between two people and that's it - but you have to acknowledge that the rise of that idea is very correlated with the rise in the diverse rate.
Divorce rate is declining, likely because people aren't being pressured to enter into long-term commitments they aren't ready for by their broader community.
It is interesting to see how conservative ideas are re-packaged to remain fashionable with the time.
I was lucky to be raised by extremely great parents who have never been married and nonetheless have stayed together for 40 years, without God looking over their shoulder.
You know the big fancy wedding for 50-300 people in a hotel? That's expensive. I forget the sociological terminology but getting married has gone from a "We're getting started" to a "We have arrived" statement and the wedding is meant to show that, which is expensive.
Well sure, but that's just one example of how corporate interests tend to push tradition into being as expensive as possible (holidays face a similar fate). They're creating social pressure to solidify their revenue.
A wedding can be whatever you want. It's not "unobtainable" unless you're treating it like a class-based measuring stick.
What is expensive about marriage? I’m trying to think of reasons. Taxes? It can be advantageous to stay single, but I wouldn’t say this is that big. Kids? Another mouth to feed and educate is wildly expensive, but I doubt this is what we’re talking about. Rent/buying a home? Cheaper to share a space I’d think. I think I’m missing something.
This is correct. When I was still in grad school and the better half was working as an engineer I pretty much got the ultimatum that we needed to get married for the tax break. We had been living together for 7 years.
But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3 years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And then I discovered that you can't fix it that way, you still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)
But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him, do take a look at the tax hit.
They changed the bracket differences for single, married filing jointly, and married filing seperately back in 2018. Married filing seperately is basically the same as being single these days.
Maybe there's something I don't understand, but per this table it's slightly worse to be married filing separately than it is to be single at the top brackets: https://www.bankrate.com/taxes/tax-brackets/
