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I think the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence on:
My prediction (which is heavily biased due to my value system): Couples that get married and stay married will become something like a new aristocracy. Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife. Children with stable two parent households will not only outcompete their peers, but will have a compounding advantage by their age of majority.
Unwed single mothers, especially those who give birth before about 25, will become wards of the state to an even more extreme degree. Sadly, I think that state provided support will become so egregious that a single mother looking to get married would be committing economic suicide outside of finding a literal prince charming who already has the financial resources to subsume paying for everything.
Another way of summing this up; Some part of society will self-select to sexual and mating habits that look like the 1950s, while another, probably larger part will accelerate to poly-orgy levels of libertinism. My assumption is that the former will control an incredibly disproportionate level of wealth and political control. This is all very Matrix-y; The lowerclass in 2045 in America will be face tattooed Zi/Zirs wired into machines 24/7 with a host of pharmacological cocktails coursing through their veins. Sexual gratification options will be nonstop both in advertisement and usage. The upperclass will simply be everyone who can say "No" for a while and unplug.
I think they call this "a financial path to home ownership" these days.
Hard evidence has already been provided.
For 1, we already know that being in a single-parent household is detrimental to average outcomes. Now, to what degree this is because the children are obviously going to possess the genes of someone who becomes a single mother (or single father) is another story- apples don't necessarily fall far from trees, and not being able to stick with a marriage is an indictment either of one's time preference or one's general ability to select a partner long-term over short-term concerns. Relative lack of resources for childhood development is another thing that can cause this, since single-family homes are required for self-development not limited to what doesn't make a lot of noise or take up that much space to practice (you aren't maintaining a vehicle, practicing an instrument, etc. in a two-bedroom apartment, so what you can get up to -> the ways these types of children develop their minds are more limited) and it's not 1980 where you could afford one of those on a single income.
For 2... well, there's a massive two-movies-one-screen effect that's been going on for the last 60 years about sexual ethics. The short version is that the people who don't need sexual ethics for the sake of sexual ethics (and their "sexual ethics" comes more from practical constraints than anything handed down from on high) came to power and re-made marriage laws in their own image. These are people who choose a life partner based on
an utterly childish conception of lovean intent and ability to align their wills to each other rather than just because he's rich/she's hot. And it's very difficult to determine who's saying what, and who's pushing which politics, and why- I don't think there's been a concerted effort to obfuscate this information (though certain traditionalist and progressive types try their best, especially if there's a religion/woke involved), but the results aren't meaningfully distinct from that.Problem is, they shouldn't ever have insisted on that being marriage (even though the room temperature of the '60s and '70s made that kind of unavoidable), and considered that (before deciding to explode everything) this a-sexual mode of love might be technically ideal but is not, in fact, normal. And they decided to ban certain kinds of behaviors based on the fact that men and women operating in this mode are equal- so obviously, she should get half of the assets in the no-fault divorce, because people who don't/can't get along outside of their normal gender roles don't get married. Obviously. [Just ignore that 50% total divorce rate; it's not like that combined with the sex the resources/custody in the divorce tend to more often be awarded to trivially repudiate that thesis.]
Therefore, men and women who don't actually like each other but want to get married for other reasons probably need to be staring down the barrel of society's shotgun a little more than they already do for better societal outcomes (though at the same time, be provided carrots- men and women need to be marrying much earlier than they already do for family formation reasons and fixing that is both inextricably linked to this problem and is the harder of the two). Men and women who don't need marriage, by contrast, shouldn't get married, nor should the State treat them as if they were (as they do in some countries).
Men and women aren't equal except for the ones that are. A default plus an opt out for the people sufficiently informed/capable is what can work- but that requires a populace disciplined enough (or distracted enough) to keep that balance.
I think I agree with you? I find your prose to be a little serpentine and hard to follow at times.
Could I request you try rephrasing this so that I can better understand. Again, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page.
Sure.
I think the "new" post-Sexual Revolution sexual ethics were made by people who didn't, or couldn't, recognize that most relationships are at least a little dysfunctional (we were very rich at the time, which can cover up a great deal of bad in a relationship- no fights about cooking if you can just afford takeout, after all- and sex was the least risky it's ever been in history due to reliable hormonal birth control and no incurable STD of consequence). When the pro-SR people are talking about "liberation" [but only pre-1980; post-1980 the actors change as the below takes effect], this is what they're talking about.
But if you give that group power, they enshrine their autistic/childish/unrealistic views of how sex and relationships (and by extension, men and women) operate into law. And the problem with that is the same one as it was with legal equality- it just tilts the playing field in favor of the sex whose advantages were most illegible to the system (and so abuse of those advantages stopped being controllable, creating the problems we have now).
The trick, then, is in implementing that inequality/equity- making sure the people who do need those rules obey them (and are protected by them in return), and making sure the people who don't need those rules do not have to (but are not).
Thank you!
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