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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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The answer is pretty simple- marriage. Some of this can be fixed(removing marriage penalties in welfare laws), and some of it requires cultural changes which have to be pushed by institutions(look down your noses at cohabitation again- seriously cohabitation is very very bad).

Indeed. One grave consequence of (mainly) the Sexual Revolution is that the women who'd objectively need marriage the most (lower-class and underclass women with high time preference) in their lives are exactly those that are least likely to marry. This has enormous social costs.

I think it should also include education and the media promoting those kinds of things. Tell people that marriage is cool and that motherhood is beautiful and being a dad is good.

Agreed. I think that doing that at scale is necessarily tied up with acknowleging and respecting gender roles so that you can equip people to fill them. Doing away with no-fault divorce would also help in the long run.

I think that modern Fishtown residents have rational concerns about the risks and benefits of marriage in their social environment. There are a lot of pieces to that. Top down changes could help, if that were an option, but there need to be on the ground changes too. I don't know how practical any of that is, absent another Great Awakening.

Doing away with no-fault divorce would also help in the long run

When France legalised no-fault divorce, male life expectancy went up by a year.