Often, when we look at disincentives for childbearing, we think of them in terms of opportunity costs for the individual. But if children are cumulatively being considered a societal good, we should also weigh the cumulative opportunity costs to the individuals as a societal tradeoff. It seems to me that Ron Hosh's substack (of "luxury belief" fame) generally lives up to its tagline of "general incoherence," but he raised this point/question in this post. The kids have to come from somewhere; what tradeoff(s) should society make?
Teenage pregnancy? Major tradeoff against developing the human capital of the parents and, thusly, the parents' ability to develop the human capital of the children. (And, if you want to follow the HBD line of inquiry, you might hypothesize dysgenic selection effects.)
College students? Lesser tradeoff than above, but same general issue.
20-something professionals? We're taking human capital out of the economy, just after investing in its development, rather than trying to maximize its compound interest.
Hosh also brings up geography and sexual orientation (same-sex couples using IVF is a thing), though I don't think the tradeoffs here are as clear.
Have any of you thought about this? My answer to "Which couples should be having more children" is "All the couples who don't have as many children as they want" which I don't think cleaves cleanly enough across any demographic to give a more clear tradeoff than the subsidies required to support the children not-conceived out of financial concern. But others here are more open to social engineering than I am.
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Notes -
It seems that the average woman does not actually demand marriage that strongly. She enjoys motherhood immensely but does not know this about herself without direct experience; her sex drive is mediocre and she's simply not attracted to most men.
In a historical society where women live with their parents and face immense pressure to find someone suitable and get hitched from 16, that woman married. In today's society, she muddles along, missing something but not sure what. Yes, she'd be happier if her parents arranged a marriage for her with Mr. Good-enough. But they're not going to, and even if they want to do this they don't know how, and even if they did, she wouldn't know this is better in the long run. She could I suppose be wooed during college, but we're busy telling young men not to do this, that it would ruin their lives on both ends, and steadily demonizing the kinds of age gap relationships that could probably route around this. When this woman does partner up it's as a forever girlfriend who becomes immensely frustrated at the lack of marriage and babies but is not, herself, the driving force behind their absence(yes, yes, she could refuse to cohabit and fornicate. But almost definitionally the average woman has rather lackluster talents at denying social pressures).
It comes down to a lot of factors- there's lots of women who, sure, are unhappy over a long enough timeframe without a relationship, but that timeframe is long, they don't have the pangs of loneliness and empty unsatisfaction from the lack thereof enough to motivate them to do the mildly uncomfortable things entailed in putting themselves out there. But the modern west's relationship progression also just takes entirely too damn long; during the fifties baby boom courtships were measured in months on the long end. In today's world, people date for a year and then move in together for several years and then think about getting engaged eventually. This is a pure bad thing, obviously- there are no benefits to cohabitation, literally. But, you know, it's what we have to live with.
Isn't this how they can return, if the pressures and incentives are re-aligned?
Yes. You can harshly stigmatize being a single woman, but it won't do anything if you don't also harshly stigmatize men for leading women into forever girlfriendship, because it is mostly not female choice that causes the late age of marriage in anglosphere countries- they would be perfectly happy marrying much earlier in a relationship.
You want a marriage boom, you stigmatize spinsterhood, yes. But you also need social pressure on men to go ahead and marry the girl. And the sexes' relative vulnerabilities to social pressures being what they are, I suspect that the pressures applied need be unequal.
Could men be motivated to marry via tax policy or free SUV if you fill it with a wife and kids?
Are there still jurisdictions where they prohibit cohabitation?
You could probably motivate cohabiting couples to marry with a house, I suppose.
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Pressuring men to marry is both unnecessary and useless. One antisocial fuckboy can lead on thirty girls indefinitely.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive; you guard what is expensive, not what is cheap.
Once you are willing and able to use physical force, social pressure, and economic privation to coerce women into only having sex inside of marriage, you will have plenty of hardworking beta providers lining up to marry the resulting virgin brides. Or, at least, you will if you also get rid of such nonsense as marital "rape" laws and no-fault divorce that understandably makes men afraid to get married.
(Imagine that the government passed a law that, at any moment, your employer can decide to stop paying you, and if you ever quit or get fired, he is entitled to steal half your assets; that's what marriage 2.0 is. What happens to the labor market in this scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.)
Access to sex was not the main factor motivating men to marry under a traditional patriarchy. Trad societies had widespread prostitution and didn't much care what, uh, disreputable women got up to with men. Your 1890's fuckboy plowed his way through the brothel, or carried on with women that didn't have much of a reputation to safeguard. This goes back quite far; the medieval Catholic Church noted that they couldn't stop men from sleeping with prostitutes until they were married no matter how hard they tried.
Instead men in trad societies were expected, and oftentimes pressured, to marry. If you wanted to court a respectable girl you had to have the intention of marriage. And that intention had to be followed through on. This is the main missing ingredient from 'trad' revivalists today- there's no dating allowed except to marry and it is enforced, usually by the women's parents(although intermediating social institutions also played a part). This is part of why 'the US had two sexual revolutions' sometimes gets trotted out- dating in 1950 wasn't really 'trad' in the sense that it would have been seen as proper when the couples' grandparents were young.
There's lots of Based Patriarchy types on the internet who advocate for restricting women's sexual freedom(and I would argue that that sexual freedom is bad for women, but whatever). There's a far smaller number who argue for reducing the social freedom of young people in general, but the former is not a stable equilibrium without the latter.
As for your point- there isn't a ton of evidence that fear of divorce is what's driving the male reticence to commit, inasmuch as young men just having a natural reticence to commit. IIRC punitive divorce laws actually drive specialization within marriage by writing gender roles into law. I will grant you that making divorce harder to get is probably a net good. But I would ask for actual evidence- not polemics- of divorce fear driving the male reticence to marry in a timely manner.
Certainly there exist societies(eg, in eastern Europe) with short courtships and very high divorce rates simultaneously.
Also Red Tribe America. Marriage in Arkansas is like voting in Illinois - you do it early and often.
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Traditional patriarchy very much did pressure men to marry, and then some. The shotgun in a shotgun wedding was pointed at the groom's back.
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No doubt there is added risk to modern marriage. I think improving incentives is a more achieveable goal than de-risking modern marriage.
I'd happily vote for the pro-marital rape, divorce is only for sexual immortality candidate, but that isn't a message I've heard.
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