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 -
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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