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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32335 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Framing this as a men's rights issue rests in the assumption that the mother has sole custody, but nowadays, most child custody is 50/50.* Hence, there is no custodial parent, and child support is paid by the parent with the higher income, at least in California. So, I guess conservatives should address this problem by pushing for more equal pay for women.

PS: See calculator here.

*A trend opposed by conservatives and pushed by liberals back in the day

but nowadays, most child custody is 50/50.*

That... doesn't seem true (caveat: underlying data is an industry study), even for newest divorce cohorts, and even for California specifically.

There are plausible arguments in favor of those results, or to say that you're just speaking for a theoretical ideal standard rather than the actual results, or that they don't 'count' (either because of non-contesting fathers, or because it's 'really' red state faults, although it's somewhat tricky to isolate cause and effect), but I don't know where you're getting this claim.

OTOH, this says that, in CA, "Both parents agree in 51% of cases that one parent should become the custodial parent." So, if fathers are agreeing that the mother should get sole custody, even if that means they will be paying more in child support (which they will, given the formula used in CA), and despite the fact that CA law requires joint custody as the default, where is the injustice in those payments?

It may well be the right policy! But it's a different claim.

And there's at least the potential for injustice. Trivially, even contested court case ones still favor sole-mother over sole-father custody ("5 out of 6" by your link), and maybe that's reflects some correct (if possibly sexist) policy, but it'd also look pretty similar if a lot of fathers weren't getting a fair shake, or where ostensibly 'neutral' standards end up making it unlikely for a father to be able to achieve all the necessary hoops. Even parents agreeing on custody doesn't necessarily avoid problems of coercive 'agreement', especially given the normal bail-and-plea-bargain arguments about the costs of the justice system are, if anything, far stronger here.

Of course there is potential for injustice. It certainly would not surprise me to find that there are unequal outcomes. But note how far we are from OP's original claim.

"5 out of 6" by your link

But if in half those cases (3/6) the mother has custody because the parents agreed thereto, that means that in 2/3 of the cases mothers get custody, rather than in 1.5/3, were contested cases evenly decided. Of course, we don't know for sure what pct of agreed cases give custody to the mother, but it is probably very high. So, again, we seem to be far from OP's original claim.

*Note that the headline in think in that link is: "Monthly Child Support Payments Average $430 per Month in 2010." This says that the average amount paid in 2017 was $6,760 per year, which does tend to undermine OP's claim that men are being impoverished.

What claim do you think the OP's making that this doesn't hit? Because 'it's only financially ruinous for people below some very common income level' doesn't seem hugely incompatible with his statements

((Kulak does miss the statutory maximum for child support/alimony in some states, so there are some limits to what extent family court can garnish wages, but... most states set them extremely high.))

'it's only financially ruinous for people below some very common income level'

Given that that number is a an average. and averages are skewed by large numbers at the high end, there is no evidence that it is financially ruinous for anyone. It might be, but what I said it true: that the data** tends** to undermine his claim. That is a very mild claim, after all.

Sorry for the "argument in depth" nit-picking, but I think we should be cautious about that stat on "agreements". Much more so than regular contracts, family court has a lot of room for coercive behavior that won't show up in a court record. "If we have to go to court, I'll say you hit me." All the "children need their mother" social bullying. The dynamic where the parent who works less handles more of the scheduling for things like playdates and doctors appointments. I know of one example where the wife only filed for divorce after a year long campaign of meticulous planning and coordination so she could drop a Tunguska-tier mindfuck on the guy and get away with everything while he was reeling in the psychological wreckage. That one would count as an "agreement" in the stats.

I suspect the number for "percent who feel like they came to a mutually fair deal" would be lower.

Well, that might be true, but that sounds like a very different claim than the one that OP seemed to be making.

And highwaymen only shoot their victim 1% of the time... the rest of the time they reach and agreement to surrender their valuables.

The threat of the court and violence fundamentally makes all of these agreements coercive... Just because the guy with the gun (the government) is standing in the corner and not saying anything doesn't mean he isn't the most important factor in the outcome

Do they agree because they know they will lose a court battle? Because if so (and I genuinely do not know), then your caveat is fully generalisable and would equally apply to, e.g. people railed by having plea bargains pushed on them.

And again, that was an over-correction from the past, where men could initiate divorce and have sole custody of the children while the mother had no rights. Courts then started giving custody to mothers equally, then preferentially (as the parent who would be doing the child-rearing while the father was considered the bread-winner) and then solely, even if the father wanted to be involved (and a lot of fathers didn't, let's remember: men who left wives and families for a new partner and started a new family with her).

Society has the turning circle of a supertanker, so changes take a long time, are hard to start, and harder to stop once started. That's why all the fast social engineering which is promoted as "what harm can it do?" takes a while to turn out to be "but how could we possibly know?" once the damage becomes apparent. You can run for a long time on the social capital of the old standards, like driving a car on the fumes in the tank, but eventually you need to put more fuel in or else you're stranded.

And again, that was an over-correction from the past, where men could initiate divorce and have sole custody of the children while the mother had no rights. Courts then started giving custody to mothers equally,

??? That is the exact opposite of what was the norm in the past:

The earlier judicial trend preferring mothers in custody disputes following divorce became nearly universally established in case law and was ratified by many state legislatures.

Beginning in the 1970s a major swing in custody law sharply reversed what had been a well-entrenched preference for mothers. Most states adopted laws conferring an equal status on the custodial rights of mother and father with a favorable attitude toward joint custody.

I expect that they refer to deeper past than 1970. Though I lack knowledge here - from what I understand in sufficiently older times "who gets children after divorce" was irrelevant as there was no divorce.

Note that it says, "Beginning in the 1970s a major swing in custody law sharply reversed what had been a well-entrenched preference for mothers," which implies that it had been around since before 1970. And, there was some divorce before then; what did not exist was no-fault divorce.

Yeah but I think farnear is referring to like the 1770s, when women had few to no rights in custody.

So, I guess conservatives should address this problem by pushing for more equal pay for women.

Women have equal pay, ceteris paribus. They should push for women looking for mates with the same SES as them.

Human females exhibit hypergamy to a greater extent than human males do. Thus even if the distribution of wages of men and women were identical, the hypergamy gap would cause men to overrepresented among payers.

Correct me if my math is incorrect, but in a world in which average income for women was the same as average pay for men, would it not be impossible for the average woman to make less money than her partner? I think perhaps your observation strengthens my argument.

Not necessarily, you could just get less marriage/cohabiting overall, with the higher earning women and lower earning men remaining single.

In terms of marriage, this has already happened. While the wage gap between men and women has shrunk since the 1980s, the wage gap between the average husband and wife has remained the same.

Women rarely marry men who earn less money than them. If you reduce the number of higher (relative to women) earning men, then more women won't marry at all.

Your math is wrong. Consider a universe of 6 people.

  • 3 men, A=$20k, B=$50k, C=$70k, for an average income of $46.66k.

  • 3 women, X=$20k, Y=$50k, Z=$70k.

There is an identical distribution of wages (and hence average pay is identical), meeting your criteria.

Female hypergamy means a woman is only willing to marry someone who earns more than her. So C marries Y (gap of $20k), B marries X (gap of $30k), while A and Z remain single. The average married woman earns $25k less than her husband.

Imagine two equal sized groups of men and women. They have identical income distributions. Then, randomly match each of them to one of the other group. Couples where the male makes more are accepted; ones where he doesn't are rejected. Then repeat the process repeatedly.

You end up with most people being matched, but there being an income gap between the members of every couple, along with a group of low income single men and a group of high income single women. You could calculate the expected distribution of the income gaps (bounded by 0 at the bottom) and the expected size of the single groups by statistical characteristics of the original income distribution.

In fact, even if women earned more on average than men, if you repeated that same process, paired men would always have higher incomes than their female partner, by construction. You'd just end up with larger groups of singles.

Are you arguing for a communistic equal income distribution or full replacement of wages with UBI? I am deeply skeptical that you're unaware of the reality of the wage gap, namely that it's overwhelmingly a result of different choice and tradeoffs between men and women.

I am not arguing for or against it. I am merely saying that if in fact men on average pay more in child support than women do, and** if that is a problem** that should be addressed, then pushing for more income equality would be a way of doing so. Whether that would be sound policy, given the other costs and benefits associated with that outcome, is an entirely different question.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change. Once upon a time, for example, almost no women chose to go to medical or law school, perhaps because when my aunt graduated law school as one of two women in her class, she was only offered jobs as a legal secretary. Now, women make up the majority of medical and law students, So, there might well be ways of reducing the income gap other than "communistic* equal income distribution or full replacement of wages with UBI."

*Whatever that means; it is usually used purely as an epithet, rather than as an analytical term.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change.

It's true that women face tradeoffs in the face of constraints. It's also true that men face tradeoffs in the face of constraints.

Most academic, media, and government work ignores the latter set of tradeoffs. But I'd argue that men face stricter constraints. If men looking for partners felt they could get away with working part time with lifestyle businesses as video game streamers, you would see the income gap disappear or reverse.

And, btw, yes, I am aware that the gap is a result of different choices and tradeoffs, but I am also aware that those choices and tradeoffs are the result of constraints, some of which are socially imposed and can change. Once upon a time, for example, almost no women chose to go to medical or law school, perhaps because when my aunt graduated law school as one of two women in her class, she was only offered jobs as a legal secretary. Now, women make up the majority of medical and law students,

Ah, I basically assume that changing that dynamic is vanishingly unlikely. In the most egalitarian nations, it's more extreme. And those lady doctors go on to become pediatricians and marry surgeons who double their salary; I'm guessing there's a similar dynamic for lawyers. The core thing you would need to change is "women prefer men who out-earn them" with a secondary "men don't care much about how much women earn". You'd also have to equalize out how much of a working lifetime men and women take off to raise children. I am skeptical that those things are amenable to social constraints, which makes it a very silly line of speculation.

"communistic* equal income distribution

I meant it as a catch all for economic systems where income/rewards are totally untethered to chosen behaviors like hours worked, risk undertaken, etc.

I imagine you're thinking of closing the gap including women making more money but gaps can closed in either direction. Instead of women making the choices of men, which by and large has made them quite a bit more miserable, men may begin making the choices of women and this might result in the pie shrinking for all. It seems dangerous to me to disincentivize working harder and earning more.

Yes, it might result in a shrinking pie, and that might be a bad thing. But that is why I said, " Whether that would be sound policy, given the other costs and benefits associated with that outcome, is an entirely different question."

How inconvenient. But at least society at large recognizes that men are widely sacrificing their interests for society and their sacrifice is appreciated. It would truly be a tragic mistake to expect men to sacrifice for society while also holding them in contempt.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. My entire point is that I am not advocating a particular policy. When I said, "that might result in a shrinking pie, and that might be a bad thing," I merely meant that that might well be a good reason to maintain the status quo. Or, perhaps not.

It would truly be a tragic mistake to expect men to sacrifice for society while also holding them in contempt.

And yet, it seems to work.

Correct me if my math is incorrect, but in a world in which average income for women was the same as average pay for men, would it not be impossible for the average woman to make less money than her partner?

Only if you assume it's impossible for people to be single.

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