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Well, I guess it is a slow day.
I’m in favor of balanced parental leave and related benefits. But I also group them roughly in the category of subsidies, and I thought those didn’t have much effect on fertility.
You might see some effect from rolling back no-fault divorce. I argued before that “really strongly socially enforced monogamy” was fundamentally illiberal, and I’ll stick with that, but it does oppress both sexes equally.
For an even more drastic shift, bring back heavy industry. Women are just as good as men at the service economy. They aren’t so good at hammering steel. Unfortunately, automation and outsourcing makes this an implausible intervention, but if the American economy looked more like 1950, so would the households.
I actually think this is one of those "can't put the genie back in the bottle" situations. If we went back to requiring cause for divorce today I suspect what would not happen is a return to traditional marriage. What would happen instead is marriage rates would crater. My impression is understanding of the downsides of this arrangement are well known and lots of people, women especially, would not be interested in risking it.
Women are not the people you need to convince to get married - men are.
But that said, I don't think "requiring cause for divorce" is really what the trad people want - that's one component of it, but it still wouldn't fix the problems with marriage as it exists now. I think you can make a compelling case for bringing traditional marriage back, but just taking bits from it and the modern equivalent piecemeal seems to me like it could create some horrific outcomes.
That is certainly the stereotype but I'm not sure how true it is. According to Pew (at least back in 2020) fewer single women than single men (in every age group) were looking for a relationship of any kind, though a larger fraction of single women were looking for a committed relationship than single men. More recent data shows an even further decline among singles looking for relationships, though mostly among single men.
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Is that true? The research is that men benefit more from marriage and are much, much more likely to remarry if a marriage ends (in death or divorce). I can't find polls for first marriages/singles but I'd be curious how they relate.
How do men benefit more from marriage and what research are you referring to?
Keeping in mind that men are uniquely screwed over by divorce/family courts and that ~80% of divorces are intiated by women (of the top of my head).
Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)
Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.
I agree with you on this point
I straight up don't believe this unless you have a source.
Alimony and asset splits can be and often are brutal to the husband even if no kids are involved. Kids just make it worse.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.
Sorry, but it's one study cherry-picked by the Guardian that just so happens to fit their political bias and serves as good clickbait fodder.
The article even implicitly admits if flirs in the face of most research.
I'm sure it could. Almost sounds like there's benefits to being married.
Also I would add that 'happiness' is a fleeting and imprecise measure in my opinion. I think modern society puts far too much emphasis on hedonia rather than eudaimonia.
This doesn't fill me with confidence.
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I don't think that either of those claims really defeat the argument being made - but I didn't provide any evidence myself so good enough. I think that men being more likely to remarry reflects the difference in "relationship market value" between the two. Men who are high quality enough to have already married and then lost a wife to disease or accident are much more valuable than women who already have children and other obligations, who are most likely going to have a harder time finding a partner.
That marriage is good in the longer term for men is a more difficult question, and one that I don't think you can really quantify statistically - but even if you did, saying that it would be optimal for men to marry doesn't actually make them more likely to marry. You could apply the same logic to drug addicts - being a heroin addict is extremely bad for your quality of life, and the optimal decision is to stop being a heroin addict immediately... but we don't actually see that happening and heroin addicts still exist.
I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.
In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.
I really don't think it is possible to get a statistical answer for this - there's also the hypothesis that women get married to secure resources, and a divorced woman still has access to her partner's resources and hence does not actually need to remarry (while the man, who is no longer getting any action, does need to get into a new relationship to meet his needs). There are a lot of confounding factors, although if there is real and rigorous data on this I'd love to see it.
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Trads don’t like social engineering anyways, and they mostly just have a revealed preference for favoring people who do things the right way(according to them).
Are you sure? Traditional social structures are a form of social engineering and I'm pretty sure the trads are very big on those.
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That’s a fair point.
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