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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.

The notion that we ought to support marriages/families as the fundamental social unit of society in favor over liberal fairness didn't really occur to me when I read this top post, but after reading this post and georgioz's below, I wonder if it'd be quite possible to hit both targets just by offering a spousal stipend. Instead of spending money filling a role with a compromise candidate who got bonus points due to nepotism, give the money to the spouse to just do whatever with. This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors.

Of course, then the university still needs to find and pay someone (presumably more qualified) to fill the role the spouse would have filled. So the stipend could be less than what the salary would have been; in exchange, the spouse has no work obligations to the university, and so is free to get a part-time job if they need to make up for the difference compared to what a salary would've given them, while still giving them more time to spend on marriage/family-related endeavors. In terms of supporting marriage and family, having one spouse with substantial time not committed to full-time work so they can pursue this stuff seems quite a lot better than just having the couple working at the same place.

This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors

Do most PhD holding women married to professors want to be homemakers? While there’s surely professors with homemaker wives, it seems like part of the homemaker bargain is ‘not getting a PhD’, and that women with preexisting PhD’s are mostly not women who want to become homemakers.

I'd guess the vast majority of PhD holding women and men wouldn't want to be homemakers. But this kind of norm would nudge the marginal couple into having one of them being homemakers. This seems like it'd be beneficial if our goal is to support marriages and families, since shifting a couple from both full-time working to one full-time working and one homemaking helps that.

There's no way to tell, but I'd also wager that this is a stronger effect than the benefits to marriages and families that come from universities giving spouses nepotism jobs, because the effect on a couple's competence in raising kids seems far more impacted by whether one of the parents is devoting time to it than by whether both parents are working jobs at the same place that matches their passion and competence and whatever. There would be negative impacts to parents who are demoralized due to their personal disappointment in their own careers, as well as those who go the long-distance-marriage route with both partners pursuing academic jobs that match their competence in different places, but I'm skeptical that these would happen often enough and with enough severity to be greater than the marriage and family-supporting effect of nudging some marginal spouses to homemaking. There's certainly the possibility that these marginal spouses are so few that these downsides do outweigh them, of course.

Again, I don't see any way of knowing or finding out. At the least, we could also hit something closer to liberal fairness while doing this.

The kind of person involved here would not be satisfied with being "free to pursue homemaking".

Most of them, almost definitely. But on the margins, this could nudge people in this situation who are just on the border into pursuing homemaking instead of taking on a nepotism reward job. And if the idea is that we want to support marriages and families as much as we do liberal fairness, this kind of nudge seems like it would be helpful.

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