Traditionalists and other contrarians have been right to argue that the revolution would lead to rising trouble between the sexes and a decline in respect for women — just as James Q. Wilson remains right that family, and lack of family, have replaced money itself as the nation’s most accurate measures of real wealth and poverty.
She attempts to tie nearly every contemporary social problem to the sexual revolution and family breakdown.
What on earth does she mean by suggesting there’s been a “decline in respect for women”? Compared to what?
Also, efforts to protect the family through brutal-to-men family laws are an important reason why some men I know, having seen what happened to the generation or two ahead of them, never seriously considered having a family at all. In trying to prevent family breakdown, you need to be careful what you wish for; a family that doesn’t exist can’t break down.
I was on the wrong financial side of a divorce (no kids, luckily). It’s an awful contract for high earners – any CFO would be fired for signing it. And yes, this has absolutely lessened my desire to have a family.
From various reader comments that follow newspaper coverage of high flyer divorces, it appears that the redistributory divorce laws offend most people’s sense of fairness and justice. It shows how docile most people are in that there is not more protest and retaliation from the victims.
Also it suggests that democracy isn’t all it is made up to be in that the legal systems around the world aren’t giving people what they want.
This could be to attempt to solve the problem by trying as much as possible to put the parties in the state they would be in had the marriage not taken place. This seems to be what most people would consider to be fairer.
Sorry to hear that. You should still consider having a family. Even if we guess 50-50 odds of divorce/regret versus happy family, the payoff of happily parenting is crazy huge. In VC terms, it’s like a 10x payoff.
Seconded. Just sending my only off to college. my only regret is not having more.
On that note, heed the fertility tables. IVF won’t save you…
Any VC would tell you that you don’t bet 75% of the fund on anything, no matter what you think the payoff might be.
Thank you for sharing that. It seemed overly pessimistic and focused on deriving all societal ills on the collapse of the family. Though it’s excessive in that regard, the article makes good points.
For me the chilling part was this:
“In effect, the state has become the angel investor of family dysfunction.”
It would be great if we could find all the old discussion threads on this topic.
The one that came to my mind offhand was this, from 20 March 2015:
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/megan-mcardle-on-bifurcated-family-patterns/
Critics of Wall Street, auto industry and other bailouts condemn “privatizing gains and socializing losses” Yet progressive libertinism desires the same with social matters: don’t you dare tell me what I can do with my body – or refuse to bear the costs of the results.
There is kind of a joke in conservative circles of picking the date “Where did it all go wrong?” in which one keeps going back. It was the 60’s! No, it was the New Deal! Nah, see, in the Great Schism of 1054…
But with beliefs about sexuality norms, there’s some truth to it.
Eberstadt is on the right track, but she goes off base in a few places, which most religious and conservative Americans do. She’s right of course that porn sells lies about sexual human nature and relations, but, alas, there has been a long history of telling such lies, as many socieites like to avoid too much explicit discussion of some ugly truths on the subject.
But (ignoring the impact of the troubadours in the middle ages for the time being) there was another set of innovative notions which mostly took off in the wake of the enlightenment and industrial revolution and which still get confused for ‘patriarchy’ or ‘traditionalism’ from the perspective of the present day, but were little different in terms of accuracy, though those lies were perhaps somewhat more ‘noble’ and less immediately destructive in that context.
Eberstadt kind of hinted at it, so maybe she gets it, but it looks like she missed the “strategic electorate shaping” aspect of the issue. When women get married, on average we can observe a kind of sudden discontinuity in their political preferences and voting behavior, in the conserative direction, naturally. So encouraging women to get married and do it early is politically beneficial for conservatives, and keeping them single, or especially as single mothers, “Life of Julia”-style, is beneficial for progressives.
If the progressive state is the angel investor of family dysfunction, then this is how it earns its dividends. Kickbacks from clients – whether in the form of votes or via contributions derived from union dues – are its capital gains.
This post and the last one illustrate why economics can’t accomplish anything other than provide for interesting discussions based on what we see at the time. It can’t be predictive in a useful way over the longer term.
This post “identified the root of America’s fracturing in the dissolution of the family.”
But the last post shows how such trends can produce wildly unexpected results. It noted that Europe evolved a more institutional religion than the rest of the world. As a defensive gesture, that institution worked to weaken rigid family bonds so that resources would be inherited by the church instead of families. They posit that this weakening led to a unique expansion of individual independence and analytical thinking. This was completely unintended, yet changed the arc of human history.
Likewise, this post can’t see around the corner. They may make accurate assessments of family decline and its immediate consequences. But they can’t see how that might change us in the longer term. It might very well release behaviors we don’t fully understand yet.
Certainly that is the case.
I’m not optimistic, however. I suspect that we are “selecting” for traits we don’t want–the traits that you would not want from the people living next door or those dating your daughter or your sister.
Peter Frost no longer blogs at Unz and apparently is still at it at Evo and Proud. I can never tell if he’s on to something, as I am not qualified to evaluate his research.
If, as Cochrane and Harpending say, “every society selects for something,” we may be selecting for “fast life history.”
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/06/yes-decline-is-genetic.html
Research of this type is useless, because there is nowhere to go with the answers. These effects are the result of prosperity and more human freedom, resources and knowledge. We know that when that happens, society must adjust, and some negative effects will occur. Human beings don’t always handle newly won freedoms well.
However, reconstructing the constraints of the past through political means isn’t going to work, and will produce ugly side effects. More freedom usually works out for the best in the long run.
Readers comments following press coverage of high flyer divorce cases suggest that voters in democracies are not getting what they want from this legislation. Redistributory settlements are considered “gold digging”, especially if made against popular celebrities. They offend people’s sense of fairness and justice, and it is surprising that there is not more instances of extreme retaliation from victims.
Putting the parties as much as possible in the state they would have been had the marriage not taken place is sometimes seen as a fairer solution to the problem.
Families get a gain from specialization between partners, and government taxes that gain heavily. We are no longer allowed to have a family home hidden from government agents with taxing power.
It speaks to the level of proportion voting we have. Generally, a population does not vote to tax the family so heavily, mainly to avoid the suicidal effects.
Perhaps related, on Monday Russ Roberts had Patrick Deneen on Econtalk to discuss his book “Why Liberalism Failed.” The discussion addressed the family breakdown phenomenom which Deneen attributes to our “liberation” from traditional norms formerly nurtured by church and family. Deneen and Eberstadt seem to agree on a lot. It would appear we have come full circle from the 19th century when popular social Darwinists like Max Nordau in his 1883 book The Conventional Lies of our Civilization argued for scientific social change because “our whole system of life is based upon false priniciples which we inherited from former ages” traditional life was in conflct with human’s evolutionary nature. Now we have perhaps the seed of a consensus that in our modern scientific society “There is something unnatural and inhuman about the way many human beings now pass their days.” Haven’t read Deneen but apparently his solution is along the lines of the Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, basically drop out and do good. In any event, waiting for the academy or politicians to lead you to personal fulfillment was never a good idea. Dylan maybe had it right with “you got to serve somebody.”
I have this theory that the conservatives are right about this, that the aggregate harm done by a lot of these changes is quite large. However, I think they discount that in many specific cases, the worst-case harm on an individual level is reduced.
For example, life for an unwed mother used to be really, really harsh. We’ve made it a lot less harsh, but in exchange we got a lot more unwed mothers. Same thing with divorce. There are some cases (physical violence, etc) where liberalizing divorce greatly reduced harm for individuals. But on the whole we got more divorces.
Society seems to make this choice often. To reduce a sharp, large harm levied on a few people in exchange for increasing harm to a lesser degree (per individual) on many people. We seem to make this choice even if the aggregate harm in the second case is greater.
To put it another way, given a choice between a thief who steals $100,000 from one person, or a thief who steals $1 from a million people, society will always choose the second thief. And I am not sure that is the wrong choice. I think there’s an argument that the sexual revolution changes discussed are the equivalent of the second thief.
Life back then was bad for everyone, including lousy fathers. But two, maybe three partners seems to be such an obvious choice for the household division of labor. Given the huge efficiency gains we have a hard time targeting the singles for services. They get bottlenecked in a world made for pairs and trios, as they should. The ‘as they should’ is the debate, family is very efficient, it is a burden on the whole when the few refuse it.
There is difference between liberalized divorce laws an encouraging divorce. It seems to me that we can’t legalize something without societally encouraging it.
Call it the “stunning and brave” rule. Any deviance that is legalized on pragmatic or circumstantial grounds then has to become a “stunning and brave” act on the part of the deviant, regardless of reasons. So someone that Eat, Pray, Love blows up their family out of ennui just has to get social validation in the same way someone that divorced a wife beater does.
Anyway, tradcon views on this tend to fall pretty flat. They aren’t going to shame women that behave badly. They aren’t going to pull the plug on bastardy support from the government. They aren’t going to cut back on immigration or anything else that would raise wages for working men. They aren’t going to stop calling sluts that get knocked up anything but “brave” for keeping their bastard children. The only thing in their playbook is shaming working men, but with little understanding of who deserves that or what effect it will have.
The slippery slope is real. If you can’t defend the first mile of your territory, you probably can’t defend any of it, and so it’s only a matter of time. The problem is that social phenomena related to norms and ideology tend to run to extremes in any situation that lacks a clear limiting principle or countervailing force based on almost universally-shared perceptions of a valid, firm, but seeming ‘irrationally’ arbitrary rule. These are situations for which typical marginal argumentation fails, because ‘differential’ analysis of costs and benefits or the wisdom of strictness or leniency is misleading – one has to integrate all the way to the next stopping point – the end of what is logically implied by the adoption of a new decision principle – and make the case for that, inherently radical outcome.
Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility is a particular instance illustrating the invalidity and untrustworthiness of these marginal arguments.
@Asdf/Handle
The law isn’t for emotional validation or moral boundaries. It is there to manage conflicts in our rights and freedoms. Sorry if sometimes you note individual reactions that you find offensive.
The only slippery slope here is when we try to use law to force moral constraints, even when they don’t conflict with the immediate rights of others. Freedom doesn’t always work out, but the law isn’t there to engineer our behavior.
But is the divorce rate down the last 30 – 40 years? The number of women that doing Eat, Pray, Love or men having affairs with secretaries has diminished the last generation. (And shouldn’t we put both into divorces here?) Divorced families have declined for decades (since 1979/1982) and even single motherhood has declined since 2008. (Teenage pregnancy has dropped 30 – 40% since 2008.) And the divorce rates of Northern California counties are some of the lowest in the nation. Again, I believe the main reason for lower divorce rates is later marriage which is not in the social conservative narraibe but I am open to other ideas.
That is what I find very limiting of the social conservative narratives is they do not look at any positive trends either and the Pill & Divorce laws changed over 50 years ago.
My preferred metric is the “fully nuclearized childrearing” proportion. That is, how many 18 year olds were raised since birth by their married biological parents.
Isolate whatever subpopulation you want, by race and class or whatever, and graph that chart over the last 70 years. That’s a picture of what social conservatives mean by “collapse”.
How does she know this? She gives us *zero* evidence for this. Shes making the exact same argument as they used to with the “all our societal ills stem from the 1964 prayer in public schools ruling.”
It tends to be a Rube Goldberg argument–“No birth control pill leads logically and obviously to MeToo.”
The forces of causation are probably more indirect–We can probably tease some of them out using an analysis of competitive dynamics and accounting identities.
“No sexual harassment scandals on the scale seen today” does not mean that things we would now call sexual harassment were not happening, indeed on a much larger scale.
Does she think Victorian prudishness was a random social development?
Logically inconsistent: the pill reduces pregnancies, single parent families are the root of all evil.
A woman using the pill does NOT become a single mother.
If you want to lay blame on the demise of the nuclear family, fine. But the sexual revolution and family planning are separate developments from society accepting out-of-wedlock births.
I have both an adult daughter and an adult son. They are tinder fans and living the revolution. I’m proud of them and they know how to prevent unexpected children. (Ironically they were both unexpected because of a religious lack of access to birth control!) Both expect to marry and form nuclear families when they’ve matured more. Their experience prepares them for better choices.
The problem is a lack of discipline, not the pill.
Despite he availability of the pill, we still get single mothers. Promiscuity seems to be the cause of bastardy, and birth control has failed to change that.
It is interesting that your two kids are the result of accidents. Maybe if you had birth control you would be childless. Promiscuity is correlate with low total fertility and higher divorce.
Peoples expectations of lifetime TFR and their realized TFR diverge, and that divergence appears largest for liberals and the promiscuous. They say they will form families, but never seem to do what it takes.
The data suggest that no strings sex makes it harder to form and keep the successful bonds of marriage in order to bear and raise children. The only group averaging 2.1 plus children is stable two parent households through 18 years of age are non promiscuous conservative religious people.
High SES libertines do often manage to birth control their way out of bastardy, but statistically speaking they never actually form the families they say they plan to after they “settle down.”
The Pill allowed women to claim the right to “equal promiscuity”.
More sex because of the Pill, so less pregnancy per encounter, but a far greater number of pregnancies outside of marriage. Especially among the majority non-college bound young, and most especially among blacks.
Part of the solution is actually happening, young folk today are having lots less sex in many cultures, and far far fewer kids. Especially the non-religious?
Like most disrupted markets, there are many trends, often in different directions.
College educated women at colleges where they’re a majority mean the cute Alpha males get lots of choice, and play around a lot, if they like. Many, probably most (tho this might be changing) of the women don’t graduate as virgins; and their future husbands know this. A good number of career women, and an increasing percentage, are finding success in careers, but not in making a family — not in finding an unmarried man who makes as much or more than they do, is attractive and hetero, and is more interested in young 30-somethings, rather than much younger recent grads.
Demographics will be selecting away from women wanting to be wage-slaves more than wanting to be beloved mothers. Often it takes young women a few years to find out how many rats there really are in the rat racing they’re racing in.
Eberstadt is very correct that the breakdown in the family is a big influence on most social problems — and will prove to be correct that no other unit will be as positive. But for the secularists, this won’t be changing their behavior too much.
@RohanV is very correct about society tilting far away from the large costs to a few, like 12 boys & coach trapped in cave, and willing to have a much higher total social cost spread lightly over “everybody”.
Poverty reduction programs that make poverty more comfortable will increase, not decrease, poverty. Programs that make it much easier to help yourself out of poverty are much harder to find, but they are the ones with a chance of reducing poverty.
That’s why I’m now advocating Guaranteed Jobs (NOT universal free money). It will be tough to implement, but will actually help poor folk willing to work to help themselves get out of poverty.
On coming changes, there is a current disconnect in the religious anti-same sex folk, where they are strong against same-sex marriage, but in practice much, much weaker against those who are married and who cheat, including Trump, Clinton, JFK, and so many other famous men, tho also some women. Sex outside of marriage is, almost by definition, not true love.
@Effem, so sorry you tried getting married, and got divorced, and lost lots of cash. When I got divorced, my ex- and I, also no kids, split stuff nicely, but we actually were close to being equally independent. My father and mother had very messy custody fighting divorce in the 60s.
Happily, my current wife of 24 years and I are planning the wedding of our 22 year old now.
Family is great, especially if you’re not the owner of a company (who you consider “your baby”). Naturally, the real owners are looking for rat racers willing to put in 60-70+ hour weeks on their “career”, but is it really worth the lost family time? It varies, I know, but my much much much lower income plus much better family life makes me think, often, that I chose wisely.
“It seems safe to bet that many modern men, especially those without religious attachments, believe similarly in the untruths that have been spreading across the human race for half a century now — beginning with the untruth that both sexes take the same view of supposedly consequence-free recreational sex.”
A woman in her 20s isn’t the same as a woman in her 30s. Actually she is, but try telling her that. In her 20s, she thinks she’s competing with other women in their 20s. But in fact she’s competing with her 30-something self. She’s making life very difficult for herself ten years from now.
So it isn’t true that there’s the view that men have and the view that women have. The difficulty is more complicated than that. There’s an extra factor to take into account, being the different views of a woman in her 20s and the same woman in her 30s.
Women in their 20s could afford to be a lot more selective than they are, and women in their 30s are overly selective. Women in their 30s want more than they can feasibly expect, and women in their 20s put up with a lot more than they need to. Women in their 20s are bizarrely desperate and undemanding and easily impressed, and it’s bizarre because they don’t have to be. They could be more discriminating. Ten years later, these same women suddenly have higher expectations, and men aren’t interested. And somehow this comes as a shock.
How are both cohorts of women going to form a coalition when their views are so different? Women in their 20s apparently want unfulfilling sex with lousy men, and women in their 30s are paying the consequences of that.
Conservatives make good points but it has way to much Andy Griffin Syndrome here and assumes the 1950s lifestyle was some long term reality as opposed to a Historical outlier due to circumstances of a war that killed over 60M+ people in the developed world. Also any reading of life before 1970 sees all kinds of sexual harrassment as almost acceptable back in the day so the arguments about MeToo are empty.
1) Economic malaise and class struggles were even larger before WW2 than today.
2) One aspect conservative miss on modern marriage is that most successful marriages and people wait until 28 – 30 to marry. (The divorce is below 40% much lower than nearly 50% in 1979.) So the most successful people use the Pill and wait until 30 to be married and have kids. This is a significant difference of today than 1960 and I don’t think this is what social conservatives truly want. (Basically people are learning to have their flings in early twenties and then settle on a partner instead getting married with their flings.)
3) The more I review the data the more I agree with Bryan Caplan is right that marriage and work success are sort of circular function here and lots of self-selection bias. (This was not as true in the 1970s when divorce was skyrocketing.)
4) The Sexual Revolution is 50+ years old and society has not collapsed. And there was loads of poverty back in the day.
Do people have flings and settle down in their late 20s? This seems to be an idealized but unrealized model. Lower promiscuity and earlier marriage work (not 28 years old, but certainly starting in the mid 20s). Higher promiscuity and later marriage don’t. People say they will settle down, but the wild oats lifestyle either lasts to long or damages people in a way that makes pair bonding difficult to form and maintain. As such libertines may not get divorced, but they get married and have kids at a lower rate then they expect. Ultimately, at too low a rate to maintain society.
I am not saying this is ideal but the girlfriends I had before 25 probably would have not ended up as a long term successful marriage and most studies show the lowest divorce rates occur when the couple are 27 – 30. So most middle class people live several years in their non-exaggerated ‘Friends’ lifestyle the last couple generations. (Again that is the lowest rates some there are plenty of successful young marriages.) Also this trend is true with all developed nations and the Far East Asian Tigers the marriage age is 30 – 32.
1) Growing up in the 1970s it was the college educated parents that were getting the most divorces and I remember several latch key friends. Now the opposite has happened in which it is non-college adults are getting more divorces and single parenthood. And I believe college adults waiting for marriage longer (as well Caplan Self-Selection) is one reason for this.
2) I suspect that as people turn 27 – 30 they are in more settled careers so it is easier to settle on a successful marriage. (As opposed to 23 where they are struggling with a career.) I am also guessing by 27+ people are more reasonable in the prospects in life and marriage. So there are aspects of later marriage that improves the chances of success.
3) The point here is the most successful people tend to not have too many partners (again they live a non-exaggerated version of Friends) but they are not marrying as virgins either. But the big difference of today versus 1960 social conservative nirvana is many people got married at 22 when they were too young and dating/having sex with somebody they were very attracted to but made poor marriage partners. Hence the divorce rate hit its highpoint in the late 1970s. (When most negative social measurements were at their highpoint.)
Statistics show that each additional sexual partner reduces TFR and increases divorce. With a big drop when you have more then one partner and smaller cumulative drops thereafter.
The upper class divorces less in part because it marries less and is less fertile. That isn’t really a desirable outcome.
Mating patterns in pre modern England emphasized virgins or near virgins marrying each other when the girl was in her mid 20s and the guy his late 20s. That seems to be the ideal framework today as well.
The pill reduced unwanted pregnancy but decreased eugenic fertility. Smart people not having kids is as damaging to society in the ping run as unwed teenage mothers.