It is a conservative’s nature to believe that society has gone off the rails. I believe that we have gone off the rails by having lost sight of the importance of children and grandchildren. I predict that many people today between the ages of 25 and 40 will find themselves becoming lonely and depressed by age 60 as they see the past as having little meaning and the future as having little purpose.
Note that being an aunt or an uncle can have some of the same satisfaction as being a grandparent. But with fewer siblings these days, becoming an aunt or uncle will be rare.
I believe that grandparents are the happiest people. This is based on introspection and observation. Show me a grandparent who does not love their grandchild.
Although I know happy grandparents who are divorced, grandparenting is more satisfying if you managed to stay married. At worst, a divorce may alienate you from your children. At best, it pretty much forces your children to divide up their visits, so that you get half the time with your grandchildren that you would if you had stayed married.
Nobody in their twenties makes decisions based on a desire to end up as grandparents. That is too far to look ahead. Instead, young people respond to immediate cultural influences.
Consider a repressive culture vs. a liberated culture, or R vs. L.
In an R culture, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is frowned upon and difficult to obtain; abortion and birth control are frowned upon and difficult to obtain; and divorces are frowned upon and difficult to obtain. In an L culture, none of these apply.
We are in an L culture, and even if we wanted an R culture there is no squeezing that toothpaste back into the tube. But in an R culture more people are likely to become grandparents.
As an aside, perhaps an L culture is somewhat self-limiting. Imagine that there is a polygenic score that measures likely deviation from straight heterosexual preferences. A score close to 0 means you are very straight. A score close to 10 means you are very non-straight. In an R culture, people with high scores are pressured to conform, so they try to get by in traditional marriages and have children. In an L culture, only people with low scores are likely to have traditional marriages and children. It seems to me that this would lead to a gene pool that tends to reduce the proportion of children who are born with a propensity to deviate from straight heterosexuality.
As another aside, perhaps some other people also want to take themselves out the gene pool.
The official Black Lives Matter organization, which has received vast sums in corporate funding, has listed the abolition of the family among its demands. Left-wing publications like the slickly produced anarchist Commune magazine have explicitly advocated for it. Last year Verso Books, the influential leftist publishing house, released Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, which made the case for family abolition amid glowing reviews in Vice, the Nation, the Outline, and elsewhere. The Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation-funded publication Open Democracy recently published an opinion piece by Lewis headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family,” while the Nation ran with “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”
I believe that grandparents are the most socially forward-looking people. They want the best for their grandchildren. For the most part, I think that this means that grandparents will vote wisely. But when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, I suspect that most grandparents think, “Those entitlements mean that I won’t be a burden on my grandchildren, so it’s good for them,” even though in the aggregate this is not the case.
People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote? Raising children means being in the same household with them. So perhaps single mothers should vote, but absent fathers should not?
“It seems to me that this would lead to a gene pool that tends to reduce the proportion of children who are born with a propensity to deviate from straight heterosexuality.”
Come visit some red families in the upper middle class parts of North Texas. At least 3 kids + a Cadillac Escalade to haul them around.
If the bluish families continue to reproduce at such low rates, then I’m predicting stable red children among a sea of out-of-wedlock children from the lower classes. Solve for the equilibrium.
It seems that at any number of years of schooling the rich have more children.
Education seems to get in the way of having children and children get in the way of schooling.
https://un-thought.blogspot.com/2018/10/more-money-more-children.html
http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/05/education-impacts-fertility-or-is-it-the-other-way-around/
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/the-rich-have-more-kids.htmlhttp://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/kids_are_normal.html
https://medium.com/migration-issues/the-great-baby-bust-of-2017-2f63907402fc
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/ru-nso063011.php
https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-us-are-the-ones-having-the-most-kids/
Arnold, you are very wrong in your first paragraph. You don’t have to wait. It’s already happening to many that are 60+. The funny thing is how so many try to seek comfort in having a pet and they treat them as if they were their children. I hope whey you walk in a park you don’t find some old people talking to their dogs as if there were their sons or grandsons (you can laugh at how they distinguish what they can say to a son and a grandson). Unfortunately, I live in front of a nice square in a neighborhood with too many old people. I may move out because I find that too grotesque (because of Chile’s system of Covid-19 restrictions, during the weekend dog-owners have to ask for a legal permission to take them to the square and you can imagine how “coordinated” the walks are).
Please don’t forget to remind them to have their dogs spayed or neutered. It’s a moral imperative and everyone agrees that it is humane and ethical to cutoff vital hormones to all of our pets at an early age.
As a childless person, I believe there should be representation for those of us who believe the system is not worth preserving, that it forces us to do what we shouldn’t have to. Not having kids is one way I vote against the system. If childless people can’t vote, I believe we should have the legal right to commit suicide and not live under the system the future-oriented impose on us.
“I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life.”
– Jonathan Haidt
Haidt is incentivized to say this because it makes him look good — it signals he will not be giving up and dropping out of life, so he’d be a good ally and you should invest in doing favors for him. The opposite view, no matter how true or widely held, will always be less proudly stated and more quietly lived. But it still deserves a vote.
The childless shouldn’t have to live in a world where patriots and religionists ban drugs, porn, abortion, and suicide because the dream of “purpose”. The optimists and capitalists force collective sacrifice that benefits them and their children on people who don’t even want to be here.
Notice that you’ve attributed everything that supposedly ails you to external forces, albeit extremely weak ones. The Christian evangelical movement has had zero success in outlawing abortion, suicide, etc.
Please take Haidt at his word. The solution to finding joy in the world resides within yourself vs. slaying fictitious dragons.
“The optimists and capitalists force collective sacrifice that benefits them and their children on people who don’t even want to be here.”
Funny, I might have said “The leftists and SJWs” instead of optimists and capitalists. The left seems more inclined to demand collective sacrifice overall.
The supposition of two, opposite cultures — R and L — places in stark relief two ‘package solutions’ in culture. And the dichotomy has some empirical bite when comparing traditional and modern cultures.
But what if we unbundle the components of R — sex outside of marriage, birth control, and divorce — and don’t interpret each component as ‘repression’? The components can be parsed, reinterpreted, and partly re-bundled in a different, coherent, libertarian mix:
a) Sex and marriage</i. Adultery is breach of contract. Consensual sex among unmarried adults of any sexual orientation is private behavior (no prohibition, no frowns).
b) Birth control. 1) Preventive contraception (the pill, condoms, etc.) is private behavior (no prohibition, no frowns). 2) Abortion (i.e., birth control after conception) is a different matter. Some libertarians argue that abortion is the hard case because mother and fetus alike have personhood and rights, which cannot be disentangled in pregnancy. Libertarians may be found on both sides of the abortion debate.
c) Divorce. Marriage is a commitment contract to encourage joint investments by spouses. A core joint investment is children (who are vulnerable and unable to consent to the contract). Easy exit predictably reduces or harms joint investments. Contractual design and/or social norms should discourage easy exit.
Thus a libertarian bundle would allow consensual sex among unmarried adults; would allow preventive contraception but have no simple answer about abortion; would have marriage laws that discourage adultery and divorce; and would allow same-sex marriage (and possibly marriage of more than 2 persons).
What about social norms — healthy cultures of ‘frowning upon’? Could there be a stable culture around a libertarian bundle for sex, birth control, marriage, divorce? Or are R and L corner solutions in culture?
Perhaps Belmont culture overlaps a lot with the libertarian bundle, but prefers social norms rather than laws to make divorce difficult.
“Perhaps Belmont culture overlaps a lot with the libertarian bundle, but prefers social norms rather than laws to make divorce difficult.”
Indeed they do. As of 2011, 87 percent of children who have a parent with a bachelor’s or higher degree were living with two married parents. The corresponding figures for high school grads and high school dropouts were 53 and 47 percent, respectively. I’m sure that it has gotten worse, not better since 2011.
The relevant figure for people with a BA or higher isn’t the divorce rate, it’s the fertility rate. You can’t get divorced if you never marry, and people with 0-1 kids and high incomes rarely run into the kind of problems that lead to divorce.
I don’t know if that last statement would hold up empirically. It seems like lots of higher income folks divorce when I think of people I know, if only because the male’s outside options were seen as better. If Gottman is correct that contempt the big marriage killer, no so much outside forces, the kinds of problems probably cut evenly across all married couples. The question then is whether people with kids in bad relationships see divorce as a step up for them.
I.e. everyone has problems, the question is do you and your spouse respect each other enough to deal with them, or do you blame each other, etc. People who don’t like each other will invent new problems, in my experience, so problems isn’t the issue exactly.
I also wonder if people with zero kids are indeed less likely to divorce over the course of their lives. Without kids the cost of divorce goes way down. Waaaay down.
Empirically, the upper class simply does not divorce very often.
I guess the question would be if they married more and had more kids, would they divorce more often? I don’t know. I know that the divorce revolution actually hit the upper classes FIRST, and then the recovered, in part because left leaning upper class people gave up on marriage and fertility. You can’t get divorced if you don’t marry, and your change of divorce goes way down after age 30…much like your fertility.
A lot of those solutions are analytically plausible but not consistent with human nature.
1) For young men, sex is the main attraction to romantic relationships; any system which permits unlimited consensual sex for unmarried adults leaves marriage unattractive to the most attractive men.
2) Children are the leading cause of marital unhappiness, according to the sociologists. On the other hand, they’re absolutely essential for long-term survival and an irrevocable commitment (short of murder, of course). In the absence of strong social norms binding men to their small children, men often walk away.
I strongly recommend Kathryn Edin’s books “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage” and “Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City”. She notes that wonderful boyfriends often transform into terrible fathers without actually changing their behavior very much.
Jay,
Thx for the pointer to Kathryn Edin’s books.
Re: Your 1st point, about human nature. That’s an empirical question. It’s embedded in my question about what social norms would emerge around a libertarian bundle. You might be right.
Re: Your 2nd point, about children and marital unhappiness. Compare Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids:
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135612560/selfish-reasons-for-parents-to-enjoy-having-kids
Tolstoy wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina).
If you think all happy families are alike, you are a fool.
File Tolstoy under fools?
Roger you are taking that Tolstoy quote way too literally.
His point was there are infinitely more ways to break something than to make it work. There are some things that all happy families do right like having respect and affection for each other and having a commitment to each other. Have you read Anna Karenina? If not, I recommend it.
You’re right. I was taking your use of the quote literally. And you are of course right that “there are infinitely more ways to break something than to make it work.”
But I’m not sure I’d agree with your next sentence. “Happy” is a surprisingly problematic idea.
I always assumed that the quote was ironic. All of the unhappy families in Anna Karenina are unhappy for the exact same reason: a conspicuously cheating spouse.
“For young men, sex is the main attraction to romantic relationships”
And it is used to take unfair advantage of them, getting them to sell their future lives in exchange for a few months of delusional pleasure. Modern family law has been a severely unethical arrangement.
If marriage took the long-term interests of young men into consideration more, it would surely help to stabilize marriage. And, in fairness, we’ve drifted somewhat in that direction in the last decade or so.
Pre marital sex is correlated with higher divorce. Can’t separate the two.
A culture where premarital sex is condoned is also a culture which tends to produce less of the “married with grandchildren” demographic. People still generally want children with their spouse vs. but they hold off on marriage when many of the benefits of short-term benefits of marriage can be had without the commitment. By the time people get into their 30s and marriage/family becomes more of a priority, it more challenging to find someone compatible and then fertility issues arise.
I did a brief review of the closest people to me, which includes close high school friends, college friends, my team at work and people I know from church. Most of these people I have seen in person in the past year, either at my house or theirs, or gone out to eat with, at work, etc. About 3 in 5 are men, most are college educated, and they are roughly split between religious and irreligious.
There were 30 in this group with a median age of 35. Only 11 of 30 are married. 1 of 30 is divorced and dating, 2 of 30 are divorced and single. 6 of 30 are dating and have never married, and 10 out of 30 are never married and single. They are only 15 children between these people (though there are three pairs of people married to each other in this group). With one exception, every single child was born to a couple in which the wife was married by age 30.
Age of marriage is part of the issue, but the correlation remains regardless.
In terms of non statistical insight, my view is that pre-marital sex with anyone that doesn’t become your spouse makes long term pair bonding harder. It’s harder on women than men, but hard on both sexes. The emotional issues involved seem too much for a blog comment, but there is something there that explains the statistics.
asdf,
Does pre-marital sex cause higher divorce?
Or does an independent variable — say, personality — cause both of them? Then the correlation you mention would be a selection effect.
I don’t know the answer.
I mean we can have a correlation/causation debate on practically anything with this many variables.
The bottom line is that if I have a chart with # of premarital sexual partners on one axis and % eventually divorced on the other I get a pretty clear graph.
Re: ‘”Want to abolish capitalism, abolish the family!”‘
Unless friendship or community somehow fully replaces family, those who reject family would have extra need of markets! No person is an island, and all that.
Arnold, let me focus on your key point that grandparents are the happiest people because they love their grandchildren. Today I should greet a grandson who will be 18, but he lives in California and in June he will be graduating from a very expensive Catholic HS. In the past 3 years, we met a few times in which I have not been able to have a serious conversation with him because of his two personalities –one related to his small, intimate world, and the other to the much larger world from which he doesn’t want to be excluded (clearly he’s willing to pay a high price to be included). I have seen this type of juvenile behavior in students from HS run by the Jesuits in Spain and Chile. Also, for 7 years until last February, I had a similar experience with his sister who last June graduated from a very expensive Massachusetts private college (to make thinks worse she asked me to help his boyfriend to pursue an Econ Ph.D. in an Ivy League university but in her own terms –yes, she was manipulating his grandfather and his boyfriend to be sure that her membership in her large, D-word was not jeopardized). I’m lucky enough to have other grandchildren who are much younger are concerned only about enjoying their small, intimate world, so I don’t need to spend time with my older grandchildren.
That’s the limited good side of grandparenting, but we cannot ignore the dark side. Even healthy, old people, who rely on past savings to finance their consumption (which includes gifts to grandchildren) know that they cannot take anything for granted. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are because, by the time you are 75, you have learned to limit consumption to the expected income from past savings. For many 75+ people, their past savings are limited mainly to a pension which has become as risky as any other investment. Around the world, very few 75+ people can rely with certainty on just one pension to finance a level of consumption equal to the average of the past 10 years. The issue has been discussed in detail for the past 50 years and has not been solved anywhere, so the large majority of 75+ people know that they will have to adjust (post-pandemic the adjustment will be much harder).
Ok, time to greet my new 18-year old grandson.
So then you “don’t need to spend time with (your) older grandchildren” because these juveniles engage in “juvenile behavior.” But the good news is you are not yet estranged from your much younger grandchildren and are still willing to lecture us on family values and how to save civilization. Even more evidence that irony is dead.
No surprise. Among many other things, you cannot understand a libertarian argument. The basic idea is that you don’t meddle in other people’s lives –even if they are your grandchildren. Parents are responsible for their children and when a child becomes 15 parents should let the child start taking responsibility for their decisions. And if anyone doesn’t want to talk to you, ignore him or her, except only your under 18 children.
Be careful. The barbarians are coming and you look like a perfect idiot to be canceled.
I completely agree they shouldn’t be forced to talk to you if they don’t want to. What gave you the idea that I didn’t?
I just don’t understand why you can’t offer them all the libertarian distance they want with less hostility. You’re supposed to be the grown up here.
They are kids. They’ll make mistakes. They can tell when you are hostile to them and that’s not going to make anything better.
You have no idea of what you are talking about -like any rotten and corrupt democrat. Please before talking about others, try to know the basic facts. Again, I laugh at your idiocy.
The BLM “What We Believe” page is no longer up.
According to an article on 6/5/2020 it previously included:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
(https://www.dailywire.com/news/black-lives-matter-what-we-believe-page-disrupt-the-western-prescribed-nuclear-family-dismantle-cisgender-privilege)
The About page no longer contains the word “Family “. (https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/)
In my opinion, the quote in this post doesn’t accurately reflect these facts.
Sounds like they were pandering to single mothers: “don’t worry; we will provide an extended family and village.” But those grow organically from nuclear families.
Latest Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20200917013317/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Lots of African countries don’t have nuclear families as Western cultures understand them – their system used to be called “female farming” – but they do have villages and extended (matrilocal, matrilineal) families.
I suspect that bit was removed because it became a lightning rod of criticism rather than a change in heart of those who run BLM, but in fairness it’s not something I can prove.
The grandma
– Olavo Bilac (roughly translated poorly from the Portuguese)
The grandmother, who is eighty,
She is so weak and old! …
There were so many misunderstandings!
She was white, white,
With human sorrows.
Today, in her chair,
Rests, pale and cold,
After so much tiredness:
And she snoozes all day,
And dozes all night.
Sometimes, though, the flock of
Grandchildren invade a room …
They enter laughing and parroting:
These fight, that one talks,
Tbose dance, jumping …
The old woman wakes up smiling.
Transfigured with joy,
Her face looks more beautiful,
Seeing so much mischief,
And listening to so much noise.
She calls the beloved grandchildren,
She kisses them, and, shakily,
She runs her wrinkled fingers,
Slowly, slowly,
through their golden hair.
She looks younger, and her heart beats,
And she recovers her memory,
When one of the grandchildren screams:
“O grandma! Tell a story!
Tell a beautiful story! ”
So, with slow phrases,
Tells stories of chimeras,
In which there are fairy palaces,
And witches, and beasts,
And enchanted princesses …
And the grandchildren tremble,
With additional tales,
And forget the antics,
– Until, forehead tilting
They fall asleep on her lap …
Yes, being a grandparent is definitely one of life’s most satisfying experiences.
It is silly though to think that attitudes towards sex, marriage, and parenthood are driven by political views. To the extent there is any cause and effect there, it runs in the other direction.
There is nothing that unites right and left in America more than agreement that the sexual revolution is here to stay. Both divorce and births to unwed mothers actually tend to be even more common in red states than blue states. Red states are no slouches in porn consumption either.
Politically, Republicans have done much of the boldest pioneering work on how far sexual norms can be pushed without blowing up a political career. I remember when it was a big deal that Reagan could be the first person nominated for President after being divorced.
By 2016 the “grab em’ by the pussy”candidate was proudly introducing his 5 children by 3 different women to the Republican Convention while paying off multiple porn stars and denying allegations of sexual abuse by over 20 other women. And we conclude from this….that left wing politics are to blame?
“And we conclude from this….that left wing politics are to blame?”
He was a Democrat most of his life.
It seems likely that someone with three wives and zero children would never have switched.
Who in these “red states” is having all these out of wedlock children? Mississippi is a red state, but I bet dollars to donuts the blue voting blacks have a higher rate of bastards.
The bottom line is that when you control for things like race and SES, politics is basically 100% the difference in fertility rates. You can see it in the fertility rates of the candidates fields usually as well.
You can’t even say its church going because leftist churches like Episcopalians have rock low fertility.
Among the right half of the bell curve, those that marry and have replacement TFR are conservative, and those that either don’t marry or have far below replacement fertility are democrats. The difference in TFR is incredibly sharp, it jumps out on any chart, and it can’t be explained by any other factors.
You are missing the point asdf. I’m saying that it is culture, not politics or race that affects the rate of divorce and out of wedlock births. The rate for white births out of wedlock is higher than the black rate used to be. The genetics wasn’t the thing that changed.
But somehow you have this amazing ability to turn every issue into a racial grievance where you are the victim of black people despite your certainty of your own racially based superiority over them.
I hear you. It has to be very frustrating getting so little return on so much racial superiority.
Greg,
“I’m saying that it is culture, not politics”
Politics is culture, or pretty close when you iron out the vagaries of individual elections. People tending to vote Republican have a different culture than people tending to vote Democrat, especially when controlling for SES and Race. If you compare two UMC white professionals and one is a Republican and the other a Democrat then on average they have wildly different cultures and life outcomes. In fertility terms its something like +1 kid per woman, its huge.
You stated that “red states” have higher divorce and out of wedlock births. But this is almost entirely an artifact of the fact that the South is both very red and very black, which even a basic statistician would notice as the key correlation in the regression. If you start looking at the actual voters in these states the important variables are obvious.
“The rate for white births out of wedlock is higher than the black rate used to be.”
Yes, marriage collapsed amongst the left half. If you believe The Bell Curve/Coming Apart, because of both leftist politics and leftists cultural attitudes.
“The genetics wasn’t the thing that changed.”
And yet these cultural changes mainly caused divorce amongst people with certain genetics.
Amongst people with good genes, both cultures avoided divorce but conservatives did it the hard way and still formed families and liberals did it the easy way by giving up on marriage and childbirth.
Income explains all of it, surely.
Globally, higher incomes correlate with lower birth rates, and also with more openness to alternative social arrangements.
Then why are Mormons and Isreali’s killing it at fertility? Those are fairly mainstream groups.
Why do UMC conservative women have replacement TFR and UMC liberal women clock in at less than 1 kid per woman?
Income can’t explain it all.
You’re right. There are second-order effects. But I’ll bet you still find the underlying trend even in those populations.
“It is is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.“
– Karl Popper
In the final, waning minutes of what might once have been plausibly considered an open society, we should mourn the death of parenting. The pre-pre school teachers union family monitors. already invade the home such as it is, detect wrong think, shuttle children away to be indoctrinated by the teachers unions, and only released to work in Amazon warehouses when the child can recite the 1619 Project by heart. A purely soothing corporately controlled internet, free of any challenge, threat, dissent, discord, or unapproved thought, will hold each new generation in the traces. Visits to grandparents forever forbidden as a disease risk and an unjustifiable source of CO2 emissions. Human life as it was once known and cherished, welcome to the age of the anthropogenic social insect. Authoritarianism has won.
Kling: “People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote?”
The vast majority of issues people vote on concern the short to medium run future where the childless have an immediate stake. This would be an interesting policy to watch though since it would end the vote for most college graduates under 28 as well as the vast majority of LGBTQ and the severely disabled.
“So perhaps single mothers should vote”
If they could plan well for the future, how did they end up single mothers?
Single mothers are probably one of the biggest voting groups in most of our deep blue cities, how is governance there?
If you’re a single mother, you’re mostly concerned with someone else helping to pay your bills in the immediate term. Long term fiscal and cultural trends are a big secondary. There is a reason for “Life of Julia”.
Married couples with property are the only ones with a real stake in the system.
“Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”
That would abolish the entire species. Which, to be fair, would solve all of our problems, but if we’re going that route then nukes are quicker.
You are not funny. In this blog, Greg G is the designated-Joker.
Thank you.
It’s an honor just to be nominated.
I had a stolen election joke there, but it’s too soon.
Nice.
Some tough issues raised here.
Small family farms used to sustain economically viable nuclear and extended families, and still do in some parts (shrinking) of the world. When economies of scale are introduced, the small farms are wiped out. Unless there is fairly rigid control on farm sizes, family farms die out.
Property zoning in cities, almost everywhere and certainly everywhere in Anglosphere, has exploded housing costs. We see families below replacement size as the new norm. America’s leadership class posits importing workers is the answer; that is offshoring child-raising.
Many places in the world, a guy can start a business on a push-cart, motorcycle sidecar, or truck-vending, or even sidewalk vending. That is all outlawed (generally) in the US.
What is called “free trade” is actually some multinationals in some nations (Far East and Germany) grabbing market share by reducing labor share of national income. This is an untenable global model for the employee class and families of developed nations.
America’s macroeconomists have spent decades deeply concerned about inflation.
If you want grandkids, I advise America’s macroeconomists to become deeply concerned about property zoning, “free trade,” farm sizes and the routine criminalization of push-cart vending.
…property zoning, “free trade,” farm sizes and the routine criminalization of push-cart vending.
Part of the problem. But the big one is that young people party until they are 40, then start thinking about a family.
Yes, I do not deny what you say, although I think economic conditions and opportunities can influence culture.
For example, if a country has chronic “labor shortages” and cheap housing, you might see more family formation.
In any event, I heartily advise that cheap housing, labor shortages and business opportunity become the national economic goals of the US.
There is no disputing that some religions, for example present-day Islam (and Catholicism not so long ago) also promote family formation.
There is plenty of cheap housing in every single metro area of America. The problem is that “cheap housing” and “warn torn ghetto with shitty schools” are synonymous. “Expensive housing” is the only way we allow people to keep the rabble out, and we don’t control the rabble to a degree sufficient that normal people want to live near them or send their kids to the same school.
So if you want cheap housing -> family formation you need to solve for the problem that cheap housing causes breakdown in the public goods families need.
“[Grandparents] want the best for their grandchildren. For the most part, I think that this means that grandparents will vote wisely. But when it comes to Social Security and Medicare…in the aggregate this is not the case.”
A case of good intentions not leading to good policy. That would cut against the idea that grandparents’ good intentions make them good voters. After all, entitlement reform would seem to be the most impactful and politically difficult of all budget issues.
“People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote?”
First, the purpose of voting is to check governments’ power to abuse constituents. Are childless people any less susceptible to government abuse? Second, even if we accept the premise that “future-oriented” policies benefit those raising children more than the childless — a different way of saying that the childless have less stake in the future — that’s not actually a good reason to preference those with children over the childless. Taxi drivers have more of a stake in protecting taxi cartels from Uber but that doesn’t mean that only taxi drivers should be allowed to vote. For example, everyone pays taxes to support public schools. While that may seem neutral, that policy actually disproportionately benefits parents over the childless. Given that we don’t provide tax rebates to childless people once they pass an age when one would realistically expect them to have children that will go to public schools in the future, I’d say that the childless actually have less influence than parents over politics even with the vote.
“Are childless people any less susceptible to government abuse?”
Yes, they have more resources and more freedom. They rely dramatically less on public goods and order. One reason cities are full of the childless is that their terrible public services don’t matter to them.
“For example, everyone pays taxes to support public schools.”
The amount of taxes the childless pay into public schools is pretty minuscule, and the childless even have the hutzpah to try and dictate education policy for other peoples kids.
Compare the educational portion of your property taxes to the cost of providing for their SS and Medicare. Who pays for their SS and Medicare? Other peoples children. Not just in taxes, but they are the ones that actually provide the services those programs pay for (if there is no next generation, there is nobody to care for you in your old age no matter what is in your bank account).
Let’s say that the cost to raise a child to adulthood is something like $250k in privatized cost. This does not count the *innumerable* hours of unpaid labor spent in childcare, the loss of freedom that parents endure, and countless other costs that parents bear. All so there is someone else to carry on the legacy of the childless, pay for their retirements, and care for them in old age.
If anything, a proper fiscal accounting of the free riding benefits of the childless would result in massive tax increases for the childless and massive tax decreases for the child bearing. That would internalize the externalities. Instead the childless are free riders.
Lastly, just imagining a childless world shows how utterly bankrupt it would be even if all the accounts balanced. “Children of Men” is not a scenario where anyone is happy.
+10
The child rearing folk are hugely subsidizing the childless folk over their lifetimes.
But, why would you ever want to reproduce in the toxic cultural and political environment in which we live? It seems somewhat inhumane to our offspring to subject them to this.
–“First, the purpose of voting is to check governments’ power to abuse constituents.”–
Some may say this is the purpose, but I think in practice the purpose is to convey legitimacy on the government and allow for orderly transfers of power.
A generic democratically elected government can easily abuse a minority of constituents or allow others to abuse them without much concern, so long as the majority doesn’t really care.
Arnold, the last two paragraphs of your post ignore a basic idea of economics: the life-cycle. First, let me emphasize how central the idea of a life-cycle is for economics and all social sciences. We used to differentiate three stages: pre-adult, adult, and post-adult. Today, however, life expectancy is much longer and we better differentiate at least five stages (two pre- and two-post). In economics, the idea is critical to understand how each of us earns and spends income, and in particular how we relate to others to earn and spend income. Second, both how much forward-looking a person is and how little or large the stake in the future of the relevant societies (yes, plural, even if you are talking about countries) depend on the particular stage of your life-cycle. Like it or not, an adult in their 40s may have a stake in the future of the relevant societies much larger than any post-adult (in particular than post-adult II) regardless of the number of actual and expected children or grandchildren, and his/her decisions on earning and spending income strongly conditioned by the actual and expected number of children and grandchildren. Let us try to understand how different our life-cycle planning has been in each stage of our 75+ lives than that of those born much later.
“People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote?”
Rather than denying anyone the vote, I propose instead that we give children (0-18) the right to vote, which would be exercised by their parents (or perhaps their grandparents…) until they reach majority.
Take as an example a couple with one child; both mother and father would get 1.5 votes to allocate to their party of choice.
Wow.
Oof.
Many of us who are NOT raising children are able to contribute a lot more to infrastructure, innovation, wealth creation and the maintenance of social networks (older single people – especially single men – maintain larger social networks). (Don’t believe we contribute more? Ask parents if they’re really not distracted from their careers.) All of which will benefit your children and grandchildren, by the way – and they won’t have to share it with ours. You’re welcome; but please don’t be such an effing jerk to us.
And sex outside marriage makes it emotionally possible for us to do it without falling into the unhappy marriages that create two (or more) generations of destroyed lives.
Meanwhile, with the reduced (hardly eliminated!) social pressure to marry, marriage has become a dramatically more stable institution despite (because of?) not trapping people in lives of desperate misery; and honest talk about separating sex from childbearing has reduced teen pregnancy very markedly.
Maybe stop assuming that your choices are the best choices (or that there is any such thing universally); learn a little bit about the benefits of embracing diversity; and remember that society takes a generation or two to adapt to social changes (just like taxes!)
Marriage is a much more stable institution today in Charles Murray’s Belmont than it was in the 1970s. But it is not more stable in Fishtown, and it is a lot less stable in Fishtown than it was in the 1950s or earlier.
It seems to me that teen pregnancy in the USA makes a U-curve historically. In a very repressive environment, there is little teen pregnancy because there is little teen sex. In a less repressive environment, there is more teen sex but much of it is ignorant and unconsidered and results in a lot of pregnancies. After a while, people become more concerned with, and become better at, “safe sex” and the pregnancy rate goes down.
I was tempted to say that “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” and unmarried people are always going to have lots of sex anyway but the rate seems to be down. Perhaps it is some combination of easy access to porn and a decline in the perceived benefits of establishing and maintaining a relationship with a sexual partner.
Roger Sweeney,
Technology, broadly conceived, largely shaped the trends you describe.
a) The pill and new, safe abortion techniques (and their legalization) enabled women to break the link between sex and bearing children. However, the same technologies enabled men to avoid responsibility for pregnancy, unraveling norms of shotgun marriage. A split emerged between women who used the technologies effectively (to delay childbirth until marriage) and a growing number of women who didn’t use the technologies and instead bore children out of wedlock.
b) Fast food, microwave ovens, and the internet (free pornography and interactive video gaming) enabled young men to bypass marriage, yet still have affordable prepared meals, virtual sex, and virtual social interaction. A growing fraction of young men work less and spend more time on these cheap entertainments.
These two waves of technology shock each have disrupted culture deeply. The first enabled sex without childbearing. The second enabled men to achieve various basic needs in new ways without traditional household formation or marriage.
The most recent generation of young women gradually has adapted by reducing risky sex and childbirth out-of-wedlock.
Thanks for your views, Thomas.
Maybe stop assuming that your choices are the best choices (or that there is any such thing universally);
Would you say that, between two choices A & B, if 90% of the people are better off with B, it is the best choice of those two available? Even if 10% would be better off with A instead?
What about if only 80% or 70% or 51%?
I’m pretty sure that most people think they’re making the best choice for themselves. At the time. But if they choose sex today, which results in an unwanted pregnancy and either a tragic abortion or gov’t funded poor single mom raising a kid, or kids, outside of marriage – sex is actually a very important cultural, and thus political, issue.
Your point about avoiding unhappy marriages is good, and too little talked about. Yet the “increased stability” of marriages seems to be that women can choose to get a gov’t check for their kids, instead of living with jerk husband who is the father of the kids. So 70% of Black kids are NOT living with a married mom.
I’m certain that is sub-optimal.
“which results in an unwanted pregnancy and either a tragic abortion or gov’t funded poor single mom raising a kid, or kids, outside of marriage”
I’m pro-abortion every single time in these situations, primarily for society, but also for the kids. Religion is totally overrated and ill-equipped in speaking to this.
“Would you say that, between two choices A & B, if 90% of the people are better off with B, it is the best choice of those two available? Even if 10% would be better off with A instead?”
No, I’d say that the 90% for whom B is a better choice should choose B, and the 10% who would be better off with A should choose A.
Now, of course, it may be that people who choose B impose costs on those who would like to choose A, and/or vice versa. And that’s a consideration, no doubt. But, if anything, in this case that’s not remotely well established as a real issue. People who want to have offspring benefit from living in a world where not everyone does, within a wide range of “not everyone.” And, certainly, people who do not want to have offspring, benefit from living in a world where most people do, within a wide range of “most.” The lessons of specialization don’t stop at the door of the pin factory.
The argument that “society is better off if people have children” is at odds with the view that “people should support their children and avoid imposing costs on society.” If the former, society should subsidize child-raising – and in fact it does – extensively. Only if children are a cost to society, does the argument that “people should avoid their children imposing costs on society” become strictly true.
In addressing the complaint that Black children lack married moms, are you objecting to a) subsidizing children b) over-subsidizing children due to an apparent failure or unwillingness of their fathers to contribute (as much as you would like) to supporting their offspring c) over-subsidizing children due to an apparent inability of fathers to contribute (as much as you would like) to their offspring (possibly due to unemployment, or incarceration, or unemployment traceable to previous legal problems which may include failure to pay child support without any means of paying it) d) over-subsidizing children because you believe women prefer not to receive support from the fathers but rather to receive state support e) over-subsidizing children because you believe families claim state subsidies by falsely claiming that the fathers are not supporting their children f) the idea of unmarried families, regardless of fathers’ presence or support? Your post suggests it is d), which further implies that it would be “better” if women did live “with jerk husband who is the father of the kids” – or would this, too, be sub-optimal?
These are hard issues. “Everyone should get married; everyone should have children; and there should be no sex outside marriage” pretty clearly falls under “naive revelation” (see Part 3 of this series). Or “divine revelation” if you’re Catholic. Then again, to quote Mencken, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Better solutions are often not neat; often they’re not even all that plausible at first look.
One other question. There are lots of people who DO have children. And are married.
As a friend of mine observed, once he had one child, “might as well go for it: there’s economy of scale” – or, as the movie title has it, children are “cheaper by the dozen”.
The question to focus on may not be, “why are some people allowed to not have children?”
The question is “why do people who want children have so few of them?”
Address that. And, when you do, I bet a whole new tranche of people who “don’t want children” will decide they do, after all.
Perhaps the biggest reason that people who want children don’t have them is that they get too old. Lots of people think they have to spend lots of time in school and lots of time “getting established” and then they look up and they’re over 30 and having fertility problems or more likely just being tired after the first one and do we really want a second?
The low birth rates of liberals has been evident for at least 40 years, and yet every year the liberals control more and more of the culture. (BLM, affirmative action, feminist studies, et al.)
I think the reason is that liberals and radicals control the ‘commanding heights’ of academia and media.
Yes – plus the secret discrimination of Dems against Republicans and Christians which has been going on for decades. Reps don’t discriminate, Dems do, iterate. Over time discrimination pushes out non-discrimination.
And discrimination leads towards demonization and dehumanization.
The Rep-hating Dems get the status – smart folk like status.
Today about 28% of white kids are born out of wedlock. Here’s what Brookings said in 1996 (by Janet Yellen)
If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great.
Everybody who wants less poverty, in America and the world, should be concerned about sex before and outside of marriage. Including condemning Trump’s cheating on his wives, as well as Clinton’s cheating, LBJ’s cheating, JFK’s cheating, and FDR’s cheating – among others.
I want less poverty. I used to believe in the Heinleinian/ Libertarian idea, promoted also by my promiscuous mother (on her third husband), that promiscuous sex with consenting adults is fine.
Now I’m sure that’s wrong. The biggest problem in the Black community is NOT systemic racism, it is systemic promiscuity.
Any solutions?
Recall Two Econ Laws: 1-No Free Lunch. 2- Incentives Matter
I’d propose a gov’t check for those who are married, with kids, and living in any “bad” school district – where the % of kids from married parents is low. About $10 000
a. All US gov’t K-12 school districts would report the % of their kids living with married parents. This allows a school district ordering, with the most married on top 100%, and least married on bottom 0% (maybe with ties).
b. The “married with kids” check comes on the marriage anniversary.
c. The full amount goes to all married folk in the bottom 30%.
d. Between 30% – 50%, the amount of the check goes down by $50 for the 30.1%, less $100 for 30.2% and goes down for each 0.1 increase in ranking from 30 to 50%, so it’s a smooth reduction.
All gov’t poverty reducing programs should be smoothed out more to reduce boundary jumps of people making a lot less when they earn more because they get a lot less from the gov’t at some threshold.
The gov’t needs to be explicitly supporting marriage and kids inside of marriage – even if that does increase the number of unstable marriages some. My own ratio would be supporting maybe twice as many unstable marriage kids to reduce one kid of a single mother on welfare (dependent on gov’t aid).
At the same time, I do also support more gov’t assistance for all kids, including those of single mothers. To the kids, food & school supplies, more than cash to the parent. Such aid would incentivize and thus increase the number of kids – I far prefer more single mother kids to abortions.
“The biggest problem in the Black community is NOT systemic racism, it is systemic promiscuity.”
Shhh! This is obviously wrong and racist…melanin is superior in all regards except when using eurocentric measurement techniques.
Please listen to our next Assistant AG for Civil Rights:
https://twitter.com/dailycaller/status/1348808636194299905?s=21
https://twitter.com/JoeRini6/status/1348254773724770312?s=20
A society’s replacement rate should really be judged across 2 or even 3 generations.
My grandparents (born between 1922-36) produced 4 kids each & 14 total grand children.
Great grand children: 4
A social, cultural and economic system that doesn’t yield children is in trouble.
Anyone born after 1980 do this experiment across all your friends. You can start at their parents.
How many of your friends parents have more than 4.2 grandkids? Bare min replacement rate.
Radical societal shift.
No siblings. No cousins.
2-3 person family gatherings…
excuse me, I have nothing to contribute to the various threads above.
I just wanted to thank Arnold for setting out these three (what-i-believe-now) posts, especially starting with this one. Being much less articulate, I have been waiting for some time to see someone better tackle it.