To me this seems like conservatives are adopting the progressive prohibition against ever being critical of someone else less well off than you (who’s in the ingroup).
If you can’t say that the reason marriage rates are falling is because a lot of working class men are losers, then you have to blame an acceptable target (educated and affluent women).
Fair comment, but I don't think a lot of working class men are losers! Rather, there's a lot of more structural problems in society that have created the conditions for their laggard performance.
Also, fwiw it's obviously amazing that women can divorce bad guys and have the economic agency to leave relationships. And shame on the social conservatives for wanting to drag us back to that oppressive era of American history.
It's a simple class issue, women and men in lower economic quintiles don't have a huge disparity if you remove stay-at-home women (20%ish v 30%ish), and top earning women marry at twice the rate of lower income women. I think this thread is pretty eye opening in that every lower income cohort male is called a loser and the real problem while the difference between genders really isn't that stark. Men make more and so are more likely to marry "down" the economic ladder, which skews this statistic even more. The "loser men" trope is tired and wrong.
There's no need to go calling people losers on an individual basis, but it's very clear that in our increasingly winner-take-all economy there are winners and losers.
Sure, but that is not gender specific. People in this thread aren't calling low income, low marriage rate women losers. I think some people are using the term to mean economic losers whereas many others here...are not
Being poor doesn't make you a loser. Being someone who is unwilling to work and then blames their misfortune on those around them does make you a loser.
If you someone alive today who was born in America, you're already one of the luckiest human beings in history. We've all won the lottery, and no amount of deindustrialization or whatever can change that.
We just can’t talk about class in our country. Neither the right nor the left can do it.
Working class people, by which I mean people that didn’t go to college, are mostly invisible, despite being a plurality. No one is writing about them in the NYT or Atlantic or WSJ.
The decline of marriage is clearly a class story. There was an article in the Atlantic about this before Covid, I think Vox (probably Yglesias?) has written this up as well years ago.
Working class people themselves don’t read articles, and educated people clearly don’t like reading about them.
This issue disproportionately impacts the working class but it’s not only a class story—there is later and lower marriage and fertility across the board.
Specifically, looking at US numbers, I think the decline in fertility is measured by births per woman has plateaued for college educated women while it continues to fall for working class women.
Also, the policy implication of looking at lower income men as the problem is probably a significant amount of wealth redistribution, and heavy handed economic management to create stable, well paying career paths for people not really about to be nimble and flexible about it themselves.
"How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y'know, they lied to me."
You have a tendency to mention the monogamy point but I think this might just be you. Like sure, in theory I’m sure plenty of guys would love to be dating 3 models at once. But I don’t think your average guy in a relationship is that interested in stuff on the side. Or to put it another way: it’s not like the options for your typical guy are “monogamous relationship with average-looking woman” vs. “have your pick of beautiful women with no commitment required”
I’m no expert but I’m skeptical that lower class women are refusing to marry eager to commit lower class men because they are “losers”. I think probably they can’t get them commit and men remain the marriage bottleneck and these women just have kids out of wedlock with unreliable partners, if at all.
Women gatekeep sex and men gatekeep marriage and it has ever been thus.
Hence the advice behind the advice of these pro marriage social conservatives is “don’t put out without a ring”.
My thought is that many of these losers aren’t so bad but the hedonic treadmill of expectations and opportunity costs of alternatives have outpaced their value.
Then there is the social structure aspect. If a man has a precarious labor market situation then he can be more of a burden on a household than asset.
Exactly. I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago and there was this dude there who would not stop bitching about the fact that all his dad needed to get a wife was a pulse and a job, and it wasn't fair that women expected more now. No one gave him any pushback aside from me. (It was a male-dominated profession. The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules, because it was "just a joke." This was on the #1 forum for people in our profession at the time.)
The unsaid part here is that the woman who wpuld have married that "loser" is every bit as much of a "loser" as the man. She isnt the PhD woman working for the Cato Institute, she's making $13/hr working the front desk of a motel 6.
Is a major reason for less marriage at the low end of the education/income distribution women being unwilling to marry men they see as not good marriage prospects? How would we tell?
This is where sociologists doing interviews with large groups of women get narrative and stated preference data. Then they form a hypothesis and look at the question with aggregated economic data.
The men were always losers, the women just had no other choice. Now, in many ways, it is actually probably better financially (and emotionally) to for a non-college educated woman to have a job, but not a full-time relationship with a man.
23 year old women in rural Iowa working at a Wal-Mart can go home and read trashy Amazon Kindle stories and watch algorithmic content too.
As opposed to marrying a guy and having a kid while said guy doesn't want to chip in despite at times, actually working less than you do?
If you say, while just pick the non-college educated guy in your area who has a decent job and wants to be reasonably equal about childcare, you've already limited your options by a lot and that's not even getting into over possible clashes about values.
Yet that same Walmart worker would be considered a loser based on that Walmart job alone. If we are going to say a man is unmarriagable over an hourly Walmart job then why do we pretend like its a good thing for a woman? Her wage isn't providing any more to a potential family than her male counterpart.
Because, theoretically, she can have children. That’s why it’s hard to call women “losers,” most are born able to make babies. And women can now do that AND hold a job, men have to bring something more to the relationship than “make me a sandwich.”
I’m going through a Dune phase and was reading about how Frank Herbert was able to spend his time writing freely because his wife was the breadwinner, in the 1960s. My ex husband paid for my masters degree while we were married (which I paid back) and I still have men comment I couldn’t have done it without a man 😱. Yea bitch you couldn’t have progeny without women but where are our hero cards?
The shift toward fewer blue-collar jobs is an old story. But there’s also much more self-selection into same-class marriages. How often do you see office men marry their female admins, or male doctors marry female nurses now? It happens, but it used to be downright normal.
That theory is much popular (more assortative mating today) but I doubt if this is really true - because all the classical examples from the past are upper-class men marrying lower-class women (and the opposite was usually considered a social scandal - look to movies like "All That Heaven Allows"); attending that the number of men and women in each social class was roughly the same, many assymetric assortative marriage would mean many upper-class women and lower-class men staying single (what was not the case)
What I suspect is that much of the apparent inter-class marriages of the past were more the result of, in the past, many upper-class women not having upper-class jobs before marriage, giving the illusion that upper-class men were marrying lower-class women
I mean, the female admins are now analysts/salespeople/advertising execs/whatever as well and the nurses are now doctors too. It's the same reason actors end up marrying actors.
Weren't those admins or nurses from a considerably higher class than their equivalents today?
That is, young women from the middle class would not have access to a four-year college education and a BA, but might well go to secretarial college or nursing school and then end up marrying the doctor or office manager who might well have been a classmate of her brother in that very four-year college that the woman couldn't get into.
These days, that young woman is going to college herself and might become a doctor or a lawyer or a manager or go into marketing or HR.
Today's secretaries/admins and nurses (especially the LPNs, who are closer in educational achievement to the nurse of the 1950s or 1960s than the modern RN) are from a distinctly lower social tier than their predecessors 60 years ago.
I think lots of doctors still marry nurses due to proximity effects. Lots of nurses even have masters degrees. Doctors aren’t generally marrying the person 15 years younger with an associates though.
In addition to City of Trees's point, when you combine economic growth and upward mobility over decades, you're going to change the composition of the working class over time.
It’s always been like this, IIRC DNA studies show most people had twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors because over half of males generally didn’t get to reproduce.
Right, but people having twice as many female ancestors means the percentage of men who reproduced would’ve been half the percentage of women, so if 1/3rd of women didn’t reproduce, then 2/3rds of men didn’t. It was not the norm historically for below-average or even average men to have a good family life.
There are many historic genetic bottlenecks (like the Neolithic horse people killing and displacing all the men in Europe), disparate male fatality rates, noble fertility patterns, and other not so nice things too.
I know a few very successful couples who started dating in college and IMO should have gotten married in their mid 20s, but there was exactly zero chance that would cause them to *have kids* in their mid-20s which seems to be the unstated desire here
I got married at 25, am now in my mid 30s, still married, want kids but don't have them yet. My friend group, other college educated adults in their mid 30s, are all only now starting to have kids or trying to.
Only few of them are succesful and focusing on their careers. The reason they don't want kids is that they are a big responsibility! People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.
The first 2 are cultural so I don't see how you can change that. For the later the biggest impact things would be to lower housing prices (people feel more "settled" and ready as a homeowner) and decrease daycare price (exactly no one looks forward to a "second mortgage").
Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we are now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did.
Bingo! It is cultural. People in the past didn’t have the means to spend their whole 20s and 30s doing this. Now we do, and the culture has shifted as a result. Nobody wants to be the woman in the image at age 24. As a man in my 20s, I had zero interest in marriage and kids. By my mid 30s, I did.
“People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.”
It seems like it must be heavily cultural, but the fertility collapse is everywhere, and the US, Japan, China, Russia, and Italy seem like pretty distinct cultures!
I feel like the norm among highly educated people I know (or at least was eight years ago or whatever) is that a lot of them are basically married in their 20s anyway but they wait until they're 30 or 32 to actually have a wedding because maybe they're doing long distance for grad school or haven't saved up for the party or whatever (and aren't having kids yes). This is personal bias, but honestly it seems fine; they (we) all seem to have turned out just fine. There's still plenty of time to have two or three kids if you start at 32.
In principle, yes, but lots of things can inhibit kids even in the 30s. Basic chemotherapy, for example, is bad for male reproduction and generally apocalyptic for women's reproduction.
Agree 100%. I know a handful of couples where both people have college degrees and started dating in high school or early college, but then waited to get married until their late 20s. Weird to me, but there’s no way marrying earlier would’ve resulted in kids earlier.
I think those people are still success stories. The failure mode that these people seem to be worried about is being in relationships in your 20s with people who do not want to commit and have kids with you, or with whom you would not want to have kids. Start looking for a co parent earlier and then lock them down, basically.
If I remember correctly, a big part of Jordan Peterson's early rise to prominence was based on this type of message to young men. It was quite popular *among men* but widely panned during the height of the woke era (I hate that term, but don't know what else to call the ubiquitousness of DEI / Trans / pronouns during the 2015-2024 period)
Never been a big Peterson fan. Obviously he says some unobjectionable stuff about making your bed and generally being on top of your shit. But I think young boys also need to hear stuff like: be a compassionate person, a good listener, patient and respectful. I also never got the sense that Peterson wanted young men to seek out equality in their relationships. Like part of being in a modern educated relationship is being sometimes fluid in your gender roles and men shouldn't think they need to be typecasted as some macho macho man all the time.
To throw a bone to his defenders, Early Peterson is indeed very different from Later Peterson. He’s a cautionary tale about audience capture and the dangers of fame and buying your own hype.
I think he’s a cautionary tale about benzos personally. Dude had a bad reaction and went crazy (especially given the unhealthy info environment he landed in, with both unreasonable worshipers and crazy detractors).
I would say that past 15 years that cultural elites have generally denigrated men and not offered them much patience, compassion, or respect.
For example, when you have the CDC listing disparate impacts of Covid or suicide and omitting the most disparately affected group (men) from any discussion, it signals something callous about priorities. It undermines trust.
Also, your roles are necessarily a bit different when you start having children. No matter how supportive a father I am (very), I couldn't ever carry a baby to term or breastfeed them, and doing those things has a big impact on everything else. A job with long hours or a lot of travel is hard to square with those things when you have very young children, and even when the kids are older it's almost unworkable for both parents to have the heavy travel jobs.
Meh? If you’re going to make your public persona about a certain thing, you kind of DO invalidate it with directly hypocritical misconduct.
Like, if Rick Santorum comes out as gay, everyone instantly knows he’s an even bigger asshole than he ever came across as. By contrast, if he comes out as an anti-vaxxer, it doesn’t directly invalidate anything he said about homosexuality, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality.
The point here is the hypocrisy of the messenger doesn't change the message itself. Being strung out on benzos is bad and that fact doesn't change based on some internet takesters life choices.
I never watched his content, but one of my best friends was driven crazy by the backlash against him. “The guy’s advice is take a shower, clean your room, and get a job. How did he become this avatar of right wing evil? Is there some anti-men-taking-showers constituency? Are men perpetuating systemic racism and sexism if they clean their rooms?”
Because to most left-leaning people he wasn't the "clean your room guy" he was the "freaking out about supposedly being under the yoke of the evil Canadian gov't to use the right pronouns" guy.
He had a point about that for like two minutes, and then he went on an all meat diet in Russia or whatever it was and came back full-on batshit. Not a well man, if he ever was.
Oh sure - but my point is Scott Galloway can of makes many of the same arguments and while there's some left-wing criticism because he has views left wingers disagree with, there's no push to paint him as some evil figure because at worse, he has some dumb ideas.
If he went to Russia I wonder if he was ensnared by an FSB honeytrap operation while he was there, and thus came back a kompromized asset of the Kremlin?
Being seen to advocate or acknowledge the challenges men faced during that era was seen as a “distraction” from the challenges women faced. It was very zero sum.
Most good broad-applicability life advice is neither novel nor interesting, so to become a public figure who’s famous for giving such advice, you need to put it in some sort of weird attention-getting package that only loosely relates to the advice. In Peterson’s case, the framework included stuff like obsessions with transphobia and all-meat diets, confusing rhetoric about lobsters, and a body of psychoanalytic theory that, as far as I can tell from reading summaries, is like what Carl Jung would have produced if he routinely smoked crack.
It’s pretty obvious that the backlash was mostly more about the attention-seeking packaging than it was about “clean your room.” (Most of the object-level recommendations in “12 Rules for Life” are things that most adults would correctly agree with.)
I've never watched Peterson or any of these dudes but to this specific point, therein lies the paradox. If a man is already successful, super talented or attractive, or just otherwise juiced in somehow, he can let the small stuff go. On the other hand if he's at a point where he's seeking out this kind of advice, it's probably a good idea to take a look at the low hanging fruit that might in aggregate make his life better.
I never read his books (I'm a little old for self-help books directed at young men), but I did listen to a few episodes of his podcast, and he was really an excellent interviewer. Several of his podcast episodes were quite good, because he engaged deeply and intelligently with his interviewee.
Woke started in African American circles, then got appropriated by white progressives, then got contextualized into the NGO rent seeking grift, and now has finally become a core tenant of Republican pearl clutching and cancel culture.
I used to watch a fair bit of Peterson and I thought his Bible and mythology stuff was interesting, but he kind of screwed up his own life despite being incredibly successful so I’m not so sure it’s good for men to be taking him that seriously.
Based on my experience and what I’ve seen of the data, a major driver of the decline of marriage in America, perhaps the biggest driver, is that it became socially acceptable for working class white women to cohabitate with men they weren’t married to. It became much more socially acceptable to have women out of wedlock children.
I have 3 aunts born in the early 60s. They didn’t go to college. They are all divorced. They married losers - abusive men, men with substance abuse issues, men who couldn’t hold down jobs, etc. My cousins, ie their kids, partnered with losers too, they just didn’t marry them. Instead they had kids out of wedlock.
I have 4 female first cousins. None of them are married. 3 of them are mothers, and 2 are divorced.
It does seem like the lesson many have learned from high divorce rates is “don’t get married” rather than “be a good partner and find a good partner.”
I think many of these decisions about whether and when to get married are driven by personal experience rather than broad societal trends. It’s why solving this is hard.
I mean sure, but in that situation people seem to be deciding I'll still partner with these people but won't marry them. When ideally the decision would be "I'm going to move" or "I'm going to be single." I get that it's easy for me to say that since I have found a great partner. But it seems uncontroversial to say that the outcome of not getting married but having kids with bad partners is not a good outcome.
Yes this is it. Unfortunately this is true. When I was I kid (90s and 00s) society and the Christian church in the South (with which I’m most familiar) pushed women to marry/stay with these men who are unfit for marriage. There has since been a shift - and that’s a good thing.
Didn’t Charles Murray try to tell this story 20 yrs ago? But he might have mixed it up with so many other things that everyone could just yell “Bell Curve racist” (with some good reason) and ignore the parts that might be valid.
Coming Apart was very much worth reading, and it was reviewed pretty widely. His thesis was that there was a social/values change that affected working class/underclass people far more than professional/educated class people, and partly he attributed this to people on the higher end of society not preaching what they practice. That is, most top-1%-income people live with something like what a person in the 1950s would call traditional values, but mostly pay lip service to a much more permissive set of values. But also probably this has to do with the massive sorting on intelligence/diligence that he discussed originally as a possibility in The Bell Curve.
The thesis of Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" was fundamentally hereditarian, and hereditarianism is anathema to most liberals because there is strong evidence that a hereditarian world view tends to make people callous towards their "inferiors".
The Nazi "Aktion T4" project to murder severely disabled Germans was a clear example of this, especially if we ask the question "why didn't the Soviets do something similar?"
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian dictatorships that cared nothing for either public opinion or Abrahamic morality, and the USSR was also considerably poorer (to the point it had lost millions of its people in famines) such that it would have a considerably stronger material incentive to dispose of "useless eaters". And a policy of outright murdering the disabled (as opposed to the far more historically prevalent eugenicist policy of sterilizing them) doesn't even require one to hold that their disability was genetic in the first place.
Most people are at least somewhat hereditarian in their own lives though, as with the common voice when getting married to look at your future mother in law to see your future wife.
Maybe, just maybe working class people ought to start shaming other working class people into marriage instead of expecting the chattering classes to do it; assuming the lack of fingerwagging is the problem.
Yes this was always the problem with Stephanie Kelton's thesis: if being lectured at by the professional class got working class men to do things then they'd all be driving Prius's and voting for Elizabeth Warren--it's not like the professional classes never lecture the working class about *anything*. But it demonstrably doesn't work!
“And this seems to me like a recurring problem in center-right discussions of marriage and family: Cultural conservatives are either afraid to say what they actually mean, or else are just so accustomed to arguing with feminists about abortion and child care subsidies that they reflexively want to continue fighting with them.”
Seems like the latter. And my guess is that there’s a funding ecosystem of geriatric donors who don’t think the family think tanks are getting the job done unless they’re browbeating women to settle down.
Idk, the reason you write things aimed at educated young women encouraging them to marry is the same reason NYT writes all their bizarro world lifestyle trends aimed at educated women, that's who reads lifestyle pieces.
If you want to reach non-college young men you'd do it on Twitch or write a pro-marriage Manga, or something.
Overall if you want to encourage hetero marriage, you should probably be engaging with both men and women.
I don’t think your average NYT lifestyle section reader is going there for actual life advice. I read the NYT Modern Love section for the same reason Denzel reads the paper in Training Day: it’s 90% bullshit but it’s entertaining.
Replace all those horrible gambling app ads during basketball games with PSAs encouraging young men to marry their girlfriend, stick around to raise their kid, be a dedicated father, etc.
This probably won't help much (changing social norms is hard), but at least it will get rid of the f--king 24/7/365 gambling ads.
I'd like to tie this to pushing back at the polarization of all education before joining the labor force and all "leisure" (retirement) after leaving it. There should be less prpfssional "penalty" for dropping in and out of the labor force to "go back to school" or to "have a few kids."
I also don't know how to effect this social change, but I think that a child allownce and progressive taxation of consumption (education is not consumption), not income, would help. :)
Hard agree. This has been a low key obsession of mine for a bit, a colleague and I were discussing how sabbaticals should be normalized and government supported. This was in an AI job loss prediction context, but it has many contextual applications.
As with most of this stuff, the solution is a cultural change. And a necessary if not sufficient condition is for the Brooklyn crowd to stop convincing itself that eg polyamory is cool and smart. And that’s why I’m a bit surprised that Matt doesn’t think the fact that we get endless content about how marriage is bad for women warrants much attention. One might even say the Brooklyn crowd is out of touch in this regard!
As someone who lives in Brooklyn I cannot roll my eyes at this hard enough. Like 95% of the people who live in Park Slope are married lawyers with 2 kids who volunteer at the PTO. And then the other 5% is the people writing the poly books because all the normies find them super salacious and buy them by the armful. It's like judging what the "Atlanta crowd" is like by watching episodes of the Real Housewives.
The answer to "why is all of the family content from perspective X aimed at women" is obtained by deleting the words "from perspective X" from the question. The major consumers of this content are women, and I'm willing to be quite a lot that it's mostly women who are already in the situation being praised. If you got married already, then "yay marriage" content is great. If your options on Hinge are depressing, then "boo marriage" content is going to be popular.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it happens. But that’s what the IFS is (my guess) trying to counter. Whether it’s going to be successful or not - hey maybe, here we are talking about it, and everyone knows Brooklyn media elite opinion is downstream of SlowBorer elite-of-the-elite opinion. That’s why Joe Biden made all policy decisions by first calling up Matt and asking him what he thinks.
Judging by my factory floor there's not much evidence of this. The number of people that think "the Jews" control everything greatly exceeds those who have heard the term "polyamory".
Be me, hate dating apps and want to meet men in person. Start volunteering with local community. Full of great guys but they are all already married. Join rock climbing group, but once again, most men are already married. In panic, start attending church fellowship events despite not being particularly pious. Full of the best dudes you'll ever meet, but naturally they are always married. For sure there is something wrong with me, but it would help to know where is this abundance of good men who just can't wait to start families that I keep hearing about.
Yes, the whole "get involved in non-dating interactions" argument regularly strikes me as missing the point that those interactions are intending to do something else other than being dating markets. We need more explicit matchmaking avenues that aren't designed to be a maw of dissatisfaction like is increasingly seen of online dating.
The opposite - "explicit matchmaking avenues" are the better way to find BAD relationships (this is what happen when people enter in relationships with people who are not previous friends or at least close acquintances)
I don't quite understand what you're asserting here. If people don't have friends or at least close acquaintances who are also open to dating, what are people supposed to do?
I’m a single man looking for a relationship that leads to marriage and kids, and I’ve had a similar experience but with the genders reversed. I can’t even remember the last time I met an attractive woman in person who was single. I’ve concluded that dating apps are the least bad option once you get into your 30s.
When you get into your 30s dating becomes a market for lemons. My wife’s friend is dealing with this. I told her to date a short uggo because then she knows why they were single (unlike those NYC finance guys.)
1) We have delayed adulthood so much in our society. We limit how much unsupervised and unstructured time we allocate to children more on average which means they don’t develop the independence necessary for adult life until later. For a long while we see less teens with jobs. This in turn has delayed natural adult relationships from developing.
2) The economic prospects of people without college degrees has materially eroded over the past 50 years. This coupled with the hedonic treadmill of expectations as to what children need and what families should have has created a barrier to coupling.
3) Marriage is also a status game. The evolution of online dating has made this type of pressure more acute. High status people often meet and marry in college when search costs for parters is relatively low. We are seeing people who don’t have high social status being left by the wayside and they don’t have the “college experience” to artificially put young people together in constant social situations.
4) Finally, the opportunity cost of marrying any specific individual has gone up over time. There are many more competitions for time, wages are higher so the returns to career investment are higher, and there are more “alternatives” to find a better match (perceived or real.)
point 1 is bang on. the number of students coming to college who are absolutely not ready for real life (accounting for all the "generation thinks the one coming after is worse" bias) is nuts.
Realistically, I doubt this has anything to do with a serious policy argument -- I think it mostly reflects a kind of anxiety in which conservative women (and the men who marry them) feel about having traded career/education for starting a family earlier and they want to reassure themselves they did the right thing by saying it loudly.
But to be charitable let me try to offer a steelman of one view that those on the right could have: yes, educated women are doing relatively well in terms of getting married but less educated women are not but you can't exactly tell them "your not smart/educated/etc enough to wait to get married". Even if it's fine for educated women to hold off on marriage because they won't lack for partners and aren't going to make bad choices about having children outside of marriage that's not true for less educated women. But you don't convince people to do things by telling them they don't have the status to act like the educated women you do it by pretending they are getting the better deal by getting married while the educated women wait.
There is also the version that's basically about educated women not having enough children and thinks that if they get married earlier they might have more kids.
I completely agree with the suspicion that these people are motivated by anxiety over their life choices. I have observed in myself that I became a lot less judgmental about other people's decision-making in my head once I was genuinely confident and happy with my own choices. If you have to yell at other people to do what you did to prove that you did the right thing, it's a sign you don't really believe it.
While I broadly agree, I don't think you are taking seriously the extent to which women pursuing careers is the cause of much later marriage.
That graph you showed picks an age (45) at which career delay of marriage won't be apparent but will show the general decline in the institution of marriage that generally concentrates amoung the least educated.
I *like* the fact that women going to college and graduate school or starting a career mean we marry later but it is a real effect. And it isn't only a direct effect but since people like to mimic those with higher social status it changes the social norms as well. I wouldn't blame the decline in marriage on it but I suspect the fact that the elite get married later to some extent discourages early marriage in groups which might benefit.
> since people like to mimic those with higher social status it changes the social norms as well.
This has a very direct effect on a lot of expectations (which makes dating, weddings, moving in together, having kids a lot more expensive), which is great on one hand (we have better technology, better real median income, having ambitions is good), but it has downsides too.
Is it a downside that it filters out less successful people? Would they be happy otherwise? Does this somehow affect one gender more than the other? Are men expected to come up with this "income gap" to fund dating, and weddings, and ..? (I don't think so, but at the same time too high expectations can lead to a lot of people being alone.) And if there's some gender difference is that fair? Even if in general we think it's fair, are there groups who are significantly more burdened by this?
OK, well you're not going to get 22 year olds at Ivy's to get married and have a couple of kids and any pressure to do so would just result in the kids at the Ivy's being more clear they aren't going to do that.
Sure, but you also won't convince the people who aren't going to college by telling them: late marriage is for people smarter and better than you. If you want to convince everyone else to get married the suggestion that they are really the ones getting the better deal isn't a bad way to sell it.
But mostly I just wanted to get the facts straight ... I don't really think this is about changing social patterns anyway as much as an attempt to raise the status of the kind of women in elite conservative circles who choose to have a family early instead of a career that they could have had.
I mean, the religious had a good deal when they could paint the city dwelling dilettantes as evil sinners who will burn in damnation so they weren't actually getting the better deal but that isn't working anymore.
Of course the actual problem is people getting married at 22-23 is largely good for one thing - having lots of children, but nobody outside of non-educated people in some parts of Africa and Ultra-Orthodox Jews want to do that anymore. Even Saudi Arabia TFR is plummeting and if they can't figure out a way to stop it, I doubt shaming sociology grads at the University of Michigan to get hitched is going to help that much.
Yes, I largely agree. See my other comment which speculates that is the a substantial motive for the remarks by conservatives. But it's not the only motive and might as well engage charitably.
But how do you even meet someone to marry if you don’t go to college? You’ll never be surrounded by so many eligible singles your age again. Just meeting people to date and marry is one of the big reasons marriage rates have fallen much more for people who didn’t go to college and women not going to college would make this problem worse unless we set up arranged marriage type systems.
If "people like to mimic those with higher social status" wouldn't working class people all be driving Priuses and Subarus (and lusting after electric BMWs)? And also voting for Democrats and not buying guns and etc. etc.
People do lots of things because that's what high status people do -- that's what most advertising is based on.
But, as I said, I *don't* think it is the primary driving force behind the decrease in marriages. But one plausible theory is that more educated women who delay marriage don't suffer a penalty from doing so but delay makes it much harder for less educated women who mimic that behavior..
“But one plausible theory is that more educated women who delay marriage don't suffer a penalty from doing so but delay makes it much harder for less educated women who mimic that behavior..”
I’m trying to think of *why* a less educated woman who chose not to marry at 22 would find it relatively harder to get married later than an educated woman — unless you believe that all the guys she could choose from also want to get married at 22 (which seems unlikely)?
1) less educated women are overall less desirable on the marriage market -- if you are more desirable you can compromise to find a guy who wants to get married.
2) sadly the further down the SES ladder you are the quicker your looks decay (money, less stress, more conscientious, better medical care etc all help preserve looks).
3) (as the piece kinda suggests) the educated men are relatively more likely to want to get married anyway so less of a penalty and more likely to stay together over a long period without marriage.
4) my sense is that often the less educated women who don't get married are romantically entangled with a guy who isn't really that great for them (on and off relationship or just someone who isn't good marriage material) and the social support and same skills that got them that education make the more educated women less likely to put up with that and clear the decks for a better relationship.
Other than 2 - which is a decent theory! - I don’t see why this impacts the *relative* fortunes of the two groups.
Like #4 is probably true but if you’re saying the alternative option for these women is just to marry that guy who isn’t right for them, then what have you really accomplished?
I'm not trying to accomplish anything. I just said there is an effect of high education women marrying later reducing the marriage rates of low education women. I'm not at all convinced that pushing marriage on women would be a good thing. Seems like a complicated question (could be quite bad for exactly the reason you said) and I don't have a position on it...my instinct is to say it's bad to push early marriage but that's probably just my bias.
My intuition as someone who isn't that conscientious is that if I delay something I'm less likely to ever get around to it than someone who is more conscientious especially when it's an easier problem for them. Is that a good thing? Fucked if I know.
that it's generally an easier thing for high education women to get married and the more conscientious you are the more likely you are to get around to making it happen but fucked if I know if that's a good or bad thing.
I think "all the guys she could choose from also want to get married at 22" is getting close.
In a lot of the conservative Christian world (and I hear the same is true in the Orthodox Jewish world), a lot of people get married fairly young, and the ones who don't are disproportionately misfits. (Like me, but that's a story for in person.) So the pool of people to marry - for both men and women - is significantly worse at 30 than at 21, since a lots of the better prospects married already.
I think "once half your cohort is married, the remaining half is somewhat anti-selected" is true for both educated and uneducated. But the age at which half your cohort is married differs by education/class, but also by culture/religious affinity.
A few reasons. If the man ages and matures, he has a broader age range of candidates. Generally it’s more socially acceptable for an older guy to marry a younger woman. This gendered expectation can result in filtering out potential partners.
As you get older generally the opportunity costs of searching for a partner increase. You have more demands for your time. If we think there is a relative disparity in quality between non-college educated women and men, then age would exacerbate this partnering search further.
But again your statements seem to be true for *all* women / relationships.
What I’m asking is why it would be the case that it’s relatively easier for an educated women to wait until she’s 30 than it would be for a non-educated woman.
One reason that comes to my mind is social expectation - no one thinks it’s weird if you’re 30 and unmarried if you’ve gotten two degrees, while if you haven’t really been doing anything besides working since you were 18, and you’re 30 and unmarried, it might send partners a signal about you. But again that seems marginal.
An educated woman with good financial prospects has more potential suitors relative to one without those qualities. Generally the returns to that deferred marriage/fertility for the educated woman are higher than the less educated woman. So the relative tradeoffs are different as time progresses.
There are status and material aspects to this. The expectations portion as to what is acceptable would probably be a minor pressure.
'Someone needs to tell them to either stay in school or else take some other conscientiousness-demonstrating path (i.e., join the military, complete an apprenticeship)'
This advice is good, but feel it is rather like saying that the solution to obesity is just to reduce calorific intake. Yes. But we know that is very hard without GLP-1 inhibitors or other major intervention.
The problem is there are no equivalent of GLP-1 inhibitors for conscientiousness or for gaining intellectual ability. Some people are bad at education.
To do well in school requires intelligence, sure. But it also requires conscientiousness, agreeableness, good impulse control etc. Some folks here seem to be putting too much weight on the earnings part and if only the guys made more money they would be good husbands. But even if they made more money they'd still be lazy, disagreeable and impulsive. And at the end of the day a lot of women want a partner and not another (man) child.
TBF, part of the reason why women in prior decades were OK w/ the lazy, disagreeable, and impulsive men of the 70's, 80's and 90s is they likely made much more than they did.
But yes, the combo of increased economic security even for low wage women compared to 30 years ago + guys crappy actions make it easier for women to say nah. Especially in a world where women can log onto social media and find out what their possible partner does in their free time.
Yeah I think a big part of this isn't really that some segment of the population has somehow become worse on some metric. It's that society has become richer which has allowed more people to have optionality.
I used to live in Vietnam, which is dramatically poorer than America, and the whole concept of being a "gold digger" (but without the negative connotations that English phrase has, in Vietnamese you'd say "go fishing") or trading off your youth and beauty is prevalent there in ways that (mostly) died out decades ago in the US. Like, Vietnam has dozens of beauty pageants (don't ask me why) and all of them end up married to some rich businessman 20 years older.
At a smaller scale that same shift means all those men who uses to coast of being able to make $28/hour at the GM plant in Janesville suddenly need to bring more to the table.
I'd argue the guy making $28/hr at the GM plant is still probably fine and in some ways, probably better off than say, an IT guy making low six-figures in San Francisco who has never been in a workplace or classroom that wasn't 85%+ male since high school.
The issue is the guy who used to make $25/hr (equivalent) at another plant that didn't exist by time he was 19 and he now works making $15/hr installing solar panels or whatever needs more because now, instead of basically nothing, the women is also making similar amounts working behind the desk as a medical admin or more as a nurse.
Jesse Ewiak has an extremely bizarre hobby horse about disproportionately male workplaces specifically in Silicon Valley, which both disregards that (1) there are lots of other just as disproportionately male workplaces today and (2) prior to the 1970s, a very large percentage of workplaces were disproportionately male.
Ok but whenever this comes up I want to ask: aren’t these working class women *also* more likely to be lazy, disagreeable, low conscientiousness, and impulsive? Seems like men who are similar are perfect matches for them.
True but it should also track that as you go down the list the woman at the 30th percentile may be more conscientious than the 30th percentile man but that doesn't mean she's objectively very conscientious.
This discourse is so mired in selection bias that it's hard to know what to make of it. Should you marry in your early 20s? Under the right circumstances, sure. Those include things like: you're in a good, stable long-term relationship; your educational and career aspirations are compatible; you can reach a mutual understanding you're both committed to about supporting each other in those aspirations. It sounds like all of those were true for Ekins. But how often is that true for people pursuing professional careers in their early 20s? That's a narrow slice of potential marriages but the point extends. I'm sure there are people who would benefit from marrying but there are also people for whom marrying was a mistake. And I don't know how to assess relative quantities given the selection effects (you can't just say "married people on average are better off" and assume that holds causally for any particular marriage).
Yep. In my friend groups there's several who "did it right"--dated a couple of years in college, lived together for a few years and professional moves, married--and then divorced a few years later.
Maybe if they married early there would have been a better shot? Or maybe they shouldn't have married in the first place? Or maybe it was just good while it lasted and life goes on?
So I think the thrust of the discussion is whether to relax all of those constraints that you define as “the right circumstance”. And indeed, the whole reason there is a discussion is because many take it for granted that those constraints are not just correct, but so obviously non-negotiable that even discussing them is a waste of time.
Right. But that's the problem: if the argument is that we should relax the constraints, you can't point to people who married under the constraints and say "look, it worked out." What if marrying early means sacrificing your career for your spouse's or risking marrying someone who will mistreat you or divorcing in a few years because it turns out your aspirations are incompatible? General statistics that married people are happier don't tell us whether those are good ideas.
Well yes there’s never going to be a randomized clinical trial of marriage. Is it such a radical claim to make that people have gotten substantially more risk averse over time? Or that that risk aversion might make them miscalculate with respect to marriage? Maybe married vs. unmarried is 90% risk tolerance and 10% selection bias of who lucked into circumstances conducive to marriage.
I don't see any reason to think people have gotten more risk-averse over time. But circumstances have changed a lot. People are less willing to bear risk when society is more affluent because your ability to maintain a decent standard of living is less dependent on risk-bearing. The same logic applies to marriage, particularly for women: if your only path to supporting yourself economically is finding a husband, or if nonmarital sex and/or being unmarried is severely stigmatized, you'll bear more marriage risk than if you can support yourself with your own career. It's not that I can't conceive of the possibility that some people are too averse to marriage (I said upfront that I thought that was true!) But it's just not clear that this is a big social problem or even that it's bigger than the problem of people being insufficiently averse to (risky or bad) marriages.
This is very confused. Try to write down a mental model of this using math and see if it makes sense.
And why is the conclusion always to blame men?
Not everyone has the aptitude for college. And if you earn a Mickey Mouse degree at the bottom of your class and then can't get professional work so you're in retail or construction but you also have college debt, is that really going to help your marriage prospects?
I do think "earn more and be more impressive" is good advice for young men. But if that's followed by "... in hopes that high-flying young women can tolerate you, but don't expect them to look up to you, and plan to do somehow so half the childcare and housework so she can have as much of a career as you do, even though there aren't enough hours in the day, because otherwise you're sexist... and know that she doesn't really *need* you... and don't think she has a duty to bear your children... and also, make sure not to blame her if she gets bored and divorces you, it was probably your fault for not having a sense of humor or something..." Why on earth *should* men take that deal?
"Yelling at." I don't see much yelling-at on the social conservative side. More like gentle exhortation. But feminists have definitely been "yelling at" men for a long time. The imbalance goes very much the other way.
Women should know that if they don't get married in their 20s, they're less likely to get married and a lot less likely to have kids. To get married in their 20s, they should display a life orientation to marriage and children. When society lets women dedicate their 20s to career advancement without ever warning them that their chance to have children is likely being missed, and that it's very unlikely that any career will bring them as much meaning or do the world as much good, then society has betrayed, injured, failed them.
Yes, no "yelling at," please. Just report the facts.
My wife and I got married at 22. I have 3 young daughters. We’re going to do everything in our power to communicate to them that marrying a man who doesn’t pull in weight (professionally and domestically) is one of the biggest mistakes that they could possibly make in life. We would in almost all circumstances strongly discourage our daughters from getting married as young as we did.
There are many inaccurate things in this post (eg working class women mostly would prefer to be SAHMs), but the issue is not about whether high flying women are tolerating working class men. It's that for many working class women, they did something like get an associates degree and a stable job, and they would like to marry someone with similar levels of ambition and stability. Currently, a significant share of the relevant men are failing on those counts.
"plan to do somehow so half the childcare and housework so she can have as much of a career as you do, even though there aren't enough hours in the day" doesn't make a ton of sense to me, is the claim that two-earner (or even worse, single parent!) households are impossible?
One, men generally receive status from work done outside the household and the gender expectation of “breadwinner” is still very much present even among progressive women.
Two, men generally receive little social status or respect when they are primary care givers.
There is a lot to unpack behind these cultural expectations but they are real asymmetric factors.
Yes, well said. But of course, it is often the duty of men to give up some ambitions for the sake of marriage and family. They usually do need a job to pay the bills, though, so it takes a different form.
As I stated elsewhere, the economic prospects of people without college degrees have consistently become more precarious in the U.S.. As a result in non college educated households often become or are seen as potential liabilities by women.
"not everyone has the aptitude for college" is something that probably should be true but it feels like a bit of an aspiration rather than a description of reality or current policy.
Colleges are passing illiterate people who clearly didn't interact or engage with their education and if they are doing it in a discriminatory way that is an issue for the marriage situation.
I think much of this is connected to the points made in the viral Jacob Savage article. (https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/). We have, for decades, in schools especially, prioritized the female/feminine over the male/masculine, especially in progressive/blue environments.* We really did make it much harder for men to thrive and feel they were valued.
Now, conservatives in power, many of whom are overtly sexist, want to restore men to their former glory and the way they see to do that is to punch down on those whom they think were unfairly benefited over the past thirty years: women and people of color.
Both approaches aren't very helpful if we want people to get married, let alone have kids. And the approaches that would budge the needle are both expensive and will require those on both sides to put aside their anger. This, sadly, seems unlikely.
*I have four children, all in their early 30s, two of whom are boy/girl twins. We live in a lovely, liberal, highly educated world. The difference in how my daughter was seen and treated compared to my son was stark.
To me this seems like conservatives are adopting the progressive prohibition against ever being critical of someone else less well off than you (who’s in the ingroup).
If you can’t say that the reason marriage rates are falling is because a lot of working class men are losers, then you have to blame an acceptable target (educated and affluent women).
Fair comment, but I don't think a lot of working class men are losers! Rather, there's a lot of more structural problems in society that have created the conditions for their laggard performance.
Also, fwiw it's obviously amazing that women can divorce bad guys and have the economic agency to leave relationships. And shame on the social conservatives for wanting to drag us back to that oppressive era of American history.
It's a simple class issue, women and men in lower economic quintiles don't have a huge disparity if you remove stay-at-home women (20%ish v 30%ish), and top earning women marry at twice the rate of lower income women. I think this thread is pretty eye opening in that every lower income cohort male is called a loser and the real problem while the difference between genders really isn't that stark. Men make more and so are more likely to marry "down" the economic ladder, which skews this statistic even more. The "loser men" trope is tired and wrong.
There's no need to go calling people losers on an individual basis, but it's very clear that in our increasingly winner-take-all economy there are winners and losers.
Sure, but that is not gender specific. People in this thread aren't calling low income, low marriage rate women losers. I think some people are using the term to mean economic losers whereas many others here...are not
Being poor doesn't make you a loser. Being someone who is unwilling to work and then blames their misfortune on those around them does make you a loser.
If you someone alive today who was born in America, you're already one of the luckiest human beings in history. We've all won the lottery, and no amount of deindustrialization or whatever can change that.
We just can’t talk about class in our country. Neither the right nor the left can do it.
Working class people, by which I mean people that didn’t go to college, are mostly invisible, despite being a plurality. No one is writing about them in the NYT or Atlantic or WSJ.
The decline of marriage is clearly a class story. There was an article in the Atlantic about this before Covid, I think Vox (probably Yglesias?) has written this up as well years ago.
Working class people themselves don’t read articles, and educated people clearly don’t like reading about them.
Plurality is always tricky because it depends on the categories, but fewer than 40% of all adults did not attend college at all.
This issue disproportionately impacts the working class but it’s not only a class story—there is later and lower marriage and fertility across the board.
Specifically, looking at US numbers, I think the decline in fertility is measured by births per woman has plateaued for college educated women while it continues to fall for working class women.
Also, the policy implication of looking at lower income men as the problem is probably a significant amount of wealth redistribution, and heavy handed economic management to create stable, well paying career paths for people not really about to be nimble and flexible about it themselves.
NBER had a paper drop last week where they looked at the effects of Cold War military spending and manufacturing employment/wages.
They claim a substantial part of deindustrialization in the U.S. can be in part explained by the wind down of military spending.
"How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y'know, they lied to me."
It’s not that working class men are doing worse than 50 years ago. It’s that women are doing well enough on their own to not want mediocre husbands.
But there are also men who don’t want mediocre monogamy.
You have a tendency to mention the monogamy point but I think this might just be you. Like sure, in theory I’m sure plenty of guys would love to be dating 3 models at once. But I don’t think your average guy in a relationship is that interested in stuff on the side. Or to put it another way: it’s not like the options for your typical guy are “monogamous relationship with average-looking woman” vs. “have your pick of beautiful women with no commitment required”
+10000
I’m no expert but I’m skeptical that lower class women are refusing to marry eager to commit lower class men because they are “losers”. I think probably they can’t get them commit and men remain the marriage bottleneck and these women just have kids out of wedlock with unreliable partners, if at all.
Women gatekeep sex and men gatekeep marriage and it has ever been thus.
Hence the advice behind the advice of these pro marriage social conservatives is “don’t put out without a ring”.
My question is how did we wind up creating such a large cohort of losers relative to previous cohorts?
I think the number has always been consistent across cohorts, but in the past society gave women fewer avenues to avoid those losers.
My thought is that many of these losers aren’t so bad but the hedonic treadmill of expectations and opportunity costs of alternatives have outpaced their value.
Then there is the social structure aspect. If a man has a precarious labor market situation then he can be more of a burden on a household than asset.
While it's still a problem today, there were a lot more battered wives 50+ years ago.
But also, back then a cad was more likely to get married and have a family, while still being a cad on the side. These days, that's uncommon.
Exactly. I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago and there was this dude there who would not stop bitching about the fact that all his dad needed to get a wife was a pulse and a job, and it wasn't fair that women expected more now. No one gave him any pushback aside from me. (It was a male-dominated profession. The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules, because it was "just a joke." This was on the #1 forum for people in our profession at the time.)
The unsaid part here is that the woman who wpuld have married that "loser" is every bit as much of a "loser" as the man. She isnt the PhD woman working for the Cato Institute, she's making $13/hr working the front desk of a motel 6.
Just to clarify, that I am using “loser” as a descriptor of people who generally lots out during the neoliberal period (late 1970s to nowish.)
You and Jesse seem to be using it as a moral pejorative.
Is a major reason for less marriage at the low end of the education/income distribution women being unwilling to marry men they see as not good marriage prospects? How would we tell?
This is where sociologists doing interviews with large groups of women get narrative and stated preference data. Then they form a hypothesis and look at the question with aggregated economic data.
The men were always losers, the women just had no other choice. Now, in many ways, it is actually probably better financially (and emotionally) to for a non-college educated woman to have a job, but not a full-time relationship with a man.
23 year old women in rural Iowa working at a Wal-Mart can go home and read trashy Amazon Kindle stories and watch algorithmic content too.
This reads as a miserable existence.
As opposed to marrying a guy and having a kid while said guy doesn't want to chip in despite at times, actually working less than you do?
If you say, while just pick the non-college educated guy in your area who has a decent job and wants to be reasonably equal about childcare, you've already limited your options by a lot and that's not even getting into over possible clashes about values.
Yet that same Walmart worker would be considered a loser based on that Walmart job alone. If we are going to say a man is unmarriagable over an hourly Walmart job then why do we pretend like its a good thing for a woman? Her wage isn't providing any more to a potential family than her male counterpart.
Because, theoretically, she can have children. That’s why it’s hard to call women “losers,” most are born able to make babies. And women can now do that AND hold a job, men have to bring something more to the relationship than “make me a sandwich.”
It's way the hell better than being married to a loser.
I’m going through a Dune phase and was reading about how Frank Herbert was able to spend his time writing freely because his wife was the breadwinner, in the 1960s. My ex husband paid for my masters degree while we were married (which I paid back) and I still have men comment I couldn’t have done it without a man 😱. Yea bitch you couldn’t have progeny without women but where are our hero cards?
The shift toward fewer blue-collar jobs is an old story. But there’s also much more self-selection into same-class marriages. How often do you see office men marry their female admins, or male doctors marry female nurses now? It happens, but it used to be downright normal.
That theory is much popular (more assortative mating today) but I doubt if this is really true - because all the classical examples from the past are upper-class men marrying lower-class women (and the opposite was usually considered a social scandal - look to movies like "All That Heaven Allows"); attending that the number of men and women in each social class was roughly the same, many assymetric assortative marriage would mean many upper-class women and lower-class men staying single (what was not the case)
What I suspect is that much of the apparent inter-class marriages of the past were more the result of, in the past, many upper-class women not having upper-class jobs before marriage, giving the illusion that upper-class men were marrying lower-class women
Maybe those examples of the past were also shaped somewhat by more lower-class men being killed in wars or in workplace accidents?
I mean, the female admins are now analysts/salespeople/advertising execs/whatever as well and the nurses are now doctors too. It's the same reason actors end up marrying actors.
Weren't those admins or nurses from a considerably higher class than their equivalents today?
That is, young women from the middle class would not have access to a four-year college education and a BA, but might well go to secretarial college or nursing school and then end up marrying the doctor or office manager who might well have been a classmate of her brother in that very four-year college that the woman couldn't get into.
These days, that young woman is going to college herself and might become a doctor or a lawyer or a manager or go into marketing or HR.
Today's secretaries/admins and nurses (especially the LPNs, who are closer in educational achievement to the nurse of the 1950s or 1960s than the modern RN) are from a distinctly lower social tier than their predecessors 60 years ago.
I think lots of doctors still marry nurses due to proximity effects. Lots of nurses even have masters degrees. Doctors aren’t generally marrying the person 15 years younger with an associates though.
In addition to City of Trees's point, when you combine economic growth and upward mobility over decades, you're going to change the composition of the working class over time.
It’s always been like this, IIRC DNA studies show most people had twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors because over half of males generally didn’t get to reproduce.
And like 1/3 of women never reproduced historically too.
Right, but people having twice as many female ancestors means the percentage of men who reproduced would’ve been half the percentage of women, so if 1/3rd of women didn’t reproduce, then 2/3rds of men didn’t. It was not the norm historically for below-average or even average men to have a good family life.
There are many historic genetic bottlenecks (like the Neolithic horse people killing and displacing all the men in Europe), disparate male fatality rates, noble fertility patterns, and other not so nice things too.
I know a few very successful couples who started dating in college and IMO should have gotten married in their mid 20s, but there was exactly zero chance that would cause them to *have kids* in their mid-20s which seems to be the unstated desire here
I got married at 25, am now in my mid 30s, still married, want kids but don't have them yet. My friend group, other college educated adults in their mid 30s, are all only now starting to have kids or trying to.
Only few of them are succesful and focusing on their careers. The reason they don't want kids is that they are a big responsibility! People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.
The first 2 are cultural so I don't see how you can change that. For the later the biggest impact things would be to lower housing prices (people feel more "settled" and ready as a homeowner) and decrease daycare price (exactly no one looks forward to a "second mortgage").
Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we are now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did.
Bingo! It is cultural. People in the past didn’t have the means to spend their whole 20s and 30s doing this. Now we do, and the culture has shifted as a result. Nobody wants to be the woman in the image at age 24. As a man in my 20s, I had zero interest in marriage and kids. By my mid 30s, I did.
“People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.”
It seems like it must be heavily cultural, but the fertility collapse is everywhere, and the US, Japan, China, Russia, and Italy seem like pretty distinct cultures!
While it feels like there should be one unifying explanation for why it's happening everywhere I think we are seeing many different things:
1. In rich countries the opportunity cost of having children has gone up, so people have them later.
2. The US made a lot of progress fighting teenage pregnancy in the 90s. Some countries, like a lot in LATAM, are only doing that now.
3. In very poor countries they are still urbanizing. Urbanization has a long history of reducing children per couple.
4. Probably something about technology and the phones making spreading cultural changes easier.
I'm sure there's a lot more
I feel like the norm among highly educated people I know (or at least was eight years ago or whatever) is that a lot of them are basically married in their 20s anyway but they wait until they're 30 or 32 to actually have a wedding because maybe they're doing long distance for grad school or haven't saved up for the party or whatever (and aren't having kids yes). This is personal bias, but honestly it seems fine; they (we) all seem to have turned out just fine. There's still plenty of time to have two or three kids if you start at 32.
In principle, yes, but lots of things can inhibit kids even in the 30s. Basic chemotherapy, for example, is bad for male reproduction and generally apocalyptic for women's reproduction.
Yes. We got engaged earlier but same
Agree 100%. I know a handful of couples where both people have college degrees and started dating in high school or early college, but then waited to get married until their late 20s. Weird to me, but there’s no way marrying earlier would’ve resulted in kids earlier.
And we were the educated couple who got married at 23 (yes, religious). Still didn’t have a kid until 31 (young by academia standards though!)
I personally married my college girlfriend when I was 22 and we now have 2 kids, but we had the kids in our late 30s.
I think those people are still success stories. The failure mode that these people seem to be worried about is being in relationships in your 20s with people who do not want to commit and have kids with you, or with whom you would not want to have kids. Start looking for a co parent earlier and then lock them down, basically.
I got married at 22 and had first kid at 29. Idk what you mean by “very successful” but our HH income is >$500k and we’re 40…
Good advice, Matt.
If I remember correctly, a big part of Jordan Peterson's early rise to prominence was based on this type of message to young men. It was quite popular *among men* but widely panned during the height of the woke era (I hate that term, but don't know what else to call the ubiquitousness of DEI / Trans / pronouns during the 2015-2024 period)
Never been a big Peterson fan. Obviously he says some unobjectionable stuff about making your bed and generally being on top of your shit. But I think young boys also need to hear stuff like: be a compassionate person, a good listener, patient and respectful. I also never got the sense that Peterson wanted young men to seek out equality in their relationships. Like part of being in a modern educated relationship is being sometimes fluid in your gender roles and men shouldn't think they need to be typecasted as some macho macho man all the time.
To throw a bone to his defenders, Early Peterson is indeed very different from Later Peterson. He’s a cautionary tale about audience capture and the dangers of fame and buying your own hype.
So was early Peterson basically just the more benign stuff?
I think he’s a cautionary tale about benzos personally. Dude had a bad reaction and went crazy (especially given the unhealthy info environment he landed in, with both unreasonable worshipers and crazy detractors).
I would say that past 15 years that cultural elites have generally denigrated men and not offered them much patience, compassion, or respect.
For example, when you have the CDC listing disparate impacts of Covid or suicide and omitting the most disparately affected group (men) from any discussion, it signals something callous about priorities. It undermines trust.
Seeking out equality in a relationship is not necessarily a good thing. mutual respect is not the same thing as equality.
Also, your roles are necessarily a bit different when you start having children. No matter how supportive a father I am (very), I couldn't ever carry a baby to term or breastfeed them, and doing those things has a big impact on everything else. A job with long hours or a lot of travel is hard to square with those things when you have very young children, and even when the kids are older it's almost unworkable for both parents to have the heavy travel jobs.
Ironically, Peterson failed to take his own advice and is whacked out on benzos.
Which doesn't discredit his advice.
Meh? If you’re going to make your public persona about a certain thing, you kind of DO invalidate it with directly hypocritical misconduct.
Like, if Rick Santorum comes out as gay, everyone instantly knows he’s an even bigger asshole than he ever came across as. By contrast, if he comes out as an anti-vaxxer, it doesn’t directly invalidate anything he said about homosexuality, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality.
I told my kids not to drink alcohol until they were of age, even though I had my first beer at age 16.
Hypocrisy ex ante is different from hypocrisy post hoc.
“I learned this lesson” is different from “I told you not to do drugs but now I’m on drugs”.
The point here is the hypocrisy of the messenger doesn't change the message itself. Being strung out on benzos is bad and that fact doesn't change based on some internet takesters life choices.
I never watched his content, but one of my best friends was driven crazy by the backlash against him. “The guy’s advice is take a shower, clean your room, and get a job. How did he become this avatar of right wing evil? Is there some anti-men-taking-showers constituency? Are men perpetuating systemic racism and sexism if they clean their rooms?”
Because to most left-leaning people he wasn't the "clean your room guy" he was the "freaking out about supposedly being under the yoke of the evil Canadian gov't to use the right pronouns" guy.
He had a point about that for like two minutes, and then he went on an all meat diet in Russia or whatever it was and came back full-on batshit. Not a well man, if he ever was.
Oh sure - but my point is Scott Galloway can of makes many of the same arguments and while there's some left-wing criticism because he has views left wingers disagree with, there's no push to paint him as some evil figure because at worse, he has some dumb ideas.
Yeah, I'm far from giving him credit for anything. He should have stuck with "clean your room".
If he went to Russia I wonder if he was ensnared by an FSB honeytrap operation while he was there, and thus came back a kompromized asset of the Kremlin?
Sometimes, people you disagree with are just people you disagree with, rather than agents of the vast evil conspiracy,
Being seen to advocate or acknowledge the challenges men faced during that era was seen as a “distraction” from the challenges women faced. It was very zero sum.
The rhetoric of those years was as toxic as current-day MAGA rhetoric, but with different targets and terminology.
Most good broad-applicability life advice is neither novel nor interesting, so to become a public figure who’s famous for giving such advice, you need to put it in some sort of weird attention-getting package that only loosely relates to the advice. In Peterson’s case, the framework included stuff like obsessions with transphobia and all-meat diets, confusing rhetoric about lobsters, and a body of psychoanalytic theory that, as far as I can tell from reading summaries, is like what Carl Jung would have produced if he routinely smoked crack.
It’s pretty obvious that the backlash was mostly more about the attention-seeking packaging than it was about “clean your room.” (Most of the object-level recommendations in “12 Rules for Life” are things that most adults would correctly agree with.)
“Clean your room” isn’t that important though! Lots of successful people never did it and most people who can afford it hire someone to do it.
I've never watched Peterson or any of these dudes but to this specific point, therein lies the paradox. If a man is already successful, super talented or attractive, or just otherwise juiced in somehow, he can let the small stuff go. On the other hand if he's at a point where he's seeking out this kind of advice, it's probably a good idea to take a look at the low hanging fruit that might in aggregate make his life better.
I never read his books (I'm a little old for self-help books directed at young men), but I did listen to a few episodes of his podcast, and he was really an excellent interviewer. Several of his podcast episodes were quite good, because he engaged deeply and intelligently with his interviewee.
Woke started in African American circles, then got appropriated by white progressives, then got contextualized into the NGO rent seeking grift, and now has finally become a core tenant of Republican pearl clutching and cancel culture.
MattY calls it the Great Awokening.
I also like MY's term and have 'appropriated' it.
The very term "woke" has its origins in African-American English.
I used to watch a fair bit of Peterson and I thought his Bible and mythology stuff was interesting, but he kind of screwed up his own life despite being incredibly successful so I’m not so sure it’s good for men to be taking him that seriously.
Media/online culture do not do a good job putting up role models--you get attention by being bad/loud/screwy in various ways.
Based on my experience and what I’ve seen of the data, a major driver of the decline of marriage in America, perhaps the biggest driver, is that it became socially acceptable for working class white women to cohabitate with men they weren’t married to. It became much more socially acceptable to have women out of wedlock children.
I have 3 aunts born in the early 60s. They didn’t go to college. They are all divorced. They married losers - abusive men, men with substance abuse issues, men who couldn’t hold down jobs, etc. My cousins, ie their kids, partnered with losers too, they just didn’t marry them. Instead they had kids out of wedlock.
I have 4 female first cousins. None of them are married. 3 of them are mothers, and 2 are divorced.
It does seem like the lesson many have learned from high divorce rates is “don’t get married” rather than “be a good partner and find a good partner.”
I think many of these decisions about whether and when to get married are driven by personal experience rather than broad societal trends. It’s why solving this is hard.
I mean, in large chunks of the country, there's a lack of good partners, period and there always have been and always will be.
I mean sure, but in that situation people seem to be deciding I'll still partner with these people but won't marry them. When ideally the decision would be "I'm going to move" or "I'm going to be single." I get that it's easy for me to say that since I have found a great partner. But it seems uncontroversial to say that the outcome of not getting married but having kids with bad partners is not a good outcome.
Yes this is it. Unfortunately this is true. When I was I kid (90s and 00s) society and the Christian church in the South (with which I’m most familiar) pushed women to marry/stay with these men who are unfit for marriage. There has since been a shift - and that’s a good thing.
Didn’t Charles Murray try to tell this story 20 yrs ago? But he might have mixed it up with so many other things that everyone could just yell “Bell Curve racist” (with some good reason) and ignore the parts that might be valid.
Coming Apart was very much worth reading, and it was reviewed pretty widely. His thesis was that there was a social/values change that affected working class/underclass people far more than professional/educated class people, and partly he attributed this to people on the higher end of society not preaching what they practice. That is, most top-1%-income people live with something like what a person in the 1950s would call traditional values, but mostly pay lip service to a much more permissive set of values. But also probably this has to do with the massive sorting on intelligence/diligence that he discussed originally as a possibility in The Bell Curve.
The thesis of Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" was fundamentally hereditarian, and hereditarianism is anathema to most liberals because there is strong evidence that a hereditarian world view tends to make people callous towards their "inferiors".
The Nazi "Aktion T4" project to murder severely disabled Germans was a clear example of this, especially if we ask the question "why didn't the Soviets do something similar?"
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian dictatorships that cared nothing for either public opinion or Abrahamic morality, and the USSR was also considerably poorer (to the point it had lost millions of its people in famines) such that it would have a considerably stronger material incentive to dispose of "useless eaters". And a policy of outright murdering the disabled (as opposed to the far more historically prevalent eugenicist policy of sterilizing them) doesn't even require one to hold that their disability was genetic in the first place.
Most people are at least somewhat hereditarian in their own lives though, as with the common voice when getting married to look at your future mother in law to see your future wife.
Maybe, just maybe working class people ought to start shaming other working class people into marriage instead of expecting the chattering classes to do it; assuming the lack of fingerwagging is the problem.
Yes this was always the problem with Stephanie Kelton's thesis: if being lectured at by the professional class got working class men to do things then they'd all be driving Prius's and voting for Elizabeth Warren--it's not like the professional classes never lecture the working class about *anything*. But it demonstrably doesn't work!
“And this seems to me like a recurring problem in center-right discussions of marriage and family: Cultural conservatives are either afraid to say what they actually mean, or else are just so accustomed to arguing with feminists about abortion and child care subsidies that they reflexively want to continue fighting with them.”
Seems like the latter. And my guess is that there’s a funding ecosystem of geriatric donors who don’t think the family think tanks are getting the job done unless they’re browbeating women to settle down.
I'm sure that the temptation for the latter is always there, but I'm much more suspecting the former, per my top level comment.
There clearly is a conservative version of the "Groups" which involves getting women to do what they are told.
This. Organized activist groups have a loud voice in public, even if they're not all that many people/voters.
"Please address this directly at my three granddaughters so one of them gives me a great-grandchild before I die off!"
Idk, the reason you write things aimed at educated young women encouraging them to marry is the same reason NYT writes all their bizarro world lifestyle trends aimed at educated women, that's who reads lifestyle pieces.
If you want to reach non-college young men you'd do it on Twitch or write a pro-marriage Manga, or something.
Overall if you want to encourage hetero marriage, you should probably be engaging with both men and women.
I don’t think your average NYT lifestyle section reader is going there for actual life advice. I read the NYT Modern Love section for the same reason Denzel reads the paper in Training Day: it’s 90% bullshit but it’s entertaining.
Pro marriage manga had me cackling lol. But it is actually a good point!
Replace all those horrible gambling app ads during basketball games with PSAs encouraging young men to marry their girlfriend, stick around to raise their kid, be a dedicated father, etc.
This probably won't help much (changing social norms is hard), but at least it will get rid of the f--king 24/7/365 gambling ads.
I'd like to tie this to pushing back at the polarization of all education before joining the labor force and all "leisure" (retirement) after leaving it. There should be less prpfssional "penalty" for dropping in and out of the labor force to "go back to school" or to "have a few kids."
I also don't know how to effect this social change, but I think that a child allownce and progressive taxation of consumption (education is not consumption), not income, would help. :)
Hard agree. This has been a low key obsession of mine for a bit, a colleague and I were discussing how sabbaticals should be normalized and government supported. This was in an AI job loss prediction context, but it has many contextual applications.
As with most of this stuff, the solution is a cultural change. And a necessary if not sufficient condition is for the Brooklyn crowd to stop convincing itself that eg polyamory is cool and smart. And that’s why I’m a bit surprised that Matt doesn’t think the fact that we get endless content about how marriage is bad for women warrants much attention. One might even say the Brooklyn crowd is out of touch in this regard!
As someone who lives in Brooklyn I cannot roll my eyes at this hard enough. Like 95% of the people who live in Park Slope are married lawyers with 2 kids who volunteer at the PTO. And then the other 5% is the people writing the poly books because all the normies find them super salacious and buy them by the armful. It's like judging what the "Atlanta crowd" is like by watching episodes of the Real Housewives.
Bro I live in Brooklyn too. Have my whole life. Also an extremely vanilla person like your Park Slope couple. But come on, what’s a better shorthand?
SF, definitely
But the SF crowd isn’t as influential culturally. Otherwise, good call.
Yeah but they're definitely more strongly associated with these fringe behaviors so it makes up for it.
The answer to "why is all of the family content from perspective X aimed at women" is obtained by deleting the words "from perspective X" from the question. The major consumers of this content are women, and I'm willing to be quite a lot that it's mostly women who are already in the situation being praised. If you got married already, then "yay marriage" content is great. If your options on Hinge are depressing, then "boo marriage" content is going to be popular.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it happens. But that’s what the IFS is (my guess) trying to counter. Whether it’s going to be successful or not - hey maybe, here we are talking about it, and everyone knows Brooklyn media elite opinion is downstream of SlowBorer elite-of-the-elite opinion. That’s why Joe Biden made all policy decisions by first calling up Matt and asking him what he thinks.
Do the hoi polloi actually take their cues from the Brooklyn crowd, or are they just a convenient scapegoat?
I think it’s clear that they do, inconsistently and downstream of several mediating factors.
Judging by my factory floor there's not much evidence of this. The number of people that think "the Jews" control everything greatly exceeds those who have heard the term "polyamory".
Ripe for a new theory in which the Jews use polyamory to control everything.
What does polyamory have to do with the expectation of no career breaks?
Be me, hate dating apps and want to meet men in person. Start volunteering with local community. Full of great guys but they are all already married. Join rock climbing group, but once again, most men are already married. In panic, start attending church fellowship events despite not being particularly pious. Full of the best dudes you'll ever meet, but naturally they are always married. For sure there is something wrong with me, but it would help to know where is this abundance of good men who just can't wait to start families that I keep hearing about.
Yes, the whole "get involved in non-dating interactions" argument regularly strikes me as missing the point that those interactions are intending to do something else other than being dating markets. We need more explicit matchmaking avenues that aren't designed to be a maw of dissatisfaction like is increasingly seen of online dating.
"We need more explicit matchmaking avenues"
The opposite - "explicit matchmaking avenues" are the better way to find BAD relationships (this is what happen when people enter in relationships with people who are not previous friends or at least close acquintances)
I don't quite understand what you're asserting here. If people don't have friends or at least close acquaintances who are also open to dating, what are people supposed to do?
If they're such good catches why are they in the matchmaking venues past their sell by date?
You seem to live in a world where all married people are superior and all unmarried people are losers.
Could be many reasons! But if they want to look for someone they should be able to get some help if they need it.
I’m a single man looking for a relationship that leads to marriage and kids, and I’ve had a similar experience but with the genders reversed. I can’t even remember the last time I met an attractive woman in person who was single. I’ve concluded that dating apps are the least bad option once you get into your 30s.
When you get into your 30s dating becomes a market for lemons. My wife’s friend is dealing with this. I told her to date a short uggo because then she knows why they were single (unlike those NYC finance guys.)
You could always solve the "all the good ones are taken" problem by joining a polycule
/s
A few thoughts.
1) We have delayed adulthood so much in our society. We limit how much unsupervised and unstructured time we allocate to children more on average which means they don’t develop the independence necessary for adult life until later. For a long while we see less teens with jobs. This in turn has delayed natural adult relationships from developing.
2) The economic prospects of people without college degrees has materially eroded over the past 50 years. This coupled with the hedonic treadmill of expectations as to what children need and what families should have has created a barrier to coupling.
3) Marriage is also a status game. The evolution of online dating has made this type of pressure more acute. High status people often meet and marry in college when search costs for parters is relatively low. We are seeing people who don’t have high social status being left by the wayside and they don’t have the “college experience” to artificially put young people together in constant social situations.
4) Finally, the opportunity cost of marrying any specific individual has gone up over time. There are many more competitions for time, wages are higher so the returns to career investment are higher, and there are more “alternatives” to find a better match (perceived or real.)
point 1 is bang on. the number of students coming to college who are absolutely not ready for real life (accounting for all the "generation thinks the one coming after is worse" bias) is nuts.
Realistically, I doubt this has anything to do with a serious policy argument -- I think it mostly reflects a kind of anxiety in which conservative women (and the men who marry them) feel about having traded career/education for starting a family earlier and they want to reassure themselves they did the right thing by saying it loudly.
But to be charitable let me try to offer a steelman of one view that those on the right could have: yes, educated women are doing relatively well in terms of getting married but less educated women are not but you can't exactly tell them "your not smart/educated/etc enough to wait to get married". Even if it's fine for educated women to hold off on marriage because they won't lack for partners and aren't going to make bad choices about having children outside of marriage that's not true for less educated women. But you don't convince people to do things by telling them they don't have the status to act like the educated women you do it by pretending they are getting the better deal by getting married while the educated women wait.
There is also the version that's basically about educated women not having enough children and thinks that if they get married earlier they might have more kids.
I completely agree with the suspicion that these people are motivated by anxiety over their life choices. I have observed in myself that I became a lot less judgmental about other people's decision-making in my head once I was genuinely confident and happy with my own choices. If you have to yell at other people to do what you did to prove that you did the right thing, it's a sign you don't really believe it.
While I broadly agree, I don't think you are taking seriously the extent to which women pursuing careers is the cause of much later marriage.
That graph you showed picks an age (45) at which career delay of marriage won't be apparent but will show the general decline in the institution of marriage that generally concentrates amoung the least educated.
I *like* the fact that women going to college and graduate school or starting a career mean we marry later but it is a real effect. And it isn't only a direct effect but since people like to mimic those with higher social status it changes the social norms as well. I wouldn't blame the decline in marriage on it but I suspect the fact that the elite get married later to some extent discourages early marriage in groups which might benefit.
> since people like to mimic those with higher social status it changes the social norms as well.
This has a very direct effect on a lot of expectations (which makes dating, weddings, moving in together, having kids a lot more expensive), which is great on one hand (we have better technology, better real median income, having ambitions is good), but it has downsides too.
Is it a downside that it filters out less successful people? Would they be happy otherwise? Does this somehow affect one gender more than the other? Are men expected to come up with this "income gap" to fund dating, and weddings, and ..? (I don't think so, but at the same time too high expectations can lead to a lot of people being alone.) And if there's some gender difference is that fair? Even if in general we think it's fair, are there groups who are significantly more burdened by this?
OK, well you're not going to get 22 year olds at Ivy's to get married and have a couple of kids and any pressure to do so would just result in the kids at the Ivy's being more clear they aren't going to do that.
Sure, but you also won't convince the people who aren't going to college by telling them: late marriage is for people smarter and better than you. If you want to convince everyone else to get married the suggestion that they are really the ones getting the better deal isn't a bad way to sell it.
But mostly I just wanted to get the facts straight ... I don't really think this is about changing social patterns anyway as much as an attempt to raise the status of the kind of women in elite conservative circles who choose to have a family early instead of a career that they could have had.
I mean, the religious had a good deal when they could paint the city dwelling dilettantes as evil sinners who will burn in damnation so they weren't actually getting the better deal but that isn't working anymore.
Of course the actual problem is people getting married at 22-23 is largely good for one thing - having lots of children, but nobody outside of non-educated people in some parts of Africa and Ultra-Orthodox Jews want to do that anymore. Even Saudi Arabia TFR is plummeting and if they can't figure out a way to stop it, I doubt shaming sociology grads at the University of Michigan to get hitched is going to help that much.
Yes, I largely agree. See my other comment which speculates that is the a substantial motive for the remarks by conservatives. But it's not the only motive and might as well engage charitably.
I mean, there's lots of policies I think are good and correct that would also make my political opponents worse off in some ways.
Sorry, I don't really follow. It kinda sounds like you are disagreeing when I thought I was agreeing with you?
But how do you even meet someone to marry if you don’t go to college? You’ll never be surrounded by so many eligible singles your age again. Just meeting people to date and marry is one of the big reasons marriage rates have fallen much more for people who didn’t go to college and women not going to college would make this problem worse unless we set up arranged marriage type systems.
Fair point. Don't think it contradicts anything I said but that is probably a factor.
If "people like to mimic those with higher social status" wouldn't working class people all be driving Priuses and Subarus (and lusting after electric BMWs)? And also voting for Democrats and not buying guns and etc. etc.
“I suspect the fact that the elite get married later to some extent discourages early marriage in groups which might benefit.”
The impact of this has to be marginal at best. And why aren’t these same groups marrying later then?
People do lots of things because that's what high status people do -- that's what most advertising is based on.
But, as I said, I *don't* think it is the primary driving force behind the decrease in marriages. But one plausible theory is that more educated women who delay marriage don't suffer a penalty from doing so but delay makes it much harder for less educated women who mimic that behavior..
“But one plausible theory is that more educated women who delay marriage don't suffer a penalty from doing so but delay makes it much harder for less educated women who mimic that behavior..”
I’m trying to think of *why* a less educated woman who chose not to marry at 22 would find it relatively harder to get married later than an educated woman — unless you believe that all the guys she could choose from also want to get married at 22 (which seems unlikely)?
1) less educated women are overall less desirable on the marriage market -- if you are more desirable you can compromise to find a guy who wants to get married.
2) sadly the further down the SES ladder you are the quicker your looks decay (money, less stress, more conscientious, better medical care etc all help preserve looks).
3) (as the piece kinda suggests) the educated men are relatively more likely to want to get married anyway so less of a penalty and more likely to stay together over a long period without marriage.
4) my sense is that often the less educated women who don't get married are romantically entangled with a guy who isn't really that great for them (on and off relationship or just someone who isn't good marriage material) and the social support and same skills that got them that education make the more educated women less likely to put up with that and clear the decks for a better relationship.
Other than 2 - which is a decent theory! - I don’t see why this impacts the *relative* fortunes of the two groups.
Like #4 is probably true but if you’re saying the alternative option for these women is just to marry that guy who isn’t right for them, then what have you really accomplished?
I'm not trying to accomplish anything. I just said there is an effect of high education women marrying later reducing the marriage rates of low education women. I'm not at all convinced that pushing marriage on women would be a good thing. Seems like a complicated question (could be quite bad for exactly the reason you said) and I don't have a position on it...my instinct is to say it's bad to push early marriage but that's probably just my bias.
My intuition as someone who isn't that conscientious is that if I delay something I'm less likely to ever get around to it than someone who is more conscientious especially when it's an easier problem for them. Is that a good thing? Fucked if I know.
that it's generally an easier thing for high education women to get married and the more conscientious you are the more likely you are to get around to making it happen but fucked if I know if that's a good or bad thing.
I think "all the guys she could choose from also want to get married at 22" is getting close.
In a lot of the conservative Christian world (and I hear the same is true in the Orthodox Jewish world), a lot of people get married fairly young, and the ones who don't are disproportionately misfits. (Like me, but that's a story for in person.) So the pool of people to marry - for both men and women - is significantly worse at 30 than at 21, since a lots of the better prospects married already.
Right but you have to believe this is relatively different for the uneducated vs the educated which I haven’t seen anyone posit a good theory on.
I think "once half your cohort is married, the remaining half is somewhat anti-selected" is true for both educated and uneducated. But the age at which half your cohort is married differs by education/class, but also by culture/religious affinity.
I partnered late because I am bald and short. Search costs in dating were very high for me.
A few reasons. If the man ages and matures, he has a broader age range of candidates. Generally it’s more socially acceptable for an older guy to marry a younger woman. This gendered expectation can result in filtering out potential partners.
As you get older generally the opportunity costs of searching for a partner increase. You have more demands for your time. If we think there is a relative disparity in quality between non-college educated women and men, then age would exacerbate this partnering search further.
But again your statements seem to be true for *all* women / relationships.
What I’m asking is why it would be the case that it’s relatively easier for an educated women to wait until she’s 30 than it would be for a non-educated woman.
One reason that comes to my mind is social expectation - no one thinks it’s weird if you’re 30 and unmarried if you’ve gotten two degrees, while if you haven’t really been doing anything besides working since you were 18, and you’re 30 and unmarried, it might send partners a signal about you. But again that seems marginal.
An educated woman with good financial prospects has more potential suitors relative to one without those qualities. Generally the returns to that deferred marriage/fertility for the educated woman are higher than the less educated woman. So the relative tradeoffs are different as time progresses.
There are status and material aspects to this. The expectations portion as to what is acceptable would probably be a minor pressure.
I suspect it is easier to move cultural norms toward "have more sex and take on less responsibility for the resulting children" than the opposite.
'Someone needs to tell them to either stay in school or else take some other conscientiousness-demonstrating path (i.e., join the military, complete an apprenticeship)'
This advice is good, but feel it is rather like saying that the solution to obesity is just to reduce calorific intake. Yes. But we know that is very hard without GLP-1 inhibitors or other major intervention.
The problem is there are no equivalent of GLP-1 inhibitors for conscientiousness or for gaining intellectual ability. Some people are bad at education.
Nicotine is a bit like the GLP-1 for intellectual ability, the effect isn't huge but it exists and explains its popularity.
I need MattY to write the liberal defense of Zyns
Much better than tobacco, not rivalrous of air space like vaping...
To do well in school requires intelligence, sure. But it also requires conscientiousness, agreeableness, good impulse control etc. Some folks here seem to be putting too much weight on the earnings part and if only the guys made more money they would be good husbands. But even if they made more money they'd still be lazy, disagreeable and impulsive. And at the end of the day a lot of women want a partner and not another (man) child.
TBF, part of the reason why women in prior decades were OK w/ the lazy, disagreeable, and impulsive men of the 70's, 80's and 90s is they likely made much more than they did.
But yes, the combo of increased economic security even for low wage women compared to 30 years ago + guys crappy actions make it easier for women to say nah. Especially in a world where women can log onto social media and find out what their possible partner does in their free time.
Yeah I think a big part of this isn't really that some segment of the population has somehow become worse on some metric. It's that society has become richer which has allowed more people to have optionality.
I used to live in Vietnam, which is dramatically poorer than America, and the whole concept of being a "gold digger" (but without the negative connotations that English phrase has, in Vietnamese you'd say "go fishing") or trading off your youth and beauty is prevalent there in ways that (mostly) died out decades ago in the US. Like, Vietnam has dozens of beauty pageants (don't ask me why) and all of them end up married to some rich businessman 20 years older.
At a smaller scale that same shift means all those men who uses to coast of being able to make $28/hour at the GM plant in Janesville suddenly need to bring more to the table.
I'd argue the guy making $28/hr at the GM plant is still probably fine and in some ways, probably better off than say, an IT guy making low six-figures in San Francisco who has never been in a workplace or classroom that wasn't 85%+ male since high school.
The issue is the guy who used to make $25/hr (equivalent) at another plant that didn't exist by time he was 19 and he now works making $15/hr installing solar panels or whatever needs more because now, instead of basically nothing, the women is also making similar amounts working behind the desk as a medical admin or more as a nurse.
Why would a male dominated workforce at a factory be better off than a male dominated workforce at a tech company? I don't quite follow.
Jesse Ewiak has an extremely bizarre hobby horse about disproportionately male workplaces specifically in Silicon Valley, which both disregards that (1) there are lots of other just as disproportionately male workplaces today and (2) prior to the 1970s, a very large percentage of workplaces were disproportionately male.
Ok but whenever this comes up I want to ask: aren’t these working class women *also* more likely to be lazy, disagreeable, low conscientiousness, and impulsive? Seems like men who are similar are perfect matches for them.
Why do we assume that all women are great?
Women do tend to be more agreeable and conscientious than men.
True but it should also track that as you go down the list the woman at the 30th percentile may be more conscientious than the 30th percentile man but that doesn't mean she's objectively very conscientious.
Yes so less bandwidth to deal with a man child.
This discourse is so mired in selection bias that it's hard to know what to make of it. Should you marry in your early 20s? Under the right circumstances, sure. Those include things like: you're in a good, stable long-term relationship; your educational and career aspirations are compatible; you can reach a mutual understanding you're both committed to about supporting each other in those aspirations. It sounds like all of those were true for Ekins. But how often is that true for people pursuing professional careers in their early 20s? That's a narrow slice of potential marriages but the point extends. I'm sure there are people who would benefit from marrying but there are also people for whom marrying was a mistake. And I don't know how to assess relative quantities given the selection effects (you can't just say "married people on average are better off" and assume that holds causally for any particular marriage).
Yep. In my friend groups there's several who "did it right"--dated a couple of years in college, lived together for a few years and professional moves, married--and then divorced a few years later.
Maybe if they married early there would have been a better shot? Or maybe they shouldn't have married in the first place? Or maybe it was just good while it lasted and life goes on?
So I think the thrust of the discussion is whether to relax all of those constraints that you define as “the right circumstance”. And indeed, the whole reason there is a discussion is because many take it for granted that those constraints are not just correct, but so obviously non-negotiable that even discussing them is a waste of time.
Right. But that's the problem: if the argument is that we should relax the constraints, you can't point to people who married under the constraints and say "look, it worked out." What if marrying early means sacrificing your career for your spouse's or risking marrying someone who will mistreat you or divorcing in a few years because it turns out your aspirations are incompatible? General statistics that married people are happier don't tell us whether those are good ideas.
Well yes there’s never going to be a randomized clinical trial of marriage. Is it such a radical claim to make that people have gotten substantially more risk averse over time? Or that that risk aversion might make them miscalculate with respect to marriage? Maybe married vs. unmarried is 90% risk tolerance and 10% selection bias of who lucked into circumstances conducive to marriage.
I don't see any reason to think people have gotten more risk-averse over time. But circumstances have changed a lot. People are less willing to bear risk when society is more affluent because your ability to maintain a decent standard of living is less dependent on risk-bearing. The same logic applies to marriage, particularly for women: if your only path to supporting yourself economically is finding a husband, or if nonmarital sex and/or being unmarried is severely stigmatized, you'll bear more marriage risk than if you can support yourself with your own career. It's not that I can't conceive of the possibility that some people are too averse to marriage (I said upfront that I thought that was true!) But it's just not clear that this is a big social problem or even that it's bigger than the problem of people being insufficiently averse to (risky or bad) marriages.
This is very confused. Try to write down a mental model of this using math and see if it makes sense.
And why is the conclusion always to blame men?
Not everyone has the aptitude for college. And if you earn a Mickey Mouse degree at the bottom of your class and then can't get professional work so you're in retail or construction but you also have college debt, is that really going to help your marriage prospects?
I do think "earn more and be more impressive" is good advice for young men. But if that's followed by "... in hopes that high-flying young women can tolerate you, but don't expect them to look up to you, and plan to do somehow so half the childcare and housework so she can have as much of a career as you do, even though there aren't enough hours in the day, because otherwise you're sexist... and know that she doesn't really *need* you... and don't think she has a duty to bear your children... and also, make sure not to blame her if she gets bored and divorces you, it was probably your fault for not having a sense of humor or something..." Why on earth *should* men take that deal?
"Yelling at." I don't see much yelling-at on the social conservative side. More like gentle exhortation. But feminists have definitely been "yelling at" men for a long time. The imbalance goes very much the other way.
Women should know that if they don't get married in their 20s, they're less likely to get married and a lot less likely to have kids. To get married in their 20s, they should display a life orientation to marriage and children. When society lets women dedicate their 20s to career advancement without ever warning them that their chance to have children is likely being missed, and that it's very unlikely that any career will bring them as much meaning or do the world as much good, then society has betrayed, injured, failed them.
Yes, no "yelling at," please. Just report the facts.
My wife and I got married at 22. I have 3 young daughters. We’re going to do everything in our power to communicate to them that marrying a man who doesn’t pull in weight (professionally and domestically) is one of the biggest mistakes that they could possibly make in life. We would in almost all circumstances strongly discourage our daughters from getting married as young as we did.
There are many inaccurate things in this post (eg working class women mostly would prefer to be SAHMs), but the issue is not about whether high flying women are tolerating working class men. It's that for many working class women, they did something like get an associates degree and a stable job, and they would like to marry someone with similar levels of ambition and stability. Currently, a significant share of the relevant men are failing on those counts.
"plan to do somehow so half the childcare and housework so she can have as much of a career as you do, even though there aren't enough hours in the day" doesn't make a ton of sense to me, is the claim that two-earner (or even worse, single parent!) households are impossible?
It can work if you can afford to pay for childcare. If.
The problem is creating a *duty* for a man to accommodate his wife's career ambitions somehow even if the SAHM route makes the most economic sense.
It's hard enough to support a family without that.
Why is it the duty of the women to give up her ambitions? Maybe that's why women are less interested in marriage.
There are a few factors to think about.
One, men generally receive status from work done outside the household and the gender expectation of “breadwinner” is still very much present even among progressive women.
Two, men generally receive little social status or respect when they are primary care givers.
There is a lot to unpack behind these cultural expectations but they are real asymmetric factors.
Yes, well said. But of course, it is often the duty of men to give up some ambitions for the sake of marriage and family. They usually do need a job to pay the bills, though, so it takes a different form.
As I stated elsewhere, the economic prospects of people without college degrees have consistently become more precarious in the U.S.. As a result in non college educated households often become or are seen as potential liabilities by women.
"not everyone has the aptitude for college" is something that probably should be true but it feels like a bit of an aspiration rather than a description of reality or current policy.
Colleges are passing illiterate people who clearly didn't interact or engage with their education and if they are doing it in a discriminatory way that is an issue for the marriage situation.
No one is blaming men, they're just saying stop yelling at women.
>or else take some other conscientiousness-demonstrating path (i.e., join the military, complete an apprenticeship)'
Matt did give an alternative to higher ed.
MattY is reacting to right wing Twitter types in this post.
I think much of this is connected to the points made in the viral Jacob Savage article. (https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/). We have, for decades, in schools especially, prioritized the female/feminine over the male/masculine, especially in progressive/blue environments.* We really did make it much harder for men to thrive and feel they were valued.
Now, conservatives in power, many of whom are overtly sexist, want to restore men to their former glory and the way they see to do that is to punch down on those whom they think were unfairly benefited over the past thirty years: women and people of color.
Both approaches aren't very helpful if we want people to get married, let alone have kids. And the approaches that would budge the needle are both expensive and will require those on both sides to put aside their anger. This, sadly, seems unlikely.
*I have four children, all in their early 30s, two of whom are boy/girl twins. We live in a lovely, liberal, highly educated world. The difference in how my daughter was seen and treated compared to my son was stark.