Marriage has failed because it was never all that great for a lot of people. In the halcyon days of the '50s and '60s everyone loves to romanticize, marriage benefited men more than it did women, and it has *never* meant fidelity for either gender, but especially men back then when women were more financially dependent. The 'squares' might have railed about how promiscuous the young folk were with their 'free love' et al, while many of them were playing the field with wives and single gals they met at parties and the more adventurous engaged in wife-swapping and 'swinging'. As women gained more economic power, divorce went up because women realized there wasn't much in this for them.
Glenn, what neither you nor Ian address in this discussion is the importance of a *healthy, functional* marriage, as opposed to the mess so many marriages are. Abusive marriages spring immediately to mind and it's clear that women of all colours often can't identify a crazy, violent, controlling guy when they run across him - or they do, but put up with it for other benefits (money, kids they want to have, a better life apart from the beatings). Plenty of women choose flawed men with whom they can never be happy and plenty of men choose flawed women as well. Throw in porn, which has messed up two generations now with its fucked-up view of women, divorced from any emotional feeling or respect, and how penis relief is the only important thing, and it's no wonder marriage continues to decline.
So I'm with you, Glenn, on that it takes effective people to get married and have a better life, that a gang banger and a poor, uneducated girl who get married will not succeed. But what conservatives have yet to adequately address is how to make marriage less of a clusterfuck for women, and that will involve men having to address the lack of emotional connection, support *and commitment* they've traditionally brought to marriage. Your and Ian's discussion also don't address that marriage simply isn't for everyone, that some people don't want to commit to just one person and that's where 'polyamory' comes in - which may not be ideal, but ethical polyamory is a lot less destructive than plain old cheating, because everyone knows what's going on and is in agreement on how it will work.
I've never been much resonant with the 'spiritual' reasons for marriage, because once again, they've been historically unfair and unjust to women, as laid out in holy books like the Bible and the Koran. 'Because God says so,' has always meant, 'Because this is what we men want.'
Very skeptical of marriage as being independently valuable. Output is dependent on input. It may be that if you put two people together who have shared values, financial stability, and personal integrity together, their union may be beneficial.
But do I sit here wishing I had married someone in my orbit? No. The prevalence of psychiatric disorders is rising. My generation of young professionals is burdened by massive debt. And the ideological craze that has swept through this generation has had a particularly strong effect on young women. Marriage sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work if there is no one to get married to.
"It only takes one exception" is of course an argument that might work at the individual level, but not at the society level.
Delayed gratification is the key. Unfortunately poor people often only experience the delay, without ever seeing the gratification. Enough instances of that can cause one to abandon the concept. If the larger gratification is stolen (by the RICH, the MAN, or the surrounding populace) then the next time the immediate gratification will be accepted instead. Better something than nothing. Those of us who were raised in the structured environment where prudence was able to be rewarded more often than not were privileged. The US has benefitted mightily from the rule of law, the prevalence of insurance and the Judeo-Christian tradition so that delayed gratification can be rewarded despite thieving hearts natural disasters, and plain old bad luck.
We spend way too much time in our present age with “howabout?” and “but…”, and “whatabout?”. These are all statistical, NON-SCIENTIFIC exceptions. Anyone with cursory knowledge of regression analysis knows it.
Ironic for a culture literally drugged and addicted to “science”.
It seems that marriage was created to civilize the relationship between men and women. Intact families are the foundation of civilization. They don't create a perfect world, of course, but they provide a tremendous amount of stabilization. Without them, there is increasing chaos.
Glenn Loury's objection over causality is suspect.
"You need to cause people to be resourceful individuals before you can get either of those things. The association that you’re calling attention to, that married people do better, is a confounding of those two influences."
How do you get people who have their stuff together? How do you get resourceful, disciplined individuals if they are coming from a family situation that is broken? It's not impossible but more difficult. The claim is that solid marriages provide stabler foundations for kids to grow up and become disciplined, etc. and have their crap together. Not a guarantee, but a better foundation. The example of the gang member is after the fact, after either a person who did not have a stable mom and dad, i.e., a statistic in favor of the original claim, or person who did have stable household but for some reason went astray, which does not contradict the original claim. No one is saying you take someone in a bad situation, force them to get married, and then everything magically gets better for the parents and children. Virtues are habits, so are vices. They take time to change.
Glenn, loved this discussion and in particular your point about causation. I seem to vaguely recall that back in the day The Gates Foundation tried to get as many kids to take Algebra 2 as possible because kids who managed to get through that class seemed to do better on average in life than kids who didn't. So getting through an Algebra 2 curriculum was viewed as some sort of panacea.
Of course there very well might have been a self selection effect and the kids who were more resourceful as you put it might have been the ones to have disproportionately gravitated towards and passed Algebra 2. I suppose one could always run an A/B test of some sort and compare how a randomly sampled test group that took Algebra 2 fared in life compared to a control group that didn't. I took Ian's perspective as conceding that even if causality couldn't be definitively inferred based on the data, with respect to the example of Algebra 2 for instance we should just have as many kids go through that class as possible and see what ultimately results, since we know that those who've passed the class in the past have on average tended to do better in life compared to those who didn't.
I'm a little skeptical that that's necessarily the optimal approach because to your point what we want to cultivate are the underlying traits that ultimately lead people to positive outcomes in life. Everyone's strengths and circumstances are different. I'm sure the data also shows that on average people who get 4 year degrees are more likely to be well-off in life than people who don't. But as various individuals including John McWhorter have argued, we should emphasize vocational training more in this country instead of subscribing to the idea that a 4 year degree is the right path for everyone. I believe that conflating correlation with causation can ultimately lead to sub-optimal policies based on possibly incorrect assumptions.
The sequence is a necessary, not a sufficient condition to escape poverty, although with the success rate cited, it would appear to be 97% sufficient as well.
I think it's hard to say. Basically I feel like it's an issue of conflating correlation with causation. Based on Ian's logic one could look at the data and conclude that since people with PhDs in Economics from MIT tend to do especially well in life on average, we should aim to get everyone through the Economics PhD program at MIT. Obviously that would be an absurd conclusion though because most of us realize that the characteristics of the pool of MIT Economics PhD candidates are probably very different on average from the characteristics of the broader population at large.
Well done Ian, John, Glenn. Here is the deal; Woke elite Dems have been subjugating blacks for decades through their policies. Witness; much higher abortion rate among blacks than whites (Dems are pro abortion), huge black on black crime (Dems are anti-arrest, prosecution and incarceration even of violent criminals), suck ass public schools (run by Dem unions). Why blacks stick w Dems is a mystery to me but also an obvious mistake and tragedy. F the words; the data is overwhelmingly conclusive.
Marriage is important, yes. Glen is right though, there are steps that come before that, like taking school seriously, and all the life lessons and self-control required to succeed in school. Some schools are good at imparting such discipline, but even for already mediocre schools, the Democrat school closures/lockdowns made school optional, took away structure, caused chaos in the lives of poor children, furthered poverty. Aided and abetted by teacher unions, Democrat politicians pulled up the economic success ladder, taking away what little opportunity poor kids had by closing their schools for months and years. They say they want to help, then do the opposite by hurting those they swore to protect.
It was the only way to keep them alive since Republicans/conservatives threw tantrums every time they were told to wear a mask inside and social distance. While lockdowns negatively impacted education, Republican pseudoscience and emotional immaturity negatively impacted *lives*, as evidenced by all the unvaccinated morons who wasted hospital space that people with *real* medical needs had because they were too babyish to behave like responsible adults.
Tell us you don't have kids in school without telling us you don't have kids in school. Keep on believing everything you're told, stay glued to your phone for regular doses of fear and loathing of those you hate. Pseudoscience? You mean Fauci-ism? Calling your fellow citizens names is not a good look. P.S. none of it (lockdowns, masks, distancing, school closures, fake "vaccines") did a damn bit of good, but it's gonna take you years to realize what most of us knew 2.5 years ago.
Not sure what you mean by 'not doing a damn bit of good', because deaths went way down after vaccines became available except for those who refused to get vaccinated. They wound up memorialized, instead, at the Herman Cain Awards. The Hall of Cain:
There's no arguing with the brainwashed. "Vaccinated" people get sick way more often than those with naturally acquired immunity, something your Saint Fauci never would acknowledge even existed. You're a year or so behind with your blaming the unvaccinated. Flus will run through a population, they always do. What was different this time around? Well, this time we had an election that just had to be won somehow, a threat to "our democracy" that could only be solved by the most undemocratic of means. Governments like ours are quite adept at propaganda (if you've studied any history) add in a supercharged media apparatus using modern communication technology to censor "misinformation" and keep people like you in a constant state of fear and panic, telling you when it was "safe" to move or even breathe, and there's your miserable, pathetic past 2 and a half years of healthy people being gaslighted by people like you. And you bought it all, hook, line, and sinker, didn't you? You did your part, got your shots, wore your mask, stayed home on your computer, got "COVID" tested over and over, and ignored the needs of other people who were suffering mentally and financially and millions of the poorest in the world starved (look it up) because YOU, Nicole, 1st world know-it-all, were saving lives by yelling at strangers online to "mask up," "socially distance," stay home, and shut up about their kids' suffering and not being able to see their relatives, all because you believed the "experts". What a hero, what a great thinker, brilliant, independent humanitarian, Nicole.
""Vaccinated" people get sick way more often than those with naturally acquired immunity, something your Saint Fauci never would acknowledge even existed."
Got any reliable scientific/medical research to back this up?
The rest of your rant validates what was clear up front: Your POV is based in ideology and politics, not scientific fact. I'm alive, I know almost no one who died from COVID (one was in the hospital with it but died from a heart attack instead, he had heart problems. This was before any vaxxes). Medical professional after medical professional reported the wards were filled, after vaxxes became available, with the unvaxxed, some of them admitting at the end they should have gotten the vax, others denying to their dying day they were dying of that which they had been diagnosed with. If you don't like how the election turned out might I suggest this as a serious contributor: The Orange Menace urged his followers not to get vaccinated and his senior citizen followers were the most vulnerable. Earlier COVID (it's not as fatal now) ripped through seniors regardless of ideology. I wonder whether Vaxxed-But-Wouldn't-Initially-Admit-It might have won the election if he hadn't encouraged his followers, essentially, to commit suicide.
Frankly, if you folks don't want to get vaxxed I'm good with that. Maybe *that's* how we will Make America Great Again, by waiting for those who can't do math and science to kill themselves.
Well that's good that you've moved on from wanting to round up the unclean ("unvaxxed") and put them in camps. That's progressive of you, see you're making progress. One thing I have in common is not knowing anyone who died from COVID. I do know lots of people who got sick after getting one of those shots though, and lots of people who side-stepped the shots, had the a mild flu and are doing great. Government should not be trusted to determine who is and is not healthy. "The Orange Menace" lol. You have to consider all the costs and benefits when making a policy, something governments did not do. They did do propaganda and fear-based policy. Science is a process, not an ideology, or a religion as you treat it. You can manipulate data, as Fraudci et al have done all along, lie, lie, lie, and have pharma companies "do science" and declare this is what we MUST DO, all to increase their profits, look it up. You'd literally believe anything Fauci or Walensky told you!
So basically science (actual science, which continues to ask questions and is never settled has become corrupted by politicians. States and countries where people could make their own, sensible, informed, rational decisions, did just fine, despite the media's tales of how we needed more lockdowns, more school closures, more shots, more fear and panic. More kids die of the flu every year, year in, year out, than "COVID." That's a scientific fact. Naturally acquired immunity works great, no shots needed for otherwise healthy (not old and/or obese) people. Scientific fact.
You don't need to be an doctor (and many doctors have big problems with our policies because they understand a healthy person is not equal to a "vaxxed" person) to get what's going on and make your own choices. Healthy, naturally immune is far superior to a diseased, vaxxed person who has never taken good overall care of themselves with a good diet and lots of exercise and time in the great outdoors. Live your life, enjoy it, stop worrying about the flu, unless you're old, fat and unhealthy, then be scared (not just of viruses, either!) Now settle down and keep doing what you're told, but leave others alone, thanks much.
It can be difficult to break out of what you are used to seeing and experiencing. Who mentors young men (and women) who don’t already have good models for how to negotiate long-term, committed relationships when the honeymoon is over and real challenges emerge and compromises have to be made? Who teaches such young people how to communicate openly and disagree respectfully? What I see in my friends is generally couples recapitulating their parents’ model and experience. I see most people I know attaining a professional or graduate degree if at least one of their parents did. I see children of comfortably middle class and above parents generally attaining that level. What one’s parents did is not destiny, but it’s stickier than many seem to assume (most friends take their parents’ accomplishments and the model they provided somewhat for granted).
I grew up in (in spite of my mom’s best efforts) a very chaotic and at times violent household due to my dad’s serious mental and emotional problems and addictions. They were a couple who had married relatively late for their era (twenty-eight and thirty-three, in the late sixties) I suspect because both were less certain of their path. The default to marry and have kids was still strong, though. My dad was, I was told much later, likely a gay or at least bisexual man who of course had to be deeply-closeted. He’d grown up in a gritty Appalachian river town to parents who had finished school in the 3rd and 4th grades. He was the only one in his family to get a college degree or try moving away. My mom took a chance on a bright, interesting, somewhat tortured man and it blew up on her. Who knows why so many of her high school friends got married by the end of college and stayed married? After a long and acrimonious divorce and aftermath full of spiteful custody battles, my dad retreated to his hometown and died barely past fifty. My mom, a shy person with her confidence shaken and lacking a large family of other support network was understandably scared to death about trying to date strangers, let alone bring a new man into her kind of shellshocked remaining three-person family including two elementary school age kids. So she basically gave up on that part of her life to try and be a devoted and responsible parent. She was an only child. Her dad was an only child. Her mom’s younger brother had died in childhood and her older sister married a selfish eccentric investor who disdained family and they never had kids. Her parents had both been single by their late thirties, having both been burned by previous partners. By chance the minister of their large mainline Protestant Church saw something in them - maybe a quiet intelligence and character - and introduced them. I don’t think they were planning on having children and my mom was kind of a surprise. That world of almost default church attendance where a minister might serve such a role in connecting two good people who were a little lonely is largely gone in this country. We had no relationship with my dad’s family and few of his siblings had children anyway.
So I grew up with very romantic, idealistic hopes for how my first relationships would be, but with no practical, realistic idea about how healthy relationships worked. I had to learn the hard way how little I knew and how badly I’d been influenced by seeing virtually only my father, an unstable, self-destructive man I’d last seen at ten, in that role of the male partner. My serious girlfriend at the age most of my friends were settling into committed relationships, following all the steps, from grad or law school, to moving in together, engagement, marriage, home ownership, two well-remunerated professional careers, parenting, etc. knew for sure she didn’t want to have kids. We loved each other a lot but neither one of us was ready or really even wanted to try and settle down and play house. So I was single and mostly by myself in a huge city and fortunately could at least date a lot. By the time an almost absurdly beautiful, smart, accomplished, fun and funny woman decided she really loved me and wanted to bring me in from the cold, I’d been self-protectively emotionally closed off and had become so distanced from that path all my friends had followed, it’s like that opportunity before me wasn’t real. It only takes one person to end a relationship and they can end at any time. Relationships trap people and eventually bring out their worst qualities. That was all I knew and had seen first hand. Whatever my friends had seen and learned and shared from their parents and their large networks of siblings and cousins and professional peers was - in spite of our sincere friendships - like the contents of a black box. Maybe women share more much relationship and partnering advice. But I heard and learned nothing from my friends. My older sister had few relationships and has never married. While I have friends who, among five siblings, for example, all are married to their first spouses and have either two or three kids. Everyone seems to share best practices and contacts and so on within families. My sister and I have rarely spoken as adults. Her conclusion from our upbringing was: you can’t trust anyone and no man will come for me, so I have to take everything for myself, however ruthlessly. When my aforementioned candidate for potential marriage and child-rearing made her goals clear to me (the somewhat exaggerated idea of moving back West and having “three to five” kids and big house with south-facing windows) all I could see was disaster and divorce. There were practical reasons not to take such a risk: I knew no one in the part of the country she was headed and with her goal of soon making partner at a firm, I’d have been the underemployed stay at home dad, stuck halfway across the country from my sole close relative, my aging mother. It’s hard to explain to the people who routinely asked: WTF is wrong with you, most people would kill for this woman, that I simply had about zero idea of how I would remotely provide the stable, long-term role of partner and parent she needed and deserved. How clearly I could see quickly becoming a penniless divorced dad largely estranged from his kid(s) and unable to financially or geographically to contribute to their lives. A few years after she did move West, and not long before she met and had a daughter with her eventual partner (thank God) she visited me and said it had always bugged her things didn’t work out between us. I was enormously touched, but gestured at my cramped apartment and referenced my mediocre civil service job (still the most stable and solid job I’d had) as if to say: I love you, but do you really think I’m cut out to give you what you need?
At new medical appointments and some other institutional settings, I’m sometimes asked, often with a slight tone of disbelief: “Never married? No kids?” Well, the women I dated (and as many dates as I went on, I always favored monogamous, long-term relationships, the best I knew how) didn’t get knocked up. We used birth control. If worst came to worst, they didn’t stop everything else in their lives and careers, when they’d no plans to have a kid, maybe ever. They got abortions. People look at me sometimes seemingly almost in disbelief that I’ve not somehow, someway just by sheer chance, produced an offspring. I look at all of the people who seem to pop out kid after kid almost as a default, regardless of age or how stable a relationship they’re in, or what kind of job they have, and I marvel at that: how do they so casually, if not recklessly, manage to always be with someone, and, in spite of whatever birth control they may use, so often seem to produce kids, even with the other biological parent barely in the picture.
Not all of our family histories or models or personal proclivities or priorities add the same. I come from generally shy, slightly melancholic, somewhat introverted and intellectual people who seemed, across generations, to have a deep ambivalence about their own existence, let alone authoring the lives of multiple others, let alone as a default. It’s hard to explain to friends who virtually only know other stable, financially comfortable, professional couples with kids, as far as the eye can see, how bafflingly opaque that reality and the path to it are to me. When I think about marriage and parenting, you bet I’m risk averse. My first thought is: do no harm. If you’re not sure about marriage and parenting - aren’t sure whether it’s right for you - and you know you lack both the personal tools and family and community support network to make the best go of it, you don’t effing get married; you don’t effing have kids. First, do no harm. I’m glad to be alive for sure. But it took everything my mom had and she needed help from her own already quite elderly parents to even have a chance. I don’t have any close living relatives. Maybe it’s sad, but unless I’m sure - sure about myself, sure about my partner and our relationship, I’m not exposing a child to chaos and trauma. I’m not placing that burden on society. And I’m not risking derailing a good woman’s own dreams and goals, by pretending to be someone I’ll probably never be. So I volunteer a lot and do a lot of animal rescue and fostering and adoption. My dad instincts come out strongly and effectively that way and I care for many smart and very vulnerable creatures who’d have little or no chance without me. Sure I’d love to have a son or daughter to throw a baseball with or take to the museum, but those are the highlights, the fun times. I don’t know what the demand is for aging, shy and somewhat socially awkward single, never married men with no kids or their own, to mentor or volunteer, but I’m open to doing that, too. I know there is a crying need. And I can remember the often anxious, uncertain boy I was and how I craved having a dad, or an uncle or cousin, or devoted family friend - someone, anyone to help show me the way.
The conversation seems to turn on whether marriage has a causal effect on other values relating to success. As Glenn points out, just getting married doesn't change one's priors, so the effect it has on the couple in isolation may be limited (though probably non-zero). But perhaps the pro-marriage argument (made in isolation from school values, delayed gratification, etc) is that the big effect it has is on the couple's child, and less so on the actual couple.
Assuming the couple actually stays married there will like be more stability, more # words/day the child hears, higher earning potential of the overall family, higher education standards, and lower crime rate; all of these things give the child tools that *do* cause success. This is basically the crux of Obama's fatherhood speech: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/text-of-obamas-fatherhood-speech-011094. That's at least the more defensible claim here (and would need the proper research)
I'm not sure that marriage itself is necessary for one to achieve their full potential, but it's certainly not wise to raise children alone, not for yourself or the child.
There are also many people who are unable to get married; for example, the genius lost in some profundity -- too bizarre to be considered -- along with the man with the unpleasant disposition, the disabled, the jobless, the vagabond, etc, etc. Women are selective, biologically selective, and some people are just not going to make it to the next round. But if you have options and you are refusing to settle down, then that is probably rooted in some form of immaturity, perhaps insecurity, and that seems to be more and more common.
That is a good point, and I wonder how much of that is economical. How many men feel insecure about their social position, and so they revert to short term relationships where they can "pretend" for a short time that perhaps they are something they are not, just to get the woman they want, then move onto the next one.
How many women turn down perfectly good men, simply because of their social position? How many men have pretty good jobs, but turn down women because they don't want to spend 100,000 dollars on a wedding? How much is just selfishness? How many good looking men want to play the field for as long as they can, because sex is easier to obtain now than ever before?
Yes, it seems that there are many men who prefer to play the field. Women are now often advised on how to differentiate between men "with serious intentions" and other men. I don't think that it is about the financial costs of a wedding - I feel that lots of men are now simply afraid of any real emotional attachment and its consequences. And dating apps and websites encourage many people to think that they have plenty of options, that they can be very picky...
I am sure that there are women who turn down perfectly good men only because of their social status or for some other shallow reason. However, there are also perfectly good women who are ignored, turned down or treated like dirt for very shallow reasons. Unfortunately we live in a world which favours superficial and narcissistic people, a world where human beings are very often judged mainly on their looks, popularity and social status.
I listened to a podcast that rated countries based on a number of factors. One of them was individualistic vs collectivistic. The United States was the biggest outlier, ranking as by far the most individualistic country in the world. I wonder if that is at the root of the declining marriage rates. The kind of concessions required to make a marriage work might be seen as an unreasonable burden to someone who needs every feeling validated and thinks compromising means they aren’t being true to themselves. If they had to accommodate someone else’s desires they wouldn’t be living their best life. Maybe I am just getting old, but it seems that pretty standard compromises married couples have always made are now seen as controlling and oppressive.
I agree with you. I would add that another aspect of this extreme individualism is that many people are focused on their own desires and expectations in a very selfish way and assume that they can find someone who will fill all their (often totally arbitrary) criteria. This approach towards relationships has nothing in common with love and is clearly a consequence of unbridled consumerism: another human being is treated like a commodity.
Glen and John
see 1:11:40 Please invite Jordan Peterson to continue this dialogue with John....
https://youtu.be/v6H2HmKDbZA
Marriage has failed because it was never all that great for a lot of people. In the halcyon days of the '50s and '60s everyone loves to romanticize, marriage benefited men more than it did women, and it has *never* meant fidelity for either gender, but especially men back then when women were more financially dependent. The 'squares' might have railed about how promiscuous the young folk were with their 'free love' et al, while many of them were playing the field with wives and single gals they met at parties and the more adventurous engaged in wife-swapping and 'swinging'. As women gained more economic power, divorce went up because women realized there wasn't much in this for them.
Glenn, what neither you nor Ian address in this discussion is the importance of a *healthy, functional* marriage, as opposed to the mess so many marriages are. Abusive marriages spring immediately to mind and it's clear that women of all colours often can't identify a crazy, violent, controlling guy when they run across him - or they do, but put up with it for other benefits (money, kids they want to have, a better life apart from the beatings). Plenty of women choose flawed men with whom they can never be happy and plenty of men choose flawed women as well. Throw in porn, which has messed up two generations now with its fucked-up view of women, divorced from any emotional feeling or respect, and how penis relief is the only important thing, and it's no wonder marriage continues to decline.
So I'm with you, Glenn, on that it takes effective people to get married and have a better life, that a gang banger and a poor, uneducated girl who get married will not succeed. But what conservatives have yet to adequately address is how to make marriage less of a clusterfuck for women, and that will involve men having to address the lack of emotional connection, support *and commitment* they've traditionally brought to marriage. Your and Ian's discussion also don't address that marriage simply isn't for everyone, that some people don't want to commit to just one person and that's where 'polyamory' comes in - which may not be ideal, but ethical polyamory is a lot less destructive than plain old cheating, because everyone knows what's going on and is in agreement on how it will work.
I've never been much resonant with the 'spiritual' reasons for marriage, because once again, they've been historically unfair and unjust to women, as laid out in holy books like the Bible and the Koran. 'Because God says so,' has always meant, 'Because this is what we men want.'
Very skeptical of marriage as being independently valuable. Output is dependent on input. It may be that if you put two people together who have shared values, financial stability, and personal integrity together, their union may be beneficial.
But do I sit here wishing I had married someone in my orbit? No. The prevalence of psychiatric disorders is rising. My generation of young professionals is burdened by massive debt. And the ideological craze that has swept through this generation has had a particularly strong effect on young women. Marriage sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work if there is no one to get married to.
"It only takes one exception" is of course an argument that might work at the individual level, but not at the society level.
Ian really needs to do something about audio. It's so low compared to you and John, makes it hard to understand him.
Delayed gratification is the key. Unfortunately poor people often only experience the delay, without ever seeing the gratification. Enough instances of that can cause one to abandon the concept. If the larger gratification is stolen (by the RICH, the MAN, or the surrounding populace) then the next time the immediate gratification will be accepted instead. Better something than nothing. Those of us who were raised in the structured environment where prudence was able to be rewarded more often than not were privileged. The US has benefitted mightily from the rule of law, the prevalence of insurance and the Judeo-Christian tradition so that delayed gratification can be rewarded despite thieving hearts natural disasters, and plain old bad luck.
We spend way too much time in our present age with “howabout?” and “but…”, and “whatabout?”. These are all statistical, NON-SCIENTIFIC exceptions. Anyone with cursory knowledge of regression analysis knows it.
Ironic for a culture literally drugged and addicted to “science”.
It seems that marriage was created to civilize the relationship between men and women. Intact families are the foundation of civilization. They don't create a perfect world, of course, but they provide a tremendous amount of stabilization. Without them, there is increasing chaos.
Glenn Loury's objection over causality is suspect.
"You need to cause people to be resourceful individuals before you can get either of those things. The association that you’re calling attention to, that married people do better, is a confounding of those two influences."
How do you get people who have their stuff together? How do you get resourceful, disciplined individuals if they are coming from a family situation that is broken? It's not impossible but more difficult. The claim is that solid marriages provide stabler foundations for kids to grow up and become disciplined, etc. and have their crap together. Not a guarantee, but a better foundation. The example of the gang member is after the fact, after either a person who did not have a stable mom and dad, i.e., a statistic in favor of the original claim, or person who did have stable household but for some reason went astray, which does not contradict the original claim. No one is saying you take someone in a bad situation, force them to get married, and then everything magically gets better for the parents and children. Virtues are habits, so are vices. They take time to change.
Glenn, loved this discussion and in particular your point about causation. I seem to vaguely recall that back in the day The Gates Foundation tried to get as many kids to take Algebra 2 as possible because kids who managed to get through that class seemed to do better on average in life than kids who didn't. So getting through an Algebra 2 curriculum was viewed as some sort of panacea.
Of course there very well might have been a self selection effect and the kids who were more resourceful as you put it might have been the ones to have disproportionately gravitated towards and passed Algebra 2. I suppose one could always run an A/B test of some sort and compare how a randomly sampled test group that took Algebra 2 fared in life compared to a control group that didn't. I took Ian's perspective as conceding that even if causality couldn't be definitively inferred based on the data, with respect to the example of Algebra 2 for instance we should just have as many kids go through that class as possible and see what ultimately results, since we know that those who've passed the class in the past have on average tended to do better in life compared to those who didn't.
I'm a little skeptical that that's necessarily the optimal approach because to your point what we want to cultivate are the underlying traits that ultimately lead people to positive outcomes in life. Everyone's strengths and circumstances are different. I'm sure the data also shows that on average people who get 4 year degrees are more likely to be well-off in life than people who don't. But as various individuals including John McWhorter have argued, we should emphasize vocational training more in this country instead of subscribing to the idea that a 4 year degree is the right path for everyone. I believe that conflating correlation with causation can ultimately lead to sub-optimal policies based on possibly incorrect assumptions.
The sequence is a necessary, not a sufficient condition to escape poverty, although with the success rate cited, it would appear to be 97% sufficient as well.
I think it's hard to say. Basically I feel like it's an issue of conflating correlation with causation. Based on Ian's logic one could look at the data and conclude that since people with PhDs in Economics from MIT tend to do especially well in life on average, we should aim to get everyone through the Economics PhD program at MIT. Obviously that would be an absurd conclusion though because most of us realize that the characteristics of the pool of MIT Economics PhD candidates are probably very different on average from the characteristics of the broader population at large.
Well done Ian, John, Glenn. Here is the deal; Woke elite Dems have been subjugating blacks for decades through their policies. Witness; much higher abortion rate among blacks than whites (Dems are pro abortion), huge black on black crime (Dems are anti-arrest, prosecution and incarceration even of violent criminals), suck ass public schools (run by Dem unions). Why blacks stick w Dems is a mystery to me but also an obvious mistake and tragedy. F the words; the data is overwhelmingly conclusive.
Marriage is important, yes. Glen is right though, there are steps that come before that, like taking school seriously, and all the life lessons and self-control required to succeed in school. Some schools are good at imparting such discipline, but even for already mediocre schools, the Democrat school closures/lockdowns made school optional, took away structure, caused chaos in the lives of poor children, furthered poverty. Aided and abetted by teacher unions, Democrat politicians pulled up the economic success ladder, taking away what little opportunity poor kids had by closing their schools for months and years. They say they want to help, then do the opposite by hurting those they swore to protect.
It was the only way to keep them alive since Republicans/conservatives threw tantrums every time they were told to wear a mask inside and social distance. While lockdowns negatively impacted education, Republican pseudoscience and emotional immaturity negatively impacted *lives*, as evidenced by all the unvaccinated morons who wasted hospital space that people with *real* medical needs had because they were too babyish to behave like responsible adults.
Tell us you don't have kids in school without telling us you don't have kids in school. Keep on believing everything you're told, stay glued to your phone for regular doses of fear and loathing of those you hate. Pseudoscience? You mean Fauci-ism? Calling your fellow citizens names is not a good look. P.S. none of it (lockdowns, masks, distancing, school closures, fake "vaccines") did a damn bit of good, but it's gonna take you years to realize what most of us knew 2.5 years ago.
Not sure what you mean by 'not doing a damn bit of good', because deaths went way down after vaccines became available except for those who refused to get vaccinated. They wound up memorialized, instead, at the Herman Cain Awards. The Hall of Cain:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/wiki/hall-of-cain/
I guess you can't argue with someone who can't do math. Or simply disbelieves in it.
There's no arguing with the brainwashed. "Vaccinated" people get sick way more often than those with naturally acquired immunity, something your Saint Fauci never would acknowledge even existed. You're a year or so behind with your blaming the unvaccinated. Flus will run through a population, they always do. What was different this time around? Well, this time we had an election that just had to be won somehow, a threat to "our democracy" that could only be solved by the most undemocratic of means. Governments like ours are quite adept at propaganda (if you've studied any history) add in a supercharged media apparatus using modern communication technology to censor "misinformation" and keep people like you in a constant state of fear and panic, telling you when it was "safe" to move or even breathe, and there's your miserable, pathetic past 2 and a half years of healthy people being gaslighted by people like you. And you bought it all, hook, line, and sinker, didn't you? You did your part, got your shots, wore your mask, stayed home on your computer, got "COVID" tested over and over, and ignored the needs of other people who were suffering mentally and financially and millions of the poorest in the world starved (look it up) because YOU, Nicole, 1st world know-it-all, were saving lives by yelling at strangers online to "mask up," "socially distance," stay home, and shut up about their kids' suffering and not being able to see their relatives, all because you believed the "experts". What a hero, what a great thinker, brilliant, independent humanitarian, Nicole.
""Vaccinated" people get sick way more often than those with naturally acquired immunity, something your Saint Fauci never would acknowledge even existed."
Got any reliable scientific/medical research to back this up?
The rest of your rant validates what was clear up front: Your POV is based in ideology and politics, not scientific fact. I'm alive, I know almost no one who died from COVID (one was in the hospital with it but died from a heart attack instead, he had heart problems. This was before any vaxxes). Medical professional after medical professional reported the wards were filled, after vaxxes became available, with the unvaxxed, some of them admitting at the end they should have gotten the vax, others denying to their dying day they were dying of that which they had been diagnosed with. If you don't like how the election turned out might I suggest this as a serious contributor: The Orange Menace urged his followers not to get vaccinated and his senior citizen followers were the most vulnerable. Earlier COVID (it's not as fatal now) ripped through seniors regardless of ideology. I wonder whether Vaxxed-But-Wouldn't-Initially-Admit-It might have won the election if he hadn't encouraged his followers, essentially, to commit suicide.
Frankly, if you folks don't want to get vaxxed I'm good with that. Maybe *that's* how we will Make America Great Again, by waiting for those who can't do math and science to kill themselves.
Well that's good that you've moved on from wanting to round up the unclean ("unvaxxed") and put them in camps. That's progressive of you, see you're making progress. One thing I have in common is not knowing anyone who died from COVID. I do know lots of people who got sick after getting one of those shots though, and lots of people who side-stepped the shots, had the a mild flu and are doing great. Government should not be trusted to determine who is and is not healthy. "The Orange Menace" lol. You have to consider all the costs and benefits when making a policy, something governments did not do. They did do propaganda and fear-based policy. Science is a process, not an ideology, or a religion as you treat it. You can manipulate data, as Fraudci et al have done all along, lie, lie, lie, and have pharma companies "do science" and declare this is what we MUST DO, all to increase their profits, look it up. You'd literally believe anything Fauci or Walensky told you!
So basically science (actual science, which continues to ask questions and is never settled has become corrupted by politicians. States and countries where people could make their own, sensible, informed, rational decisions, did just fine, despite the media's tales of how we needed more lockdowns, more school closures, more shots, more fear and panic. More kids die of the flu every year, year in, year out, than "COVID." That's a scientific fact. Naturally acquired immunity works great, no shots needed for otherwise healthy (not old and/or obese) people. Scientific fact.
You don't need to be an doctor (and many doctors have big problems with our policies because they understand a healthy person is not equal to a "vaxxed" person) to get what's going on and make your own choices. Healthy, naturally immune is far superior to a diseased, vaxxed person who has never taken good overall care of themselves with a good diet and lots of exercise and time in the great outdoors. Live your life, enjoy it, stop worrying about the flu, unless you're old, fat and unhealthy, then be scared (not just of viruses, either!) Now settle down and keep doing what you're told, but leave others alone, thanks much.
It can be difficult to break out of what you are used to seeing and experiencing. Who mentors young men (and women) who don’t already have good models for how to negotiate long-term, committed relationships when the honeymoon is over and real challenges emerge and compromises have to be made? Who teaches such young people how to communicate openly and disagree respectfully? What I see in my friends is generally couples recapitulating their parents’ model and experience. I see most people I know attaining a professional or graduate degree if at least one of their parents did. I see children of comfortably middle class and above parents generally attaining that level. What one’s parents did is not destiny, but it’s stickier than many seem to assume (most friends take their parents’ accomplishments and the model they provided somewhat for granted).
I grew up in (in spite of my mom’s best efforts) a very chaotic and at times violent household due to my dad’s serious mental and emotional problems and addictions. They were a couple who had married relatively late for their era (twenty-eight and thirty-three, in the late sixties) I suspect because both were less certain of their path. The default to marry and have kids was still strong, though. My dad was, I was told much later, likely a gay or at least bisexual man who of course had to be deeply-closeted. He’d grown up in a gritty Appalachian river town to parents who had finished school in the 3rd and 4th grades. He was the only one in his family to get a college degree or try moving away. My mom took a chance on a bright, interesting, somewhat tortured man and it blew up on her. Who knows why so many of her high school friends got married by the end of college and stayed married? After a long and acrimonious divorce and aftermath full of spiteful custody battles, my dad retreated to his hometown and died barely past fifty. My mom, a shy person with her confidence shaken and lacking a large family of other support network was understandably scared to death about trying to date strangers, let alone bring a new man into her kind of shellshocked remaining three-person family including two elementary school age kids. So she basically gave up on that part of her life to try and be a devoted and responsible parent. She was an only child. Her dad was an only child. Her mom’s younger brother had died in childhood and her older sister married a selfish eccentric investor who disdained family and they never had kids. Her parents had both been single by their late thirties, having both been burned by previous partners. By chance the minister of their large mainline Protestant Church saw something in them - maybe a quiet intelligence and character - and introduced them. I don’t think they were planning on having children and my mom was kind of a surprise. That world of almost default church attendance where a minister might serve such a role in connecting two good people who were a little lonely is largely gone in this country. We had no relationship with my dad’s family and few of his siblings had children anyway.
So I grew up with very romantic, idealistic hopes for how my first relationships would be, but with no practical, realistic idea about how healthy relationships worked. I had to learn the hard way how little I knew and how badly I’d been influenced by seeing virtually only my father, an unstable, self-destructive man I’d last seen at ten, in that role of the male partner. My serious girlfriend at the age most of my friends were settling into committed relationships, following all the steps, from grad or law school, to moving in together, engagement, marriage, home ownership, two well-remunerated professional careers, parenting, etc. knew for sure she didn’t want to have kids. We loved each other a lot but neither one of us was ready or really even wanted to try and settle down and play house. So I was single and mostly by myself in a huge city and fortunately could at least date a lot. By the time an almost absurdly beautiful, smart, accomplished, fun and funny woman decided she really loved me and wanted to bring me in from the cold, I’d been self-protectively emotionally closed off and had become so distanced from that path all my friends had followed, it’s like that opportunity before me wasn’t real. It only takes one person to end a relationship and they can end at any time. Relationships trap people and eventually bring out their worst qualities. That was all I knew and had seen first hand. Whatever my friends had seen and learned and shared from their parents and their large networks of siblings and cousins and professional peers was - in spite of our sincere friendships - like the contents of a black box. Maybe women share more much relationship and partnering advice. But I heard and learned nothing from my friends. My older sister had few relationships and has never married. While I have friends who, among five siblings, for example, all are married to their first spouses and have either two or three kids. Everyone seems to share best practices and contacts and so on within families. My sister and I have rarely spoken as adults. Her conclusion from our upbringing was: you can’t trust anyone and no man will come for me, so I have to take everything for myself, however ruthlessly. When my aforementioned candidate for potential marriage and child-rearing made her goals clear to me (the somewhat exaggerated idea of moving back West and having “three to five” kids and big house with south-facing windows) all I could see was disaster and divorce. There were practical reasons not to take such a risk: I knew no one in the part of the country she was headed and with her goal of soon making partner at a firm, I’d have been the underemployed stay at home dad, stuck halfway across the country from my sole close relative, my aging mother. It’s hard to explain to the people who routinely asked: WTF is wrong with you, most people would kill for this woman, that I simply had about zero idea of how I would remotely provide the stable, long-term role of partner and parent she needed and deserved. How clearly I could see quickly becoming a penniless divorced dad largely estranged from his kid(s) and unable to financially or geographically to contribute to their lives. A few years after she did move West, and not long before she met and had a daughter with her eventual partner (thank God) she visited me and said it had always bugged her things didn’t work out between us. I was enormously touched, but gestured at my cramped apartment and referenced my mediocre civil service job (still the most stable and solid job I’d had) as if to say: I love you, but do you really think I’m cut out to give you what you need?
At new medical appointments and some other institutional settings, I’m sometimes asked, often with a slight tone of disbelief: “Never married? No kids?” Well, the women I dated (and as many dates as I went on, I always favored monogamous, long-term relationships, the best I knew how) didn’t get knocked up. We used birth control. If worst came to worst, they didn’t stop everything else in their lives and careers, when they’d no plans to have a kid, maybe ever. They got abortions. People look at me sometimes seemingly almost in disbelief that I’ve not somehow, someway just by sheer chance, produced an offspring. I look at all of the people who seem to pop out kid after kid almost as a default, regardless of age or how stable a relationship they’re in, or what kind of job they have, and I marvel at that: how do they so casually, if not recklessly, manage to always be with someone, and, in spite of whatever birth control they may use, so often seem to produce kids, even with the other biological parent barely in the picture.
Not all of our family histories or models or personal proclivities or priorities add the same. I come from generally shy, slightly melancholic, somewhat introverted and intellectual people who seemed, across generations, to have a deep ambivalence about their own existence, let alone authoring the lives of multiple others, let alone as a default. It’s hard to explain to friends who virtually only know other stable, financially comfortable, professional couples with kids, as far as the eye can see, how bafflingly opaque that reality and the path to it are to me. When I think about marriage and parenting, you bet I’m risk averse. My first thought is: do no harm. If you’re not sure about marriage and parenting - aren’t sure whether it’s right for you - and you know you lack both the personal tools and family and community support network to make the best go of it, you don’t effing get married; you don’t effing have kids. First, do no harm. I’m glad to be alive for sure. But it took everything my mom had and she needed help from her own already quite elderly parents to even have a chance. I don’t have any close living relatives. Maybe it’s sad, but unless I’m sure - sure about myself, sure about my partner and our relationship, I’m not exposing a child to chaos and trauma. I’m not placing that burden on society. And I’m not risking derailing a good woman’s own dreams and goals, by pretending to be someone I’ll probably never be. So I volunteer a lot and do a lot of animal rescue and fostering and adoption. My dad instincts come out strongly and effectively that way and I care for many smart and very vulnerable creatures who’d have little or no chance without me. Sure I’d love to have a son or daughter to throw a baseball with or take to the museum, but those are the highlights, the fun times. I don’t know what the demand is for aging, shy and somewhat socially awkward single, never married men with no kids or their own, to mentor or volunteer, but I’m open to doing that, too. I know there is a crying need. And I can remember the often anxious, uncertain boy I was and how I craved having a dad, or an uncle or cousin, or devoted family friend - someone, anyone to help show me the way.
The conversation seems to turn on whether marriage has a causal effect on other values relating to success. As Glenn points out, just getting married doesn't change one's priors, so the effect it has on the couple in isolation may be limited (though probably non-zero). But perhaps the pro-marriage argument (made in isolation from school values, delayed gratification, etc) is that the big effect it has is on the couple's child, and less so on the actual couple.
Assuming the couple actually stays married there will like be more stability, more # words/day the child hears, higher earning potential of the overall family, higher education standards, and lower crime rate; all of these things give the child tools that *do* cause success. This is basically the crux of Obama's fatherhood speech: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/text-of-obamas-fatherhood-speech-011094. That's at least the more defensible claim here (and would need the proper research)
"The lifelong commitment of two people"
Lost me there. That's as bad as pregnant person.
I'm not sure that marriage itself is necessary for one to achieve their full potential, but it's certainly not wise to raise children alone, not for yourself or the child.
There are also many people who are unable to get married; for example, the genius lost in some profundity -- too bizarre to be considered -- along with the man with the unpleasant disposition, the disabled, the jobless, the vagabond, etc, etc. Women are selective, biologically selective, and some people are just not going to make it to the next round. But if you have options and you are refusing to settle down, then that is probably rooted in some form of immaturity, perhaps insecurity, and that seems to be more and more common.
Or maybe just bad examples throughout your life.
Men are also selective. Many women struggle with finding a partner ready for a committed relationship and some have even given up on men.
That is a good point, and I wonder how much of that is economical. How many men feel insecure about their social position, and so they revert to short term relationships where they can "pretend" for a short time that perhaps they are something they are not, just to get the woman they want, then move onto the next one.
How many women turn down perfectly good men, simply because of their social position? How many men have pretty good jobs, but turn down women because they don't want to spend 100,000 dollars on a wedding? How much is just selfishness? How many good looking men want to play the field for as long as they can, because sex is easier to obtain now than ever before?
There are certianly a lot of factors involved.
Yes, it seems that there are many men who prefer to play the field. Women are now often advised on how to differentiate between men "with serious intentions" and other men. I don't think that it is about the financial costs of a wedding - I feel that lots of men are now simply afraid of any real emotional attachment and its consequences. And dating apps and websites encourage many people to think that they have plenty of options, that they can be very picky...
I am sure that there are women who turn down perfectly good men only because of their social status or for some other shallow reason. However, there are also perfectly good women who are ignored, turned down or treated like dirt for very shallow reasons. Unfortunately we live in a world which favours superficial and narcissistic people, a world where human beings are very often judged mainly on their looks, popularity and social status.
I listened to a podcast that rated countries based on a number of factors. One of them was individualistic vs collectivistic. The United States was the biggest outlier, ranking as by far the most individualistic country in the world. I wonder if that is at the root of the declining marriage rates. The kind of concessions required to make a marriage work might be seen as an unreasonable burden to someone who needs every feeling validated and thinks compromising means they aren’t being true to themselves. If they had to accommodate someone else’s desires they wouldn’t be living their best life. Maybe I am just getting old, but it seems that pretty standard compromises married couples have always made are now seen as controlling and oppressive.
I agree with you. I would add that another aspect of this extreme individualism is that many people are focused on their own desires and expectations in a very selfish way and assume that they can find someone who will fill all their (often totally arbitrary) criteria. This approach towards relationships has nothing in common with love and is clearly a consequence of unbridled consumerism: another human being is treated like a commodity.