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Glen and John

see 1:11:40 Please invite Jordan Peterson to continue this dialogue with John....

https://youtu.be/v6H2HmKDbZA

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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.'

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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.

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Ian really needs to do something about audio. It's so low compared to you and John, makes it hard to understand him.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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Sep 23, 2022·edited Sep 23, 2022

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.

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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.

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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.

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Sep 22, 2022·edited Sep 22, 2022

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.

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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?

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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)

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"The lifelong commitment of two people"

Lost me there. That's as bad as pregnant person.

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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.

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