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There is a whole slew of problems. 1) There is still an expectation women will marry up, and men will marry down, in terms of income potential. If the woman is
by wegs2 5y ago
There is a whole slew of problems.
1) There is still an expectation women will marry up, and men will marry down, in terms of income potential. If the woman is a little bit ahead, it's okay, but e.g. a doctor marrying a nurse is perceived as acceptable in one direction, but taboo in the other. This means there is a growing shortage of mates for men at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, and increasingly, women at the top (unless college-age and pretty).
2) Overlapping and poorly-defined roles make for a lot more conflict in marriages.
3) Divorce laws vary by states, but in the most liberal states, tend to be punitive towards men; the de facto standard is women get the kids, and men pay (massive, debilitating) child support. At the same time, the legal industry works hard to increase divorce rates. With half of marriages ending in divorce, this leads to all sorts of misaligned incentives and imbalances which are taboo to talk about, but interplay in complex ways. Marrying down is now a huge liability.
4) And, as you pointed out, social classes are much more likely to calcify.
We kind of got to where we are randomly, without thought or planning. We had a bad system (women were oppressed), and we pushed hard against it. It snapped. We landed somewhere pretty random and still pretty dysfunctional; just dysfunctional in other ways.
- vmception 5y agoYeah, misaligned incentives galore It will take collaboration between genders to reconcile Right now it is convenient for misandrists to just laugh at the concept of men complaining, and never even noticing that misandry is a character flaw - let alone a word this all exacerbates the reality
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jokethrowaway 5y agoAs a man, I simply refused to to marry. It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me. Still, I have a pretty traditional family without the titles: only one of us is working and it makes sense for both of us. This is likely going to change when kids are bigger and we have more time, but at the same time, we're close to not be in full time employment for someone else. We will likely work in our own business because we enjoy doing it, more than for the money we make. I think what's important, in today's society, is to not be career driven. Corporations chew you, you end up wasting your life and your family is unstable because there's no one home for the kids. Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much. Society adapted to having two working parents per family, wages stagnated while prices increased thanks to double the workers available and thanks to double purchasing power. Divorces and single parenting, unstable families are what created this problematic generation. Now we pay the price.
- welfareanyone 5y agoNobody's even going to mention the effect of welfare here, either, which subsidizes single motherhood and each additional child out of wedlock? Or the effect that this has had especially on the families of minorities?
- jokethrowaway 5y agoThomas Sowell does. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit with the narrative of more welfare, more taxes which allows both parties to increase government spending and gain even more power.
- ks938ks 5y agoWelfare polices do not subsidize single motherhood as much as punish intact families where the man cannot find work. In that way it does create perverse incentives that are harmful to families it is meant to support.
- vmception 5y agoCan you elaborate, I'm not familiar with this part I know of the scenario where a man has to check in to jail when they cannot successfully pay the alimony or child support, which doesn't help their ability to do that. basically debtor's prisons. are you referring to that?
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoWhat viable alternatives are there?
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoAs a man, I simply refused to to marry. It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me. In Australia you’d be defacto and thus more or less married.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ch4s3 5y ago> With half of marriages ending in divorce, That's half of ALL marriages in the US, not half of first marriages. Only 41% of first marriages end in divorce in the US, and rates are much lower in the EU, and the UK.
- bradlys 5y ago4 in 10 is not good. Especially if there is a high chance of an extreme financial penalty over it.
- pcbro141 5y ago41% is really high considering the potential consequences.
- vmception 5y agoIt would still be a shitty contract even at 10%, or 5%, or 2% maybe at 2% there could be a viable divorce insurance product and the terms of the contract wouldn't have to be updated by legislatures but at higher percentages an insurance product is not possible, and we need a better contract, laws, and court behavior
- leetcrew 5y agoha, that is the first time I have read someone suggest divorce insurance. I would love to see the stipulations insurers come up with.
- vmception 5y agoI've looked into it several years ago and a product was trialed, but basically you can't insure events that are bound to happen, you need to bolster the insurance pool. I and a few others don't have any issue abstracting all topics into their economic realities, including the marriage concept that the state offers in its entity catalogue. I think many more people could do that as well, it is just convenient to deflect and pretend marriage isn't about that, convenient for typically one party in any case.
- ks938ks 5y agoI think some of this is correct, but would like to push back on a few points. 2. I think that some amount of redundancy in skills and roles is helpful. Being able to exchange roles and responsibilities fosters adaptation of the family unit to changing circumstances and new opportunities. 3. Is this because divorce laws favor women or because men are usually the primary breadwinners while women are the caretakers? High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for. Is it really lawyers that are driving divorce rates? It’s not like they are showing up unsolicited and sowing discontent in otherwise happy relationships.
- wheresTheRents 5y agoMy wife has a 200k/yr profit biz. I'm 120k/yr contract. I paid for her doctorate and the 3 years it took to become profitable. I'm not exactly concerned about having to make alimony payments. But I generally know what you mean, I think without these extraordinary circumstances they favor women.
- vmception 5y ago> High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for. They ended #3 by saying marrying down is the liability, which would be true for all spouses of all genders. But in a world where men are still overwhelmingly making the unilateral choice to marry, this is mostly about the incentives that men are prudent to weigh.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoIt speaks to the winner-takes-all outcome of our economy: No social mobility. #1 is a particularly bad problem. I’ve seen a handful of exceptions but it’s truly an exception. We don’t seem to have the collective will to legislate the underlying causes away either, and it bothers me tremendously. It’s become worse every decade without exception, as 90 to 95% of the population keeps fighting over for less and less.