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i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into c

i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Only if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess. 67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time). [1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it/9uq1ytbcovr71.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...) [2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-are-becoming-less-common https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-... (edit: US centric)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  >but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out. Exactly. It's greater risk for a greater reward. Also divorce rates are significantly lower (seeing ~20% on Google) for this with a college degree
  - hamandcheese 5y ago
    What is the greater reward?
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      Having a real family?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      There is some evidence that male marriage participants live longer and are healthier [1] than non married counterparts. Conversely, there is also evidence that single, childless women are the happiest subpopulation [2]. With regards to data about happiness, you can make a case for whatever your position is based on picking your choice of longitudinal study. Happiness is a crapshoot. [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...
      - pempem 5y ago
        Happiness is a caveated crapshoot I'm fairly certain we are all capable of the google search and you can and will find the multitude of studies, anecdotes, memes and conversations about: - women's unpaid labor at home, with their children, in their community and for aging relatives/relatives who need care - women's thwarted ability to get promoted - women's inability to negotiate as easily for a raise bc when you're aggressive you're a bitch and when you're not you dont get a raise - women's emotional labor in relationships as men in our specific (NA/Euro) societies tend to have limited social circles as they age Single childless women are happier for structural and social reasons. It is not in fact just a crapshoot.
        Thorrez 5y ago
        The promotion and negotiation problems will negatively affect single childless women too, right? So those would make that group less happy compared to the male groups.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  Agree, but you need to remember that in some places you don't need to be married to pay alimony: some USA states have common law marriages and in Canada you don't even need to cohabitate to be legally responsible for alimony (there was a very famous case 1 year ago with 2 people that never lived together).
- austhrow743 5y ago
  Disagree. Willingness to move where you receive the best job offers is one of the key factors to strong career progress and earning potential. Unless you happen to both be in the same line of work and have that line of work be centralised in one city so hard that your best offers are pretty much always going to be there anyway, you can only maximise one of your careers. The other person is turning down offers they otherwise could have taken, moving to locations they otherwise would not have, at times when they otherwise would not have. It's a huge sacrifice even if both people are full time employed and no kids are in the picture. Deciding to try to spend the rest of your life living with another person is the opportunity cost. Marriage and alimony are the tools that try to balance that out and make it fairer.
- amscanne 5y ago
  Your source [1] commits several data errors in the first sentence. Having a divorce rate of 60% does not mean that 60% of married couples are unhappy (even though the divorce rate is not 60%, as your link [2] shows -- the peak divorce rate is for marriages originating in the 1970s, of which 48% did not last 25 years). Marriages are not distributed uniformly: many people will have none, many will have one, and some may rack up more than a few. By definition people with many marriages will account for more than their fair share of the "divorce rate" (even in the 48%), and you can't simply swap "people" or "couples" in for "marriages" in the denominator of that statistic. Yet, why are there some people who keep getting married and failing? Their passion and decision-making that causes them to marry is probably related to the reasons they end. I think if you're so dispassionate that you can consider all the reasons to not get married, then you're probably the sort of person whose marriage would be carefully calculated and not end in flames quickly. Your second link has much more meaningful data on this: yes, marriages are getting later in life and more people and choosing not to marry. However, divorce rates are lower than the 70s and marriages are generally lasting longer. If you consistently advise people not to get married out of some misplaced fear of having to split assets in half, that seems a bit myopic. It seems like a more complex issue.
01100011 5y ago
I can only speak to my reality, which is that I am paying $40k/year to someone who never had kids, never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles). I can try to reduce my payments, but lawyers say there's a risk they'll actually go up because I'm making more now(because I couldn't afford to live in my old town due to alimony). The other party has an inactive form of cancer, but the primary tumor was removed over 30 years ago while I was still in junior high school, and a vocational evaluation , which consulted with their doctors, found there is no reason not to work full time. I've been paying for over 5 years now and there's no end in sight. The system is forcing me to pay a lazy person to sit at home all day long without any obligation to work.
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
  I’m curious about what circumstances stop payments to them? Does it require you to have zero income?
  - 01100011 5y ago
    Id have to have a valid excuse for not working, like a medical condition. If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.
    - notdang 5y ago
      if you stop working, what happens?
      - 01100011 5y ago
        Contempt of court I believe. It's basically like defying any other court order. From what I hear, you go to jail for a bit and just keep repeating that cycle every few months until you start working and paying.
- throwawayarnty 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. Of course this also requires further investments from the state (mandatory parental leave, cheap/free childcare, good early education), which I assume Netherlands also prioritizes.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. I do wonder about our priorities here. It seems we are choosing economic output over everything else.
- vasco 5y ago
  Netherlands doesn't, it costs around €1.3k/month for a 5 day a week daycare. It's very expensive to raise kids in the Netherlands and most women work only 3 days a week, and some men 4, making it so the child can stay at home with one of the parents so the costs are lower. This makes it difficult to raise kids if both parents want to work full time.
odiroot 5y ago
> i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. Is this some "western developed country" thing that I just don't get? All throughout my childhood, both of my parents had to work. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to support me and my sister. But I was growing up in an (post-) communist state and it was quite the norm. It had nothing to do with ambitions or building your career, just pure economics.
- tsol 5y ago
  Agreed, this seems like an older relic. If anything you see this situation more often in non- western countries where women aren't as involved in the workforce. In America, for example, it's not uncommon that not only do both spouses work, but they both must work to support the family. The assumption that one spouse is unable to work feels like a rather dated convention. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it certainly does, but it's no longer the default.
  - treis 5y ago
    It's also a relic of a time when maintaining a house was a lot of work and reasonably analogous to a full time job. That is when chicken soup involved plucking and preparing a chicken instead of buying stuff from the store and throwing it in a instapot.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Here in Switzerland, "full-time childcare costs are around two-thirds of an average Swiss salary" apparently, so quite often people prefer to do it themselves rather than work mostly to pay someone to take care of their child.
  - odiroot 5y ago
    > Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Mostly my grandma. And once I was 5 or so I went to kindergarten. This was already in the post- times. But my first 3 years were still in a communist state.
yason 5y ago
Divorces still work out in many countries without any adult-to-adult alimonies. You get divorced, you split your combined assets (excluding prenups), the child support vector will be based on the relative net income of each parent (and beyond certain basic level of income the vector just settles at 50/50). The stay-at-home parent will find work or failing that gets unemployment/welfare benefits. The standard of living is expected to drop for both spouses after a divorce because it's cheaper to live together in any case. Nevertheless, securing the children's upkeep comes first. If one parent can't or won't pay child support the state provides it for the other parent so that the kids can live on something, and later collects the payments from the first parent the same way it will collect other debts such as back taxes. For the stay-at-home spouse it's still a choice with pre-known potential disadvantages, and thus smart couples can draw a contract at the decision time to even out the tally. They can split the income of the high-earning parent at point each month, or they can formulate a mechanism to give the stay-at-home spouse a higher proportion of the combined assets in case of a divorce, and have that indexed by the number of years that spouse remained home, or anything else that works out well. It's all doable so that upon a divorce both spouses get their fair share. The worst thing is not to pre-plan anything, then get divorced at once and find yourself in a completely new situation with no preparations. But there's nothing that prevents either partner from being proactive regarding this. The law doesn't need to enforce any hand-holding here: it's not the fifties anymore. Most people, both men and women, have their own career and get married as adults and divorce as adults.

i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Only if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess. 67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time). [1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it/9uq1ytbcovr71.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...) [2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-are-becoming-less-common https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-... (edit: US centric)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway6734 5y ago
>but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out. Exactly. It's greater risk for a greater reward. Also divorce rates are significantly lower (seeing ~20% on Google) for this with a college degree
- hamandcheese 5y ago
  What is the greater reward?
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Having a real family?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    There is some evidence that male marriage participants live longer and are healthier [1] than non married counterparts. Conversely, there is also evidence that single, childless women are the happiest subpopulation [2]. With regards to data about happiness, you can make a case for whatever your position is based on picking your choice of longitudinal study. Happiness is a crapshoot. [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...
    - pempem 5y ago
      Happiness is a caveated crapshoot I'm fairly certain we are all capable of the google search and you can and will find the multitude of studies, anecdotes, memes and conversations about: - women's unpaid labor at home, with their children, in their community and for aging relatives/relatives who need care - women's thwarted ability to get promoted - women's inability to negotiate as easily for a raise bc when you're aggressive you're a bitch and when you're not you dont get a raise - women's emotional labor in relationships as men in our specific (NA/Euro) societies tend to have limited social circles as they age Single childless women are happier for structural and social reasons. It is not in fact just a crapshoot.
      - Thorrez 5y ago
        The promotion and negotiation problems will negatively affect single childless women too, right? So those would make that group less happy compared to the male groups.
AdrianB1 5y ago
Agree, but you need to remember that in some places you don't need to be married to pay alimony: some USA states have common law marriages and in Canada you don't even need to cohabitate to be legally responsible for alimony (there was a very famous case 1 year ago with 2 people that never lived together).
austhrow743 5y ago
Disagree. Willingness to move where you receive the best job offers is one of the key factors to strong career progress and earning potential. Unless you happen to both be in the same line of work and have that line of work be centralised in one city so hard that your best offers are pretty much always going to be there anyway, you can only maximise one of your careers. The other person is turning down offers they otherwise could have taken, moving to locations they otherwise would not have, at times when they otherwise would not have. It's a huge sacrifice even if both people are full time employed and no kids are in the picture. Deciding to try to spend the rest of your life living with another person is the opportunity cost. Marriage and alimony are the tools that try to balance that out and make it fairer.
amscanne 5y ago
Your source [1] commits several data errors in the first sentence. Having a divorce rate of 60% does not mean that 60% of married couples are unhappy (even though the divorce rate is not 60%, as your link [2] shows -- the peak divorce rate is for marriages originating in the 1970s, of which 48% did not last 25 years). Marriages are not distributed uniformly: many people will have none, many will have one, and some may rack up more than a few. By definition people with many marriages will account for more than their fair share of the "divorce rate" (even in the 48%), and you can't simply swap "people" or "couples" in for "marriages" in the denominator of that statistic. Yet, why are there some people who keep getting married and failing? Their passion and decision-making that causes them to marry is probably related to the reasons they end. I think if you're so dispassionate that you can consider all the reasons to not get married, then you're probably the sort of person whose marriage would be carefully calculated and not end in flames quickly. Your second link has much more meaningful data on this: yes, marriages are getting later in life and more people and choosing not to marry. However, divorce rates are lower than the 70s and marriages are generally lasting longer. If you consistently advise people not to get married out of some misplaced fear of having to split assets in half, that seems a bit myopic. It seems like a more complex issue.

01100011 5y ago

I can only speak to my reality, which is that I am paying $40k/year to someone who never had kids, never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles). I can try to reduce my payments, but lawyers say there's a risk they'll actually go up because I'm making more now(because I couldn't afford to live in my old town due to alimony). The other party has an inactive form of cancer, but the primary tumor was removed over 30 years ago while I was still in junior high school, and a vocational evaluation , which consulted with their doctors, found there is no reason not to work full time. I've been paying for over 5 years now and there's no end in sight. The system is forcing me to pay a lazy person to sit at home all day long without any obligation to work.

GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
I’m curious about what circumstances stop payments to them? Does it require you to have zero income?
- 01100011 5y ago
  Id have to have a valid excuse for not working, like a medical condition. If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.
  - notdang 5y ago
    if you stop working, what happens?
    - 01100011 5y ago
      Contempt of court I believe. It's basically like defying any other court order. From what I hear, you go to jail for a bit and just keep repeating that cycle every few months until you start working and paying.
throwawayarnty 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. Of course this also requires further investments from the state (mandatory parental leave, cheap/free childcare, good early education), which I assume Netherlands also prioritizes.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. I do wonder about our priorities here. It seems we are choosing economic output over everything else.
vasco 5y ago
Netherlands doesn't, it costs around €1.3k/month for a 5 day a week daycare. It's very expensive to raise kids in the Netherlands and most women work only 3 days a week, and some men 4, making it so the child can stay at home with one of the parents so the costs are lower. This makes it difficult to raise kids if both parents want to work full time.

odiroot 5y ago

> i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. Is this some "western developed country" thing that I just don't get? All throughout my childhood, both of my parents had to work. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to support me and my sister. But I was growing up in an (post-) communist state and it was quite the norm. It had nothing to do with ambitions or building your career, just pure economics.

tsol 5y ago
Agreed, this seems like an older relic. If anything you see this situation more often in non- western countries where women aren't as involved in the workforce. In America, for example, it's not uncommon that not only do both spouses work, but they both must work to support the family. The assumption that one spouse is unable to work feels like a rather dated convention. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it certainly does, but it's no longer the default.
- treis 5y ago
  It's also a relic of a time when maintaining a house was a lot of work and reasonably analogous to a full time job. That is when chicken soup involved plucking and preparing a chicken instead of buying stuff from the store and throwing it in a instapot.
Leherenn 5y ago
Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Here in Switzerland, "full-time childcare costs are around two-thirds of an average Swiss salary" apparently, so quite often people prefer to do it themselves rather than work mostly to pay someone to take care of their child.
- odiroot 5y ago
  > Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Mostly my grandma. And once I was 5 or so I went to kindergarten. This was already in the post- times. But my first 3 years were still in a communist state.

yason 5y ago

Divorces still work out in many countries without any adult-to-adult alimonies. You get divorced, you split your combined assets (excluding prenups), the child support vector will be based on the relative net income of each parent (and beyond certain basic level of income the vector just settles at 50/50). The stay-at-home parent will find work or failing that gets unemployment/welfare benefits. The standard of living is expected to drop for both spouses after a divorce because it's cheaper to live together in any case. Nevertheless, securing the children's upkeep comes first. If one parent can't or won't pay child support the state provides it for the other parent so that the kids can live on something, and later collects the payments from the first parent the same way it will collect other debts such as back taxes. For the stay-at-home spouse it's still a choice with pre-known potential disadvantages, and thus smart couples can draw a contract at the decision time to even out the tally. They can split the income of the high-earning parent at point each month, or they can formulate a mechanism to give the stay-at-home spouse a higher proportion of the combined assets in case of a divorce, and have that indexed by the number of years that spouse remained home, or anything else that works out well. It's all doable so that upon a divorce both spouses get their fair share. The worst thing is not to pre-plan anything, then get divorced at once and find yourself in a completely new situation with no preparations. But there's nothing that prevents either partner from being proactive regarding this. The law doesn't need to enforce any hand-holding here: it's not the fifties anymore. Most people, both men and women, have their own career and get married as adults and divorce as adults.