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Technology shock, fewer shotgun marriages, and the rise in unwed births (1996)
- Bostonian 4y agoThe "technology shocks" were legal abortion and increased use of contraception, especially the pill. One of the co-authors, Janet Yellen, is Biden's Treasury secretary.
- upupandup 4y ago[flagged]
- whateveracct 4y ago> Women value emotional connection in relationships > That's why they have less reason to get married You have a pretty sad view of marriage if you don't think it's about emotional connection...
- upupandup 4y agoTell me more. I would argue your marriage is in trouble if you don't recognize how important emotional connection is for its longevity.
- iso1631 4y agoThe original post claimed that women wanted emotional connections (and also implyed women don't have one night stands) The post then went on to claim that because they want emotional connection they don't get married (thus implying that marriage does not involve emotional connections)
- upupandup 4y agoI think it's mostly men replying in these comments but as a woman: Yes, women do not have sex for purely physical reasons when they have affairs. They form emotional attachments after sex whereas men often do not. If they are able to access sex thanks to contraceptive technology, then the cost of marrying is very high. Are you saying that women shouldn't be having sex like men? Are you saying its not okay for women to be promiscuous?
- iso1631 4y agoNo, that's what you're saying. You are claiming that women can't have a nice satisfying fuck without emotional baggage, but men can't have loving relationships of tenderness and emotional connection and it's just a physical act.
- upupandup 4y agoI did not make such claims that when women have affair its not to satiate physical needs. There could be rare cases where women only gets physical satisfaction but its sad to me that there are people who view women and men as equal we are built differently and experience the same thing differently. After all if your mom wanted to get her rocks off she could hire a male prostitute like your dad.
- Jerrrry 4y agoyou will be downvoted for spouting facts. Nobody wants to admit it, but: The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
- NoGravitas 4y agoYou are literally quoting the Unabomber here.
- imwillofficial 4y agoSometimes the most insightful ideas comes from the most unexpected places.
- 55555 4y agoI don't buy the argument; I think the world has gotten a lot better. But Ted Kaczynski was/is extremely smart, even if he was a domestic terrorist. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- Jerrrry 4y agoI think the argument is, that since the world improved so much, a lot of the social paradigms, customs, traditions that relied on and improved upon the human condition are left unsubstantiated, and the loss leads to social decay, that inevitably leads to societal decay.
- bombcar 4y agoI think that's the whole point/joke. It's a bit of a meme these days.
- bobbyasdfasdf7 4y agoIt's really dehumanizing to say women "cannot" have an affair for purely physical reasons. Women are people just like men and their motivations are just as complex and diverse as men's.
- upupandup 4y agoAs a woman I hard disagree. Women absolutely forms emotional attachments, sex is not physical on the level it is for men. If it was there would be massive industries dedicated to satiating their physical needs like for men. We are built differently and its not dehumanizing to be a woman because we are more emotional.
- bobbyasdfasdf7 4y agoYou said women categorically cannot have an affair for purely physical reasons. Do you really think out of the billions of women that have lived on earth that exactly zero had an affair for physical reasons?
- psyc 4y ago“Women are people, just like men are people.” - yes, obviously. “Women are people, who are just like men.” - Noooop!
- bobbyasdfasdf7 4y agoWow I never said women are just like men, did I?
- psyc 4y ago"Women are people just like men" What you did say is known as equivocation. That's what I'm pointing out.
- spamizbad 4y agoSorry, I'm not convinced these issues would magically go away if you somehow reversed equal pay/job opportunities for women. One major change that happened in the wake of the cultural revolution was that family problems were discussed out in the open. So instead of basically everyone (including men!) suffering in loveless marriages, abusive relationships (also including men), child sexual abuse (again, impacted men as well) you could now air the dirty laundry - and, thanks to that revolution, you had an opportunity to escape it. Speaking as someone who is married, let me tell you: it has tons of advantages. You don't need to create a bunch of social restrictions to force anyone into it. But it does require you to hold up your end of the bargain to your partner.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThe harm that social media platforms cause is not necessarily derived from the politics of their employees, for a few reasons: 1. People adopt political views that they do not act upon consistently. 2. The structure of a particular business can force it to act in contradiction to its political beliefs. In other words, Meta can say it supports whatever social justice initiative it likes while still acting to the detriment of the groups it claims to protect. The actual business it runs is one where the most profitable thing to do is to screw over the mental health of teenagers because it "boosts engagement". Those teenagers are not anguishing over being "too equal", they are bullying each other with exactly the same cudgels that the social justice left would rather get rid of. Children are bastards, and the business of giving social media accounts to children is profiteering off of making it easier for children to be bastards to one another.
- jchallis 4y agoFor context on coauthors , Janet Yellen is the former Fed chair. George Akerlof is a Nobel Prize winning economist and Yellen’s husband. They have one son, who is also an economist.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoYes, the author list is one of the most notable things about the article!! It's also striking how they basically just go out and grab onto the third rail with their bare hands. Yes, they try to be dispassionate, but it's amazing that Janet Yellen was willing to go out on a limb and write publicly about these topics at all.
- readingnews 4y agoWhoa, I am out of the loop/information. > By 1990 the [out-of-wedlock birth] rates were 64 percent for Black infants, 18 percent for whites. WOW, so in 1990, 64% and nearly 20% of births of those groups were (ok, we are grouping here and it might not be totally true) fatherless? I mean, I have a relative with a out-of-wedlock birth, but dad is being a dad and they just do not want to get married right now. I wonder if those stats from way back took those cases into account? Still, those numbers seem pretty high. Am I out of touch?
- jstanley 4y agoGiven that the only out-of-wedlock birth you know is not in fact fatherless, why do you assume that almost all out-of-wedlock births are fatherless? I think it's more likely that people just aren't getting married.
- XorNot 4y agoMe and my two brothers are all out of wedlock births...to two parents who have been happily unmarried for over 30 years.
- readingnews 4y agoI literally was not assuming that. That was part of my question... I wonder if they take into account the ones that are NOT fatherless, just not getting married.
- iso1631 4y agoAs you say, just because you aren't married doesn't mean you aren't a nuclear family, and even if you aren't married it doesn't mean there's no father.
- Bostonian 4y agoFor the U.S. in 2020, "Percent of all births to unmarried women: 40.5%" https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarried-childbearing.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarried-childbearing.htm
- 4y ago
- bhouston 4y agoThis is fascinating. I think that unwed births also likely decrease family size because it is a struggle to support based on one parent in the household. Thus those with out of wedlock births may be more likely to have small families. It often feels like we as a society have sort of entered into a weird territory with a lot of these liberal changes. The societal structures that have worked in the past, while you may not like them, did work. We have sort of removed a lot of that previously structure that worked, for logical reasons of course, but we haven't really replaced it with structures that work equally well. Thus we have the very low fertility rate we have now. The problem with social progress is that we do not really do it understanding the consequences long term. And then we run into these issues. I am not sure we can fix the problems these changes have brought with them faster than the demographic advantage can switch to those still are religious/conservatives who do not have similar dropping fertility rates. Fertility wins in the end, not anything we write or reason about abstractly, no matter how logical or elegant those arguments may be. I think because fertility wins in the end, political philosophies that are in competition over the long-term (decades or longer), need to take that into account, or they lose by default as their adherents decrease.
- helen___keller 4y ago> Fertility wins in the end I’m not sure this is actually true. In the USA, identification as Christian is decreasing and identification as “nothing in particular”, “agnostic”, and “atheist” is increasing. This is in spite of the fertility differences noted I think philosophies tend to look ‘inherited’ most often in stable societies, with low geographical mobility and low penetration of outside ideas. I don’t think todays society fits that bill.
- bhouston 4y ago> In the USA, identification as Christian is decreasing and identification as “nothing in particular”, “agnostic”, and “atheist” is increasing In general atheist is projected to decrease around the world as a share of the population and that is primarily because of low fertility among atheists. For example, here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-pr... > I think philosophies tend to look ‘inherited’ most often in stable societies, with low geographical mobility and low penetration of outside ideas. I didn't mean to imply they're inherited, but if anyone adopting a particular philosophy has as a result low fertility, it is a very hard philosophy to grow as it constantly needs new converts. It isn't self regenerating.
- anovikov 4y agoMen don't marry because they can. Women don't get pregnant or when pregnant, choose freely to give birth or not, because they can. A lot of stuff in life is hard to explain if you look for reasons why people are doing it, but becomes a lot easier if you look for reasons why they didn't do it before, or don't do it in other place we are comparing with. A lot of stuff happens simply because it becomes possible, because there is no need to look for motivation: there was always a motivation, it's just there wasn't a possibility. Changes in people's migration patterns is even a brighter example. Almost all of the change is defined by possibility: the will of people to move from where they are going from to where they are going to, always existed, it's just until a certain point they couldn't do that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kixiQu 4y agoThis seems interesting, but I'll admit I'd prefer to read a more recent analysis -- a few decades of extra data have to be useful in terms of picking out significant factors.
- atentaten 4y agoI don't think all of this is solely due to "reproductive technology." I believe a cultural shift in values and mores took place via mass media (TV, music, movies, magazines, newspapers, education[1]) that played a strong role in changing behavior to allow more unwed births and less shotgun marriages. [1]education as a form of mass media in terms of it's ability to communicate ideas
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago"But poverty stayed the same" Computers gave us enormous productivity as they ramped up by orders of magnitude in Moore's Law. Where did that productivity go? Well, wages are stagnant, but who has made a LOT of money since? Oh right, the wealthy. This was most prominent in the 1990s as we moved from 66Mhz to a gigahertz in CPU speed, to say nothing of disk space, RAM, networks, the internet, etc. So if birth control restricted kids and the amount of labor that they required, and suddenly everyone has two job parents, but they poverty stayed the same... Here's an exercise for the reader: So TO WHOM did the money/productivity gain go?