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Unfortunately, as far as I know children of single-parent families do worse in education, earnings, the legal system, and in other ways, so the breakdown of the
by jacoblyles 14y ago
Unfortunately, as far as I know children of single-parent families do worse in education, earnings, the legal system, and in other ways, so the breakdown of the family has immense social costs.
You will notice that the upper class still marries before they have children.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoWe don't know whether these children will do better or worse in an unhappy married family. And certainly we don't have reasons to think that marriage (the piece of paper) is the casuation for the gap, not merely a correlation.
- jacoblyles 14y agoThe most parsimonious way to interpret the data is that divorce is bad for children. But we can add epicycles to some other secular hedonist theory and make it fit.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoThe most parsimonious way is also a most uninformative one. For example, you can figure out that being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick. Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father). What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.